Design Opportunity mapping and making choices in India

Image: Mapping Design Opportunities – Individual Assignment

Having explored the five regions of the universe of digital design opportunities (Nature, Society, Life, Work & Play) all the students have had an experience of having intensive brainstorming sessions as well as the task of categorisation of all the concepts into a coherent structure. This is a process of plumbing the memory banks of each individual member as well as the team as a whole since the process creates thge possibility for collaboration and cooperation in the very confusing area that is the "Fuzzy front end of design" if I were to borrow the words of Liz Sanders and her colleagues who have done remarkable work in the whole field of exploring the beginnings of the design journey and the papers about this journey are available for download from her website here.

The students are now full if ideas and appraoches about potential application areas and they should use this preparedness to try and capture the opportunities that each of them individually feel are of high priority as well those that are imminently doable through local investment of effort, resources and money. The next assignment is therefore a "Mapping of selected digital Design Opportunities" that are in their view high on their personal list of priorities. For this they may need to think as entrepreneurs and envision how they would take it forward and use this inner vision to articulate in one paragraph of not more that 100 words the specific opportunity that they think is both desirable and perhaps feasible. They should also give the project an evocative title like a potential brand name that can be attached to the task as a working title that will guide the partners and the team members about the core concept and the intentions of the design opportunity that they offer to the group.

Each student is required to list out at least five such design opportunities in consultation with their team members and while this is an individual task the team will be in it together to support and expand the opportunity so that we can make it happen sometime down the road.

These five design opportunity descriptions will be sent by email to both the teachers as well as to all the team members.

We now look forward to the articulation of the design opportunities and to a full presentation of the models and the insights generated by the group brainstorming and the intense discussions that all the teams have had all night at the Gandhinagar campus yesterday, very stimulating indeed.

See my papers below in case you need some clarification on the concept of design opportunity mapping.
What is a Design Opportunity?
What is Design?

Also look at the KaosPilot site for information and insights about the Fourth Sector. (Downloads small pdf file.)

Also see the two wonderful Apple Design Projects of 1995 and 1996, INFARM and MANDALA as examples of design opportunities that were visualised and shared with the design community in 1997 at ICSID, World Design Congress at Torronto.
Download: INFARM pdf file 1.5 MB
Download: MANDALA pdf file 1.4 MB