Northeast Team shows the way: Design Opportunity Maps

Image: Northeast team offered several design opportunities and presented these in a categorised manner.

The format provided for the capture and sharing of the design opportunities were used by all the students groups for the first time and it seems to have worked as planned. This is a new pedagogic tool for providing a common framework for groups to collaborate and make a coherent presentation. The small A5 sized cards on which the students could individually draw their imagination of the particular design opportunity along with a brief description was used well by the Northeast group. They offered all the generated alternatives into a meta structure where the identified design opportunities were divided into five categories: Individual, Family, Community, Village/Town and Eco-System Level.

For the chosen subject of design opportunities with Water, this categorisation worked quite well and the students were able to make a very expressive presentation, working as a group. The other groups too presented their explorations and at the end of the day we had a large number of avenues that could be explored in this specific field across all the design disciplines.


The format that the students used is in an DIN A5 size and the artwork was made on a DIN A4 paper for quick reproduction using the photo-copying process. Having a format I think helped in bringing a sense of order to the presentations and facilitated collaboration at the presentation stage particularly for the difficult task of categorisation of all the concepts. The rest of the presentations will be shared in the next post.