Design Opportunities and Water: DCC2008 nears closure.

Design Opportunities and Water: DCC2008 nears closure.
The five teams worked hard and presented their groups explorations and concepts for the explored and identified Design Opportunities that they saw for enhancing the sustainable use of water in each of their regions. Each group chose their own style of presentation and each had a specific focus when it came to content and emphasis of the presentation and these were influenced by what they felt was critical for the specific region that they had taken up as a group.

The presentations extended over two days, on Wednesday and Thursday last week but when it came to the last group it seems that the energy levels of the class had dropped to a real low and only the presenters and a few others were available and present in the class for the fifth and the last presentation. So once again, the scheduled class session was abandoned and we had a series of discussions in the office but the teachers decided that the final team, The Maharashtra group would make their presentation with whoever was available and record the same on the voice recorder and on digital images. However, the teachers abstained from attending since so many of the classmates choose to absent themselves. The students did have their presentation and a visiting faculty from Poland, Alexandra Giza, a Graphic Design teacher from the Northern Illinois University was present along with a few other interested students and the Maharashtra group made an excellent presentation, after all.

The other groups who had completed their presentations earlier included the following groups in the order in which they are listed below:
1. Northeast Hills: Design opportuinities for Water.
2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water.
3. Himalayayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water.
4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water.
5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water.

The images of the group presentations and a brief description are listed below and can be accessed from the hyperlinks provided in the list above.


Digital pictures of all stages of presentation as well as a digital voice recording have been placed as usual on the NID server so that they can be accessed by all students for future reference and for the contemporaneous course documentation that has been a practice as part of this course. This kind of documentation gives the students and teachers access to material on which they could reflect and ponder and the learning is very deep indeed due to the rich recall of details that the medium affords. Now we have the blog which is an extension of the strategy but all the pictures and voice files are made available to all students in the form of recorded DVD that contain the full resources of this course. This is the first year that we have been able to share this material on the DCC blog and we look forward to an active exchange of ideas from other teachers in numerous design schools across the world.

The next assignment that has been given to the students has been listed below where they are required to explore and develop an individual scenario representation and share this with their peers before making the submission of the final artwork to the teachers for a final review and evaluation as a conclusion to this course. We look forward to a highly motivated response from all the students and their individual scenarios will be shared on this blog next week.