Design Opportunity Mapping by Groups at Gandhinagar

Image: Views from the group sessions at Gandhinagar on the last day of the course.

The four groups have gone into a huddle to develop and visualize Design Opportunities across all the categories that they have identified as areas of need and value. This is being done by the members sitting together to visualize each opportunity that comes to their mind on the format that was provided for the purpose. On an A4 size sheet we have four quadrants where the students can draw and write briefly about what was visible in their inner eye and their imagination.

The groups would continue to explore the possibilities as they come up in their conversations, visualisations and debates about priorities and possibilities in the context of India today and tomorrow. From the several hundred design opportunities that we expect to emerge from each group the students are expected to categorise these into meaningful groups so that these could be discussed and evaluated in some depth. From the set of thumbnails that emerge from this stage of group processing each student is expected to select one that they would like to explore and elaborate into a more developed scenario.

Image: Views from the group sessions at Gandhinagar on the last day of the course.

This scenario visualization would need some time for the incubation of the thoughts and images so that both the form and the structure of the specific design opportunity could be developed in some depth and through this process the individual student is encouraged to keep in active discussion with peers for their feedback and encouragement. Like an entrepreneur each student would examine all the dimensions of the design opportunity and then prepare a composite image on an A3 size sheet of paper that could tell the story that has unfolded through this process of imagination and articulation.

Image: Format for group capture of design opportunities and one case study from the Punjab Group.

These individual scenarios as well as the group’s categorized thumbnail sketches would be reviewed by the whole class on the next Saturday at NID, Paldi campus with all students being present for discussion and a photo session for reporting the final outcomes to the blog members at large.