Focus Groups for Food: DCC2008 Teams Assigned

Image: four volunteer coordinators and team leaders in conversation with the class teachers before the team selection process in class at NID Gandhinagar auditorium.

Four teams have been formed with the four volunteer coordinators selecting their teams from all five disciplines participating in the DCC2008 PG course at Gandhinagar this semester. The areas of focus are Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat. Each of the teams have started the first assignment of discovering what they already know about the chosen areas of focus as well as the theme of Food, Inflation and the Indian Economy which is their meta focus. The teams have started the process of iterative brainstorming and discovering an acceptable structure of the field of focus and from this structure they would be able to share with the rest of the class their collective understanding of the chosen subject and the given context, just as they would have to do with any new design assignment dealing with the discovery of future solutions to several pressing problems at hand.

Image: Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat team members in their respective studios working of the first stage of the assignment through brainstorming in a group.

The brainstorming task would be followed by catgorisation and group would then looking for a suitable structure that could bring meaning to the group as a whole, a negotiated and agreed structure for the design domain at hand. This would then be worked upon to give it a visible face in the form of a metaphor that could be memorable and could capture the sensitive aspects of the subject as well as include the framework of the discovered structure that has been developed by the group. This model would have areas of uncertainty and areas of ignorance, which the group would address at a later stage. However in this phase the emphasis is in discovering what the group as a team knows about the subject at hand and about the context in which these would need to be placed. The presentation of the groups findings are svcheduled for tomorrow morning and I do look forward to learning a thing or two about food in these exciting regions as well as about the potential approaches that could be used to address some of the looming threats and opportunities that this sector has to offer to the design community to work with.