Design Opportunity Mapping: Experiencing Synthesis

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping: Water in our lives across sectors of action

Image01: With a large image of the planet Earth and an exaggerated drop of water at the centre the water in industry team grouped their design opportunity thumbnails in four broad clusters. The individual scenarios were then drawn up and presented with each member coming forward to explain their concept and the associated scenario illustration.

The assignment of exploring and discovering a large number of possible approaches and opportunities in the product, systems and services space that impinges directly or indirectly on the area chosen by the group may be a good way forward, particularly since they would have gone through at least two rounds of exploring the field and understanding its dynamics and its structure. Through this assignment the students get a feel for the early stages of design thinking and action, particularly in visualizing potential design opportunities and in experiencing the articulation of scenarios in the formulation of design ideas and avenues for action. The structure of the design situation becomes clear through the brainstorming and categorization assignments that have been carried out by the groups and these have been shared with the whole class. Having done this and after having experienced the sorting and organizing for a good deal of time the student is quite clear in the mind as to what the particular sector holds and offers as well as what as an individual they would like to focus their subsequent efforts.

Image02: The design opportunities in the domestic use of water was shown in the form of bubbles from a fish, not a very effective image, but it helped the group organize their thumbnail representations into four or five broad clusters. The group members then came forward and showcased their individual scenarios with this large image as their backdrop.

This is an assignment that gives the group and the individual student an insight into how design opportunities are visualized in a number of iterative stages and it also gives them an insight into the role of external models and discourse with colleagues in the process of design exploration and conviction building when the process of form and structure discovery is still in progress. Visualisation with the use of draft thumbnails is introduced to the students at this stage. Since we are looking at quick and expressive external images that could capture a gist of what is passing through the mind of the student this stage does give all students a glimpse into the minds of their colleagues and it is a revelation when a huge variety of concerns get disclosed that are not usually present in the verbalizations and dialogues within the group.

Image 03: The group dealing with water in public spaces came up with an illustration of a railway train and they used the clouds of smoke from the train’s chimney to cluster the design opportunity thumbnails that they had developed as a team. This was then used as a backdrop to showcase their individual design scenarios to the rest of the class.

The variety that emerges in the expressive form of what may be seen as one single word concept is another lesson to be learnt here. Many student produce huge variety of concepts based on the same starting point and it is a clear showing that in design individual expression can be influenced by a very large number of personal factors as well as biases. With the use of a format provided all the students of each group settle down to make sketch proposals for what they felt could be an opportunity in the particular sector or area of work. In this case the students worked as groups looking at possible design opportunities in the four areas of focus that were assigned to them, namely, the role and impact of Water in the following areas of focus:
1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image4: The last group dealt with water in agriculture. They used the literal clouds on top to show the raining down of design opportunities in four broad clusters or groups of ideas as design opportunity thiumbnails cascade down from the clouds above. The categories that they used include the farmer, the Government, water and issues, the headings unfortunately did not tell us very much about the contents below.

The individual scenarios were carried out on DIN A3 size sheet of paper so that the students could have adequate space to explore the idea through a number of iterations but not all the students understood the need for sequential drawings and the manner in which their thoughts could be captured as they occurred on a large sheet of paper. However after the presentations their understanding of the process of visualization and discovery was better that when they began, but still a long way to go, and this would need constant practice. Design learning is also a function of knowing and doing and the internalization of the process and the emergence of designerly ways of thinking and visualization can be seen to have begun but not as yet fully achieved. Individual student visualizations are shown in the images below and these are categorized into the four groups that they belonged to as listed in the image caption below.

1. Water in Industry

2. Water in Domestic Use

3. Water in Public Use

4. Water in Agriculture

Image 05: Stills from an online video offered by Nature Magazine about the water hot spot developing in western India with severe water stress and ground water depletion in the States of Rajasthan, Punjab, Harayana and Delhi which also happen to be the food bowl of India.

While the DCC course has been addressing the various issues of water in our lives across many domains and verticals we have constant news flows about the shortage of water coming from many sources. The latest one is the result of a six year long satellite based study conducted by a consortium of scientific institutions led by NASA. The alarming video can be watched at the Nature Magazine website at this link here. I have also made a separate post on my Design for India blog to raise the issues that this holds for the design community in India and how we can rally to address these real needs on the ground and how well we are currently prepared to face these realities. The blog post on this issue can be seen here at this link below.
Design for India

Prof M P Ranjan

Insights from the Field: of "experts & "visual narratives".

Meeting “experts” and making “visual narratives” from the field

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image01: Four teams dealing with Water: Industry, Domestic, Agriculture and in Public Use – in front of their models that show the current level of understanding after having met experts in the field over the long weekend of research in the field.

Teams came back from the field work with rich insights about the topic that they had gone out to investigate through an active contact programme with “experts” in the field. These “experts” are not an academic category but include those people that the team members were able top locate who had a considerable amount of experience in the various sub issues that the team was seeking to learn about.

Image02: Views of the Water in Domestic space presentation showing the models and the rich elplanations made by the team members about the issues and perspectives that they had gleaned from their field research and meetings with experts.

Design uses knowledge that is available and what is available is processed deeply to bring a degree of understanding from which the design mind can launch the search for design opportunities, all visual, both ion the mind as well as in the visualisations that abound in the process that is used to bring clarity and to discover structure and meaning. The four groups met hoards of people in their search for experts in their particular domain and they came back enriched with new insights and many new discoveries and a fair degree of clarity about the domain that they had set out to research.

Image03: Team Industry had a rich visual narrative along with a fairly comprehensive structure to explain their findings from the field.

Learning about team work and about the value of images in this form of research was the key take away for the student teams at this stage of the DCC explorations. The metaphors made by these groups stil failed to capture the richness that was to be seen in the structure as well as the process diagrams from which the team had journeyed through. Perhaps a function of time available and the other activities that competed with the course, such as the Monsoon Fiesta, that coincides with the course at this time in the semester.

Image04: Views of the team presentation from the Water for Public Use.

Image05: Views from the Water for Agriculture team where for some reason the team has chosen a mechanical metaphor rather than a more appropriate organic one.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Visual Narratives: Learning from the Field

Rich Pictures in the Process of Understanding the Design Journey

Prof M P Ranjan

Image01: Group members drawing on a collective scroll laid out on the table while telling their story of meetings with informants in the field.

One group of students at Gandhinagar who were working on the theme of water and Industry came up with a rich visual narrative that is both interesting and makes sense. They had fanned out across Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar and some went out of town as well in search of people, who could be “experts”, who could explain the workings of the water processing and distribution systems of the city, with particular emphasis on what they had identified as industry applications, They came back after each day over the weekend in the field and shared their experiences and face to face encounters and meetings with the people on the ground and this was done in a visually rich manner.

Image02: Group members standing in front of the large scroll that they used by turns to share their insights from the field work carried out over three days in the field.

Each member of the group told their days story in a series of pictures that they laid out on a long scroll of paper that was both wide and long. They sat on the table and talked to each other as they drew the rich pictures on their own part of the sheet and having told their version of the story of the days meetings and the record of their journeys grows and spreads on the sheet. One other device that the group innovated was to draw a star at the point in their storytelling scroll to identify one new person in the journey of information and insight gathering that they had done that day.

Image03: Members came up to the scroll individually and told their story and shared the insights that they had gathered to make their more refined models and the final metaphor.

Having drawn the images they then linked the meta story that they had begun to understand from the growing diagrams on their large sheet of paper. Rich pictures helped in their internalizing the story and in preparing themselves for the presentation that would follow. Each team member came up to the sheet and talked with conviction about their part of the information gathering ventures into the field. Deep learning and clarity of expression gave the group a clear advantage when it came to sharing the findings with the larger group and the whole class was enthused with the breakthrough that the group had brought to the class.

Prof M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

Water in our Lives: Gandhinagar DCC teams address water again - Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image00: Blackboard at Gandhinagar DCC 2009 session where students responding to the question of “What is Design?” came up with a whole host of words that were listed as the session progressed and the end result was a fairly wholesome list of terms that could be associated with both the design process as well as with design learning.

Continuing with the theme this year of looking at water from many of its critical dimensions the teams at NID Gandhinagar were assigned the following areas of emphasis for their own journey of exploration and discovery of design and design learning.

1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image01: Industry: Team of students looking the theme of Industry came up with these offerings as they brainstormed and organized their discovered words and concepts in a manner in which the team had understood the subject. Their structure was quite rich but their metaphor did not quite make the grade.

Image02: Domestic: The team dealing with domestic issues and perspectives came up with a very rich metaphor to capture the issues that they had discovered from their exploration of their own memories of the subject of water in their own lives.

Image03: Public Use: The team dealing with the Public use of water with a focus on urban applications came up with a very powerful expression of the human body to capture their understanding of the systems of relationships but their structure was not yet fully evolved and the model did not show the relationships although the seeds of the possibilities were touched upon.

Image04: Agriculture: The model was once again a human body but this time more like a Scare-crow in the field which may be appropriate for the subject of agriculture that they were dealing with. However the structure left out many gaps that we think shows the gaps in our own urban understanding of the realities in the rural situations today.

Prof. M P Ranjan