DCC2009: Water in our lives

DCC2009: Water in our lives

Prof. M P Ranjan

The year has started and another year of courses with new students from several PG design disciplines come to this course at NID. The first batch consists of four disciplines on the Paldi campus of NID and these include Product Design, Textile Design, Transportation and Automobile Design and Animation Film Design. The theme for this year is Water. Various facets of water in our lives are to be explored by these students and for the first Paldi batch we have three sub-themes that are listed below.

1. Water: Storage and Delivery
2. Water: Festivals and Sport
3. Water: Awareness of Issues and Methods

Image01: Blackboard with the preliminary discussions on What is Design? Using words offered by the students as part of the class discussion.

The black board shows the early discussions in the class when we tried to assess the current level of knowledge about design amongst the students of the batch and as the dialogue progressed the board filled up with the words that were used by the students to try and share their own notion of design and what they thought it is. Rashmi, Shashank and Ranjan were involved in these discussions by reacting and adding their own dimensions. We asked the students to think deeply about themselves and their lives to try and see when they discovered the idea of design and found it may be a career for each one of them. The discussions led to both sharing as well as an introspective journey that would continue for some time particularly for the students to discover themselves and find out a bit more about their own beliefs and positions in relation to a variety of human subjects, many of which are intangible and not usually a subject of either active analysis or discourse. What do you really believe and what would you do in a particularly difficult situation?

Image02: Group formation and bonding of groups in three sub-groups before the commencement of the formal brainstorming and structure building sessions that follow.

The action to these situations may reveal our deep seated fears and convictions which we may not be aware of at the surface of our consciousness and this would influence all the design decisions that we were to make in our careers ahead, therefore it would be useful to know, if it is at all possible to know all of it, which may not be possible till we are actually confronted with a particular opportunity or situation that would test this belief in some deep way. Ranjan used his slides as well as pages from the internet to share ideas about design and to introduce some of the key thinkers of the day along with their current ideas about design.

Image03: Books discussed this year in class. The students are also primed on the other resources that are available in digital format and on the internet and appropriate links are shown and provided in this session.

The scholars discussed included Dr Harold Nelson and John Heskett for their books “The Design Way” and “Toothpicks and Logos” respectively. Hesket’s book has been released again as a low cost edition in India under a new title called “Design: A very brief introduction” that is available from many book stores as well as online. Also discussed were the new books by Bryan Lawson with Kees Dorst called “Design Expertise” and another book by Dorst called “Understanding Design” and the teachers shared the long list of 175 attributes of design that is included in the contents of the book for students to look up as a direction finder for their own search for understanding of “What is design?”

We have asked the students to reflect on the question once again quite deeply and get back to the teachers with an email response to the question and this could open up the platform for any further dialogue on the new subject. Our finding from the various responses by the students while the black board was being filled up with words associated with design thinking and action was that they individually knew very little and even that knowledge lacked any conviction. So far three students have submitted their email response and we are sure the others will muster courage to make their offerings as the week progresses and they feel up to steam on the discourse on a subject as complex as design

Image04: Class presentations and group discussions in thumbnail views. The class is held in a large studio with flexible furniture arrangements possible with a lot of softboards available for the posters and visual material for the presentations.

We introduced the course by sharing a slide presentation that was made for the EAD06 conference in Bremen, which was a description of this course that was made for the first time by Ranjan since the course was formulated and conducted at NID over the past fifteen or twenty years. This course has indeed evolved from its origins in the “Design Methods” and “Design Process” beginnings in the early 70’s at NID and the name change to “Design Concepts and Concerns” occurred in the late 90’s and from a scientific and environment focus of the 70’s and 80’s the shift that we made to “Concerns” brought an element of relevance and ideology into the core consideration at the centre of this course offering. This is why we started looking at meta themes and we did shift away from micro problems and in the process removed the kindergarden from the basic design course at NID while keeping the quality of flexibility and the non-prescriptive nature of assignments that design education demands. Another major shift was the design assignments being handled by a team rather than being assigned to individual with the specific intention of encouraging team processes and attitude forming that could support such demands top deal with the typical conflicts that design tasks abound.

Image05: The theme and sub-themes of "Water" with a description of the process of discovery by the group to set the assignment rolling.

The structure of the assignments is therefore collaborative and graded through the following intentional stages.
1. Understanding oneself and ones beliefs through deep thought and articulation of the self.
2. Group processes in exploring a meta theme and discovering what one already knew about the topic so that it could be used as a platform for design action.
3. Outward exploration to fill in the gaps in ones knowledge by meeting and connecting with experts and with resources that are available both published and in the environment.
4. Understanding the processes of categorization and modeling leading to the building of external models to share and discuss ones deep understanding of the meat theme in question and to be able to see a structure that could depict the current understanding of the subject which is open to change through the arrival of new insights and new knowledge.
5. Sensing and discovering design opportunities that are worth doing and elaborating all the latent opportunities through a process of visualisation and discourse.
6. Building deep convictions about possible opportunities through a process of visual exploration and sharing with colleagues, while at the same time it is a process of learning to think and learning to act in design with a future focus on potential and optimistic outcomes.

To discuss this and other aspects of becoming a designer Ranjan talked about the “Design Journey” using the model and a copy of the paper that describes the various modes of thought that the designer had to use and this brought us to the first assignment and the forming of three teams with tasks as listed above. The presentation is expected on Thursday morning and each group woud be given one hour to make their presentation having explored the sub-theme fully through the process of brainstorming and categorization followed by forming structure and giving form in the shape of a suitable metaphor for durable recognition of the theme and its organization that would be reflected in the structure. The students have now started working on the task of finding structure and form of their sub-theme areas through the process that we described above. The group work is intensive through ice-breaking conversations, brainstorming and collaboration, categorization and arguments, finding structure and agreement with some compromises and last of all finding form through a shared metaphor that could show the level of understanding the the group has arrived at through this active process, a real learning by doing. We look forward to the presentations and the deep learning that can be used for future design projects as well.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Reflections on DCC2008: Priyadarshinee Mohapatra

Image: Model of the Design Process proposed by Priyadarshinee Mohapatra and sent to me by email along with a description of the model that is quoted below.

Design is complex and challenging, as it involves both analytic and creative solution to a problem. Designing a product, not only requires a designer, but also needs the understanding of human experience on it. It's a task involving not only the designer but also the target users for whom it's designed. For any design solution it's important to follow the design process which is an iterative process. Design concepts and concerns-2008 by MP Ranjan has taught the "design process" in a very effective and planned manner. It's a wonderful experience to be part of this programme. It has a clear path/process from "recollecting the known" to "discover the unknown" and finally "creating design opportunity" while solving the problems in a given context.

What you already know:

In the first level, it's basically "recollecting the data already exist in your mind". It's self exploration phase. So the information is collected from every individual based on "self knowledge" and "on what he/she believes in". It's followed by group brain storming to make it more precise and determine the information architecture, structuring and reflecting the same on a visual metaphor. A visual metaphor gives a complete overview of the context. A strong visual metaphor is self explanatory.

Initially, though the group had less information, eventually the information was created by self exploration and group brain storming. Truly said by Ranjan "You never know what you know and you can challenge any modern age computer".

Discover the unknown through research:

The next level, we had to "discover the unknown" through research and field study. During this phase we were exposed to real world to know and find out information. Finally, we incorporated all the information on structure and metaphor. The collected insights give a complete idea about the real world problem. It helped us to create personas and to understand the common man's mental model about the context. From insights, one could make out "What is already there?"and "what could be done?"

Creating design opportunity:

Finally design opportunities created by analysing the observations and insights from field research in the given context while solving the problems. The issues were pointed out in a group brain storming. From various ideas, every individual has to take one idea or design opportunity and give a detailed solution to the real world problem. The solution has to be presented visually to make it self-explanatory.
I worked in Gujarat group. My learning through the whole process was a lot .It was not limited to my own group only, I also learnt a lot from other groups as well.

Thanks & Regards

Priyadarshinee Mohapatra
Strategic Design Management (SDM)

DCC2008 Paldi01: Brainstorming and Categorisation about Food

Image: Brainstorming at an early stage with varied levels of expression

The four groups have started the process of exploring what they already know about their chosen subjects, namely, Food, Inflation and the Economy with respect to the four regions that have been assigned to each of the four groups. The groups are working on the following regions as listed below:
Group 1: West Bengal
Group 2: Rajasthan
Group 3: Goa
Group 4: Uttarakhand

Image: Categorisation at an early stage with groups discussing possible approaches

As usual they all started with a fairly superficial list of words after a hour or two of discussions and when the teachers came around for the review they were all working on organizing the few words that they had listed out in the first round of articulation. This led to some discussions with each group when we stressed on the need for a greater depth in both the number of word ideas as well as the variety of concepts which would be only discovered if the lists were truly random and done in an intense session with active participation of the group. This led to a second round of brainstorming and this time a far more elaborate set of words emerged and some groups “got it” and they had a rich texture of concepts that could be seen strewn across the large page on which they did their brainstorming capture. Others still had the all dominating list-mania and found it difficult to abandon a lifelong learning of making lists in an organized manner, but this would change as the groups met each other and saw the difference in the approaches and what it did for the richness of texture and content of the brainstorming sessions.

The groups have now started caregorising the discovered words and they are using both post-it stickers as well as index cards to sort and re-group the discovered words into some meaningful categories that they could use for the development of a structure that would have a shared meaning for all members of the group. The process is always full of debates and arguments but eventually time constraints lead to some form of negotiated settlements even if these are not fully satisfactory to all participants. This makes the design process a bit like the political negotiations that take place when contentious issues are being examined in mixed groups and a deadline forces the settlement of the matter in a form of truce with some give and take from all sides.

Image: Categorisation at a fairly developed stage, more cards and several sub-groups discovered

Tomorrow the groups will be converting their found structure into a memorable metaphor that could support and enhance the reading of the subject and its content as a composite image that could aid both recognition of the core features of the categorization as well as the overarching theme of Food and the name of the region that the group is addressing. The choice of image and the use of its parts to map out the discovered structure will determine just how successful the group has been in translating the understanding from the structure to the making of a memorable image that will remain in ones mind and aid recall of all the subtle attributes and features of the explored subject, which in this case is Food, Inflation and the Economy in the context of the four chosen regions and also as an aid to look forward to setting a platform for the further work to be done to expand the groups understanding of the subject and the context in which they are located.

DCC2008 Regions and Teams: Brainstorming and Structure

Image: Four teams of students, Punjab (top left), Kerala (top right), Northeast (bottom right) and Gujarat (bottom left). The names of each of the team members are listed below.

Four teams were formed to explore the theme of Food, Inflation and the Indian Economy from the perspective of what the team members already knew from their life experience. This was carried out through a couple of rounds of brainstorming that was followed by categorization and a process of finding an agreed structure that had a hierarchy of concepts that are arranged in a meaniungful manner. This structure is then reinterpreted in the form of a visual model that could be shared with the class as a whole and the Gandhinagar Atrium was chosen as the venue for the presentation and each team was assigned one wall space on the four sides of the Atrium.

The groups presented their findings by turn, Punjab, Kerala, Gujarat and then the Northeast. The class slowly warmed up to the mode of discussion since in the beginning they were not yet quite used to open discussion and debate in a constructive manner. However as the day moved on they became more vocal , asked questions and then started making comments and sharing insights and experiencing the peer review process that is so important to design understanding. Prof Klaus Krippendorff has often repeated his conviction on many online design discussions such as the dialogue of the PhD-Design list, that design is always mediated in language and as designers we will need to understand this dimension of the design discourse if we are to use the process effectively. In his book the Semantic Turn, he has developed this idea into a well structured theory of design that is still not understood by the design community at large.

KERALA

Sanjay Kumar (Coordinator), Abhishek Dwivedi, Kanika Malhotra, Gauri Kathju, Deepak Nanaware, Ruchika Sarda, Kirti Anand, Shambhavi Gupta, Shambhavi Gupta, Sharanya Rukmangadhan, Charuta Bhatt, Kabeer, Vidula Aher, Ritu Ganguli, Austin Davis, Pritesh Dhawle, Purvee Jain.

PUNJAB

Darshana Tatibandwale (Coordinator), Salil Bhargava, Jyoti Rani Rajput, Shuchi, Ramshi P Hamza, Rohini Shitole, Shubhi Shrivatsava, Neeta Khanuja, Swati Agarwal, Raghavendra Singh, Ankita Patel, Ishita Singh, Shakuntala Marndi, Sumeeta Chanda, Ashish Kumar, Kanika Bhadwaj.

NORTH EAST

Sanmitra Chitte (Coordinator), Prasurjya Phukan, Ananya Chatterje, Gavin Francis Remedios, Niharika Sethi, Amanjot Kaur Sandhu, Neety Rai, Shailaja Pahuja, Asif Kureshi, Sanjeev Gupta, Gauri Pandey, Janki Mallick, Nalini Bhutia, Swati Bhartia, Vikas Gupta, Venus Mehandiratta.

GUJARAT

Archana A (Coordinator), Priyadarshini Mohapatra, Vipin Singh, Xavier Dayanandh, Abhishek Maithul, Pranav Gupta, Ritika Mathur, Sagar Raut, Midhun Subhash, Chetan Sharma, Awantika Kumar, Fatima Jaliwala, Pranita Mujgelwar, Linda Lee, Pranjal Rai, Prarthana Ahuja.

Self-Disclosure: Reflection about the self

Image: Students presenting rich image maps of themselves as part of their first assignment in the DCC course:

Self-Disclosure: Reflection about the self
Self-Disclosure: Reflection about the self and looking back into ones life activities and experiences to find and locate ones preferences and belief systems including likes and dislikes and ones taboos and epistemic roots when confronted with reflexive situations in the process of design. Students are expected to draw a map of themselves on a sheet of presentation paper (A3 size) along with key-words and images that would disclose themselves to the rest of the class. This is also a journey of self discovery in many cases and it is carried out with a great deal of commitment. These sheets are all displayed for several days on the softboards which are ever present in a design classroom at NID and it represents the first of many composite images that the student is asked to prepare during this course. About half a day is given for this task after the introductory lecture on the origins of design and our current understanding of design. No reading list is now given since the key-words generated during the lecture are to be used for research in the library and on the internet search sites to locate interesting new resources each time. This material becomes a point of reference all through the course, particularly during the intense group processes of the assignments that are to follow.

This description of the self disclosure assignment was part of a paper that I presented at the EAD06 conference on design at Bremen, Germany in 2005. The full paper (pdf 50kb) titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” and the visual presentation (pdf 4.1mb) can be downloaded from the links here.

To see the full presentation with all the embedded quicktime movie files please download all the files listed below and place them in a single folder along with the pdf file from the links below:

01_Self Disclosure3.mov (mov file 1.6 mb)
02_Macro Model Known.mov (mov file 3 mb)
03_Context with Experts.mov (mov file 6.2 mb)
04_Business Models.mov (mov file 3.9 mb)
05_Designer Profile.mov (mov file 3.4 mb)
06_Calico Scenario.mov (mov file 8.4 mb)
07a_Unknown Visualised.mov (mov file 4.1 mb)
07b_Unknown Visualised.mov (mov file 8.9 mb)
EAD06_2005_Show_MPR.pdf (pdf file 9.6 mb)

Business Models from the Field: Chaiwalla.com and DCC

Learning about Business Models from the Field: The Chaiwalla.com assignment and DCC
Image: Prof. M P Ranjan explaining the Systems Design Model to the DCC class. This four stage process includes User studies, Scenario Visualisation, Concept Detailing and Business Model development.
Several years ago, as part of the DCC course, we realized that strategy and planning were as important as concept and product detailing if a particular set of design offerings were to be successful in the marketplace. Unlike technological innovations and science innovations which can be proven in the laboratory or be subjected to peer reviews for validation, design innovations and design offerings are of a class that can be measured and the success of which can only be tested in the marketplace and this makes it truly complex to prove. The producers who have almost the same quality of product on offer can only differentiate their offering by the thoughtful development of their business models. So we see objects being converted into a service offering through a lease finance model or a service being dematerialised through the use of technology and the shift could be in either direction and the winner is the one who can capture the imagination of the consumer and offer a special convenience that the other is not able to offer.

Learning business processes is seen as the exclusive domain of the management graduate and not that of the designer, however as teachers at NID we realized that without this knowledge being integrated into the product creation and development process, the impact of the new product or service offering would be essentially incomplete. This led to the creation of the four stage systems design model that I presented at the CII-NID Design Summit in 2001. This model was several years in the making and was an implicit part of the DCC assignments over many years before it got formalized in the Design Summit paper and presentation which is called “Cactus Flowers Bloom in the Dessert”.( download pdf: Part 1 of 3.6 MB and Part 2 of 4.6 MB and paper of 123 KB) Much earlier, in 1998 we had asked a group of students in the DCC class to go out onto the streets of Ahmedabad and study several street food vendors in working groups and come back to the class with an understanding of their business processes and strategies. We called it the Chaiwalla.com assignment and it was an instant success since we realized that the students were indeed able to observe, interact and understand the structural, functional and performance attributes of the business particularly since these were small and micro enterprises that were managed and effectively carried out by one entrepreneur with a small team of supporters, many from within the family itself. We have offered this assignment to all batches since then and the learning from the explorations and presentation that go across three or four days is very rich indeed. The contacts in the field, we found, were also open to share much information and insights with the students, but there were others who were either suspicious or indifferent to the needs of the students. On their part the students learned how to be diplomatic and deal with the very public interactions with care and empathy. Besides learning about fieldwork and about gathering information first hand from the live subjects the students also developed insights about start-up entrepreneurship and how some of these individuals learned to cope with poverty and to deal with it rather effectively. The revelation that the students usually came back with was that some of these individuals earned more each day than their teachers, their own parents in some cases or even officers in very respectable and well known large business enterprises.

The assignment that evolved over the years included the forming of five or six groups, each being assigned to research one kind of street food vendor through direct contact and observation in the street. Students were briefed about various issues to be kept in mind while making these field observations and in the interviews that followed The criteria for the selection of the vendors would be based on a quick survey of a number of such vendor locations and to seek out the ones that were basically cooperative as well as those who provided some significant attribute such as proximity to public facilities, apparent success by the customer draw that was exhibited in the preliminary observations, and the presence of other differentiators which the group feels would be worthy of deeper examination. Over the years we have had our students look at Street Tea vendors (The Chaiwallah), Omlette makers (Omlettewallah), Fried Bhajiya makers (Bhajiyawallah), Paav Bhaji wallah (Fried Bread and mashed vegetables), Golla wallah (Crushed ice on a stick), Pani Puri wallah (Puffed Puris with a sour dip) and so on, all favorite Indian street foods, all served from Laris or informal carts, by small and micro business enterprises, each run by a poor but determined individuals who is trying to build a livelihood in a harsh socio-economic environment.

Each group of students are required to make repeated visits to the chosen locations for observation and use the insights to model the flow of resources, finances and build an understanding of the visible as well as intangible assets and processes that have been incorporated to make the particular business a success. Through the interviews that are also required to get an understanding of how the story pans out across the year or a longer period and in some cases get an understanding of the history of the establishment and its various successes and periods of crisis, of which there are many being so exposed to the vagaries of the street environment that is at once full of opportunity as well as challenges. This collective understanding is to be mapped out using the group processes of discussion, dialogue and modeling from which would emerge a coherent model that can be worked into a suitable metaphor that can be used to share their understanding with the rest of the class. The students would be required to make a rich visual representation of their model in the form of a wall size poster for presentation and this would be used as a prop to explain the concepts that they have gathered about the particular business that they have studied. Teachers use this opportunity to connect the students to possibilities for further study and they are in turn quite ready to follow up on these leads since the learning from the field is quite deep and highly motivating as well. We look forward to seeing how this particular batch respond to the field study challenge particularly since it happens across the Holi festival weekend with all its associated distractions, but we are sure that they would stay focused and get the job done in time. Only time will tell.

Nature of the Design Process: Systems Thinking at NID

Nature of the Design Process: Systems Thinking at NID

Image: Four stage model of the Systems Design process.
Rather than following a single big idea I believe that designing is about following a number of related concepts and in exploring the opportunities that the design space offers you. It is about the insights that your own imagination brings to the surface as you continue the journey while sensing the environment and the situation that surrounds the particular opportunity. This is why the outcomes are so unpredictable but if you persist and remain sensitive to the insights you will eventually develop a set of convictions that will prompt you to act in a particular manner and then subject these explorations to a number of tests as these are evaluated in the progressive stages of the design process.

In my model of the design process, which I teach my students at NID during the Design Concepts and Concerns course, I offer a four stage model where the User Research leads to Scenario Visualisation and this will bring to the surface many ideas and concepts that can be shared with users and others as the work progresses. These concepts and models can be subjected to debate and discussion as well as detailed modeling and testing till you are ready to invest time and effort as well as develop the basis for obtaining the costs to detail out one, two or more of these scenarios and subject these to further testing, all usually done in rapid succession. So, in this way designing is an action oriented work where research is invariably interspaced with action of modeling and discourse as well as a good measure of discussion and debate based on which your insights and convictions would develop more fully and you will then make some decisions about directions and goals that need to be reached. Both goals and possible solutions as well as means of achieving the goals are co-developed or co-evolved as the work progresses.

The third stage is Concept Development which takes a substantial amount of time and money in a business situation. Here the detailing of some promising concepts are taken up in a systematic manner and this can take a good deal of time effort and cost and the fourth stage is to develop Business Models that can help realise the concept in the real world. I have these models on my website and you can download these as pdf files if you wish from the site below from the Design Theory section of the website:


By the way I have posted another story today on my blog about my experience in Madras in 1974. Take a look. This an the previous posts show case studies of design action in the real world and the impact these can have on a business situation, particularly in a small scale industry setting.

Design Opportunities in Rural India: DCC2008 for Foundation students at NID

DCC2008 for Foundation students at NID began this week and we have chosen to look at trades and occupations that can add value and create wealth in rural India through design in the age of the creative economy.

Image: Exploring and reflection of the self and the rich picture models produced by the students.
The time is here once again to start the Design Concepts and Concerns course for the batch of students in the Foundation Programme at NID. This year we have 75 students in the class and we have decided to look at trades and occupations that could be enhanced and value added by the use of design. Design can be applied to the creation of new products and services and it can be used to improve the efficiency and comfort levels of the people involved in the trades itself and also to the services offered by each of these. With the arrival of the creative economy we are sure that many of our traditional trades will reinvent themselves with the use of design and offer high value to both the practitioner as well as their clients. Some of these ideas are discussed in more detail on my blog called "Design for India".

Image: DCC Blackboard with the discussion on the area of models and their role in design research and action.
This time our course has been truncated to one week in the first phase and to three and a half weeks in the second phase with a gap of three weeks when the students will do the SLA course in one week and have two weeks in the field for their Environmental Perception course. We have therefore modified our course offering and packed two assignments in the first week, one dealing with exploring and expressing the self through a process of introspection, reflection and expression in the form of a composite image which can be used to share their own story as a rich picture model. This is the first of the many models that the students would build during this course. Most students did not know what we meant by the word “Model” in the context of design exploration and this gave the teachers an opportunity to explore the concept and all its dimensions in a lecture discussion session in the class yesterday after a brief introduction to the various dimensions of design as we know it today. The DCC Blackboard seen in the picture will show the gist of the discussions in class and the words were contributed by the students as the discussions progressed, they quickly grasped the meaning of the term and the use of models in the design of new and innovative offerings.

Image: Rich picture representations of their self image on display in the class softboards.
The students made rich pictures of their self-reflection and expression assignment. These are displayed in the class and each student was asked to share their story with three other students over the next three days. Based on this sharing they would be able to develop a text that each would send to one close relative (an uncle, aunt or even parent or friend) as well as to the teachers of the course and to some of their classmates and all of these would be documented with the digital image of their picture and be made available to all the students in the class. We hope that by doing this they would be able to appreciate the role that each one of us plays in shaping the design directions by the value systems that we hold dear and how these would shape the decisions that we made on behalf of others in our design journey. The design journey is one of exploration and research that leads to the gathering of numerous insights that are based on these current and past explorations and insights. Insights get accumulated over the journey and these provide a certain degree of conviction based on which our design decisions are invariably taken. These are not just based on facts but also on feelings and convictions that would be influenced by the philosophy and ideology held by the designer. The paper and the model on the Design Journey that I had written earlier this year was circulated to all our students and we will be discussing this paper in class as we go forward with the learning in this course.

Image: Students of the DCC2008 class attending the lecture discussion session on day two.
The second assignment is based on what the students already know in their conscious and sub-conscious mind about a given topic. This year we have decided to make the first week a sort of preparation for the field work that would be undertaken as part of the environmental perception course when all the students will be visiting a village near Ahmedabad and using this visit to sensitise themselves to design opportunities in the rural sector as well as give them a first hand exposure to the India reality on the ground. In this assignment they are divided into groups of fifteen students and each group has been given the task of exploring amongst themselves their understanding of an Indian village and its challenges and opportunities based on what they already know deep in their collective minds. The groups have been assigned the following five regional situations and the context that is established by the very incomplete description of the village type and location in the broadly defined regions mentioned below.

Coastal Maharashtra
Himalayan Foothills
Kerala Rainforest
Northeastern Hills
Desert Rajasthan

Image: Brainstorming session in progress
Students are expected to brainstorm and identify all the attributes of the village type in question and try and capture in as rich a picture as possible without necessarily doing any external research from books or interviews with experts which is reserved for another stage in the course. Based on their brainstorming and the key-words that the group identifies they are expected to sort and categorise these into an agreeable structure that would be meaningful to the group in the form of key-words and hierarchies that make sense. The structure needs to be as complete as possible and the areas of ignorance too may be identified at this stage. The students would then develop a metaphor that could be used to express the structure in a memorable format and that which has a contextual relevance to the team as well as one that would make sense to most viewers as well. They are then required to make a presentation and tell about their journey as well as their findings to the rest of the class in a well prepared presentation and show and tell session that would be done in the class on the scheduled time. This presentation is now planned on Saturday morning at 10.00 am in the classroom at NID. The sequence of presentations would be decided by the teachers. Besides these inputs in class as well as the papers that were distributed we have set up a server based resource on the NID server for digital resources that are available on the net. Links to world thinkers and experts in fields that impinge on the subject at hand are made available through this channel. For instance we have links to hazel Henderson’s website and to her papers on development economics which the teachers feel are very relevant to the task at hand. Similarly, the links to DOTT07, the Design Council UK, Kaos Pilot, NextD and PhD-Design list are some popular design and inspirational resources that are shared with the students in the class. We will add resources as we proceed with the course and students too would be contributing new links and resources as we go forward with the course.

Image: Student reflection about themselves shared on the softboard as part of assignment one, Self Image.

Sustainability and Social Equity as a Design Challange in India

Undersdtanding the Known Universe: Assignment on Sustainability and Social Equity as a Design Challange in India

Images: Students sharing the work presentation at the end of assignment one in the DCC course at Bangalore.

The students of NID R & D Centre at Bangalore from the Retail Experience and Digital Experience disciplines were assigned the task of exploring the areas of three key sectors of employment to discover how the supply chain could be strengthened by design approaches to ensure both sustainability as well as social equity across the following sectors:

1. Handmade Products and Handlooms team with their models

2. Farm Fresh Produce team with their models

3. Dairy and Poultry Products team with their models

The groups were asked to brainstorm and then categorise the various dimensions of these sectors so as to capture the known factors and attributes so as to understand the sector as a system which could then be inmproved from the stated goal of achieving both sustainability as well as social equity in the age of rapid globalisation and urbanisation that is sweeping the country today. This understanding was then to be used to develop design opportunities at a leter stage in the Design Concepts and Concerns course at the Bangalore Centre of NID. The two new disciplines at Bangalore are doing this course for the first time and the attempt is also being made to integrate the areas of focus of both groups at the Centre as well as the interersts of the students in each group. Groups were formed by choosing volunterr coordinators and they in turn selected the teams to make these multi-doisciplinary as well as with a gender balance in each group to get the required variety on the teams.

Image: Detail of one of the models by the Fresh Farm Produce Group

Each group made their brainstorming sessions with a lot of passion and committment and then spent a good deal of time in categorising their findings over a period of two days of intense activity. The teams then prepared a structure that made sense to them and based on the agreed structure they developed a rich metaphor to capture all the dimensions of their assigned sectors.

Rashmi, who is in Ahmedabad, shared a wonderful set of links from the Open University in the UK on Systems Modelling and Diagramming and the students have been requested to explore these links to study the theory of modelling and diagramming types through the rich multi-media presentations available at these links below:

What are Spray Diagrams?
What are Rich Pictures
What are Systems Maps?
What are Influence Diagrams
What are Multi-Cause Diagrams
What are Sign Graphs

These are not to be treated as frozen methods to be followed but as a guide to understanding and each experience will show the student their own way forward and give then an ability to make their own models and diagrams which are best suited to their task as well as one that can be achieved within the constraints of the skill sets available to the group with whom they are working.

Image: Teachers explaining the next assignment dealing with meetings with experts as well as strategies for gathering insights from the field.

DCC2007_PG Class starts at Paldi campus for Textiles and Furniture students

Image: Day one, students who made it to the class today.
Today we had many absentees due to the long weekend with Onam and Raksha Bhandhan, but the brave ones were there and we did get the show on the road, DCC has begun and the students have made a dash to Calico Museum after we discussed it in class. There was a heavy downpour in the afternnoon and I am not sure of they made it to the museum on time but their report on Wednesday will tell us what happened.

Image: DCC2007 Black Board on Day one.
The DCC black board shows that we discussed "What is Design? .... and the Designer?" and looked at various aspects of design and how the designer knows what needs to be known. The nature of knowledge was seen as not being additive but with a focus on understanding rather than a mere collection of facts, like putting new ones into a container. Insights were important as was motivation and exploration. Imagination was the key to finding design opportunities and this also created the problem of not being able to share these easily and much effort was needed to show through models, from abstratct to tangible at various levels of reality, before we are able to manifest a design action in the real world. The future is not knowable although we may glean trends and possible approaches, but the future can be created by design, if we are able to translate our intentions into tangible actions with sensitivity and care, this future can be sustainable and beneficial as well.

Image: Books that were introduced to class.
We introduced some leading thinkers in design as well as current concepts that are being discussed and debated on forums such as the PhD-Design list as well as the DesignIndia list on yahoogroups with a focus on the major authors whose books are at hand as well as those who are easily accessible through JSTOR research and ofcourse on Google and Wikipedia. More later about these sources and the authors.

Students will submit a writen note by email on what they think is design after they have explored various internet sites and accessed the books in the NID library. Students were asked to reflect deeply on their own belief systems and what they had experienced in their childhood which may have contributed to some of these beliefs. This would lead up to the next assignment when we meet again in class.

Assignment two: Disclosing the Self – Modelling the Discovery through Reflection and Introspection

Image: Slide from the EAD06 Show about the DCC assignment on “Disclosing the Self”

In the lecture and discussion held at NID Gandhinagar yesterday with the batch of thirty students in the DCC course we examined the nature of design as well as the attributes and characteristics of the designer. Design is an activity that takes place in a field of thinking and believing persons where a variety of belief systems and levels of understanding may prevail and this by itself would call for a great deal of sensitivity in the management of the intentions as well as the directions of the proposed outcomes. Technology is but one of the many considerations that the design teams would need to cope with and it may not be the most challenging aspect of the design task on hand. Social and cultural factors may play a significant role in shaping the intentions as well as determine what can be indeed offered as a solution to the perceived problems in the given context. Temporal factors too would have their own impact and one solution that was found valid at a certain moment may become invalid or even objectionable when the context would change with time and location. This makes the task of design truly complex and it has therefore been called “wicked problems” when the complexities are almost unmanageable using the usually accepted tools of logic, science and management.

Image: DCC Whiteboard from Gandhinagar, August 2007

In such a situation the designer too would need to know what the self is bringing to the situation, since all of us have our own system of beliefs as well as our abilities and knowledge levels which would in turn determine our ability to understand or empathise with the particular situation that is to be improved or changed. It is here that this assignment of exploring the self with an intention to discover and disclose comes into focus. The student is asked to reflect and introspect about themselves and attempt to try and plumb their memory and the boundaries of their consciousness about themselves in order to discover their true interests as well as the sources of their learning and belief systems in a whole range of areas that may matter in the process of design. Knowing ones strengths and weaknesses as well as interests may help in setting the learning agenda as well as help set priorities for what one would like to learn through reading and self study. It can also help motivate one to make the investments needed to change oneself in the area of skills, knowledge and most importantly in the area of the attitudes that one brings to the activity of design. It is here that the assignment may make sense in helping one reveal to oneself many aspects of our being and from this we may choose to disclose only a part of our experiences and beliefs but the journey would be useful in any case for the individual and their peers in the class.

Design is a reflexive activity since it is carried out in a thinking and acting field of persons who can and will react and this calls for a heightened level of sensitivity in the designer if we are to achieve a degree of satisfaction and closure. Charles Eames when asked a question about the nature of the boundaries of the design task he asked for the boundaries of the design problem. In a diagram that he submitted for an exhibit in Paris in 1969 he modeled the roles of the designer, the client and the society in a very insightful manner and stated that one could achieve real satisfaction only when the task fell within the overlapping zone of the interests of all partners. This amazing diagram or model of the “What is Design” can be seen here along with more about Eames at the Library of Congress archive.

My slide presentation and paper titled “Creating the Unknowable” which described this course at the EAD06 conference in Bremen 2005 can be downloaded from my website here. Link: Full paper 50 kb pdf file Link: Slide Show 4.1 MB pdf file

Design Concepts & Concerns Blog: An interactive platform for the DCC course at NID, India

Image: Fire as a Metaphor for Design

The Design Methods course provided the limited framework for discourse on design theory at NID and in the mid seventies the course went through its first metamorphosis with the appearance of the environmental agenda into the Foundation Programme being introduced by the then coordinator and teacher Mohan Bhandari and this layer has persisted over the years. I started teaching this course in 1982 soon after Mohan Bhandari left NID and by then I had started bringing in my own convictions to this course in some tentative way at first and later with a more definite value orientation that is reflected in my own engagement with design research and practise over these years in the crafts, bamboo and small industry perspectives and later in the domain of digital design all informed by the context that is India. The case material and the concepts being developed caused me to change the name of this course to Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) in the mid nineties. In this period we also embraced systems design philosophies that came to be accepted at the senior years of the industrial design programmes at NID and its intellectual bearings came from the works of Stafford Beer and Gui Bonsiepe besides Buckminister Fuller and Victor Papanek. Bonsiepe’s books and documentations of the work in Argentina and Brazil continued the thought processes started at the hfg Ulm and brought a new perspective that of the difference between design in the West and that of the Periphery and its associated social and economic implications.

Image: Profile of the Designer

For me the Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) course became a platform to revisit the domain of theory each year after several fresh and new experiences in research and practise during that year since all NID faculty are expected to teach, research and practise within the Institutional studio and professional practise framework. Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) is about Finding, Knowing, Doing and Feeling, the last word of the quartet being the most important in my opinion. Which is why the name of my course was changed from Design Methodology that was used in the sixties to suggest that design was a scientific discipline and later on it was called Design Process to suggest that it was steeped in good management but now we understand that t is neither Science nor management and it certainly is not Art. I changed the name of my course without official sanction several years ago since NID gave a great deal of latitude to its teachers to experiment and evolve their courses as they too developed a better understanding of their subject. I am grateful for this liberty as a teacher but bemoan the fact that many colleagues do not read enough and pursue an intellectual debate to argue these positions nor do they understand these ideas fully nor support these views from a form of apathy that seems to permeate our intellectual landscape. My model for the “Profile of the Emerging Designer” that I use in my class to sensitise design students to the range of possible professional profiles was first published in 1994 at a seminar on design education at the IDC in Mumbai provided a framework to look at all design professions from this tetrahedral view of the skills and knowledge base of a design professional. (Ranjan 1994)

No one is comfortable when we talk about ourselves as designers in India and the role that we should, could, or would play as a designer in the Indian context. It is the context that gives us the shakes. We get perplexed at the sheer size and complexity and cannot see where to begin or we see the opportunities for our special skills at the comfortable and special end of the economy where about two percent of our population lives and push away our sense of guilt when someone asks us about the other 98 percent and our contribution to these people or even the middle 60 percent of India. However all our students know that design as we are discussing it in the DCC class is about looking, knowing and doing what needs to be done, however uncomfortable. Doing it thoughtfully, skillfully and with a great degree of empathy for the user. The value orientation in this class is deliberate and the model of the designer as a tetrahedron of vertices with Finding, Knowing and Doing as its base and the most important quadrant, in my view is the apex, which is that of Feeling. This is what we bring to our students each year and throughout their stay at NID.

Redesign of the DCC Course: Introducing the Macro-Micro design strategy
For the Foundation class of 2001 we were compelled to innovate our teaching strategy because our city of Ahmedbad was seriously affected by the continuous bouts of rioting that prevented the usual movement of students into the field for user centered studies. Therefore we decided to look at macro economic issues as our point of reference for this particular course in design thinking. The results wee startling to say the least. The “Concept Mela”, a sort of concept sharing exposition, which the students put up at the end of the course shared visualisations and explorations that the seven groups of students had created and each was the proposed framework for a sector specific initiative for design action in India. These explorations were informed by a series of brain storming sessions and the usual lectures and coupled group assignments that followed the structure that this course has been known for at the NID. This time however the young students were in the process of transforming India from a resource poor country to a self confident and successful economy that it can be since nobody told them that this was not possible, the skeptics were missing. They were told to research the various macro parameters and use the NID faculty and senior students as their immediate source of expert consultants. The groups formed went through a progression of assignments at building models of the economy with a view to discover structural relationships and functional proximities between related industries and economic sectors. Five groups looked at the same issues and discussed these with great enthusiasm and captured the major attributes of these sectors and their interrelationships by a process of brainstorming and discussion. The thus identified parameters were arranged using Post-it stickers into intermediate structures and based on a consensus within the team and amongst the consultants that they chose to involve.

The resultant structures were represented the form of presentation posters, each using a suitable metaphor for organising the elements. The five groups had five different models but several aspects of these overlapped and some models were more amenable to further manipulations than the others. However at this stage all the students were highly motivated and demonstrated a very high degree of clarity about these macro economic parameters and their impact on the National economy and its related issues and contexts. One group proposed a Ministry of Design and divided the economy into basic producers (primary), processors (secondary) and services. The representation was in the form of a city road map with a downtown circle that had the three forks, one for each category, which got further divided into a branching diagram that accommodated all the individual sectors identified by the group.

Another group selected to depict the economy as a Venn diagram with here major areas of economy, ecology and society with the interstices of these accommodating the critical sectors that needed inputs across these areas. Yet another interesting strategy was to look at the interrelationships between a few key-driving parameters and this was represented as an interactive wheel where the outer circle defined the individual sectors where design could and should play a critical role, and these numbered 230 in all.

Design Initiatives: Sector Specific Strategies
The efforts of the students and the resultant flow of ideas was further supplemented by a series of lectures by the author on the institutional frameworks that were needed to make this initiative a reality in India. I shared the work done for the two institutes dealing with crafts sector and the bamboo sector with the students and asked them to identify specific opportunities that they could locate for immediate action in the Indian context. The teams were further divided into seven and this time the students were permitted to join teams that they could align themselves with on a personal interest and ideology basis. The result was startling and the motivation levels kept these students active in groups on an almost round the clock basis in a seemingly inextinguishable flow of energy and creativity. Each group created panels that described the issues visually and built models to share their vision of the proposed framework for action, each in a small panel based exhibit that could be taken to the public. This time we invited the public into our campus, and over two days of intense interactions, the students got a great deal of feedback and critique from a large number of visitors. Seven sectors were selected from a larger list of possible choices and the Institutional frameworks developed to address these are as follows:

1. Badal (Monsoon Clouds)
Proposed as a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), the metaphor of the monsoon clouds is used to describe a process for strengthening micro-enterprises through the use of research, assimilation, refinement and delivery of know how to the micro-entrepreneurs just as the clouds perform a function of delivering rain to the people. This is way of understanding self-employment strategies of some successful people in one part of India and to be able to share these with the others in need.

2. Udaan (Flight of the Spirit)
A strategy for the empowerment, modernisation and for Information Technology enabling of rural India with a deep understanding of the needs of this particular community or groups of such communities distributed all over the country, each in their own environment and unique cultural and linguistic space.

3 Aavriti (A Platform for Change)
The child and its activities are the focus of this initiative. The design opportunities area of toys, games and active education are addressed in this framework. India does not have a single agency that is capable of embracing the design needs of children although they form almost 60 percent of the total population.

4. EDD (Education Design Developments)
The proposed network of designers would work towards improving the quality of education in India. The design needs of the education sector are both complex and fund starved at the same time. The use of the web and face to face strategies form the basis of this design scenario that could build a network of designers with teachers, students and other interested specialist contributors.

5. SEEDS (School of Ecological Design Studies)
This organisation fosters a holistic approach to issues of environment through education, research and action strategies that are unique to the problems of India. The belief system embedded in this proposal assumes progress through a two way learning process in building contemporary design solutions and in learning from the traditional wisdom of an established society.

6. Green Dots (Design Organisation for Sustainable Transport Systems)
Transportation strategies that do not damage that environment need to be innovated and made acceptable to our society if the quality of life in our cities and villages is to improve. This strategy includes the use of novel solutions and sustained information campaigns to build acceptable models with the involvement of people.

7. IID (Institute of Interface Design)
To supplement India’s software engineering strengths there is a need for the capacity to make products that are usable and appropriate for a wide section of indigenous users and for export needs. The proposed framework and associated scenarios fill a real need for value added approaches to enhance the interface design capabilities of our existing software industry.

This effort gave us a glimpse of concepts that were both necessary and achievable. The next stage in this course led to the development of scenarios by each student of one sub-opportunity that they individually felt could help precipitate the necessary investments or action in the sector of their choice. The fact that these explorations reached concrete action plans with well-defined objectives and a visual expression of the possible scenarios made it easy for visitors, senior students and faculty to engage in a deep discussion on the merits and risks of each specific approach. This is the hallmark of design thinking and action that is rooted in the domain of the visual scenario that can locate the discourse at the macro level and at the micro level simultaneously. The future of design too lies somewhere along this path and we can and must find new roles for design in the production of images that can inform decision processes, some of which are so complex that they need many iterations and political mediations to resolve in an amicable manner. Most importantly these design processes need the involvement and partnership of a multitude of stakeholders and such visualisations make the concepts, decisions and issues available for visual review in a transparent and understandable manner that fosters long term partnership needed to achieve the lofty results. Design at this level has the ingredients to create the avalanche effect, a great positive mobilisation, an overwhelming quantity of something hopefully new and beneficial, with a very small designerly effort.

Since this batch we started selecting a major theme each year and offering these as challenges to the batch of students through which they could experience the design journey of inploration and exploration using the tools and processes that were introduced during the course. Some of these themes, a few examples listed here , were introduced in the various courses of which some have been briefly documented at my website at these links below while the others will be added as time permits.

Theme : Globalistaion and Impact on Indian economy – Link: Documentation of the course in 2004
Theme : Khadi as a way of life for India and the World – Link: Documentation of the course in 2003

Theme : Child friendly services
Theme : Services across sectors
Theme : Food, Clothing, Finance and Entertainment as design opportunities
Theme : Creative Industries of the Future
Theme : Design Institutes for the States and Regions of India

The various concepts and concerns that inform design action as well as the theory of design have been expanded upon at other links here as well as on my blog called “Design for India” which will be updated with contemporary concerns and reflections in the days ahead.

Design Theory links:
Prof. M P Ranjan’s website and Design Theory links below
What is Design?
What is a Design Opportunity?
What is Design Knowledge?
What is a Designer's Profile?
Levels of Design
What is Design: Fire Metaphor