Goa Group: Fish, Boats and Beach as Metaphor

Image: Goa group with their massive model and metaphor representation with the Fisherman in the foreground and the Goa Tourist map and persona in the background.

While the Goa group had very rich palette of images to support their presentation it was their structure that was truly memorable. Using a radial structure they built their structure about Food, Inflation and the Economy with the Meta factors around the circle and the process questions along the radial axis. This gave them the possibility of using the rings to represent the various parts of their structure in a very interesting manner.

Image: Radial model of the rich structure by the Goa group with the Fish, Boats and Beach Metaphor with the Fisherman in the foreground.

The structure model was further strengthened by the use of small iconic images strewn all over the diagram that helped us locate the major ideas visually while getting an overview of the structure. The Move in understanding was huge. While the first presentation that was based on what the group already knew was skewed towards a sort of outsider view of tourist Goa the second round saw the group connecting with all the right kinds of people who can be called experts and this led to a huge shift in understanding.

Image: The Goa team making their impassioned presentation with all members taking the stand and making a pitch with a very high level of motivation.

The presentation which had all the team members participating was truly memorable and of a very high quality. In the teachers experience this is by far the best effort in many years in the PG programme at NID. I would request the students involved to make a textual note of their experience and to share this with all of us so that this experience can produce durable learning that Prof Bruce Archer had told us about when he visited NID in the early 80's to give the Sir Misha Black Award for excellence in Design Education to the then Executive Director of NID, Ashoke Chatterjee. He told us that experience by itself does not produce knowledge, but it is the reflection on experience that does create deep and durable knowledge.

This assignment is therefore a way for groups of individuals to first map out what they already think they know about any chosen subject through brainstorming and categorisation followed by rounds of modelling to find structure and finding a suitable metaphor to map the discovered structure for all to see and understand. The next assignment has the students sharing their understanding with real experts and through research and the process of modelling, finding structure and making a metaphor so that the findings can be shared in a coherent manner. This process also has the effect of clarifying the concepts in ones own mind as well as in locating insights that would drive the process of opportunity mapping and decision making as the design process goes forward.

The other two groups too have completed their second round which will be reported here later in the day. We need to meet today to review all the MeBoards, perhaps in the SDM studio and the final opportunity maps as well as the individual secnarios will be exhibited in the NID Foyer on Tuesday the 12th August 2008 at 5.30 pm IST. We have booked the Foyer space through the NID Academin Administration and we look forward to a live participation from faculty, students and invited guests.

Down the Drains

Image: Ayan Ghosh at Gandhinagar and Paldi DCC2008 discussions

I feel a primary aspect to be understood while analyzing the role of food and its importance in its current context is to examine how humans consume food, which is after all what its main function is. This consumption pattern has never been constant, and has changed considerably depending on the way food has been cultivated, stored, transported, re-stored and eaten. These systems have been considerably modified by the various discoveries, innovations, improvisations and inventions which continued to evolve since humans settled as an agrarian society.

Cultivation
Some main events in the journey of food have been the discovery of fire and the plough, and a basic understanding of time and seasons, leading to agriculture. This new form of foraging, through cultivation, was helped substantiality by innovations in irrigation techniques (like the Archimedes’s screw and the Noria) and extensive canal building. Later, architectural innovations followed in the form of dams and later more sophisticated aqueducts built in ancient Rome.

However, the pattern of agriculture the world over remained unchanged for thousands of years, although techniques might have differed from civilization to civilization depending on the climate and topography. The most significant innovations that boosted the production capacities of fields to feed the increasing global populations happened in the post industrial revolution late 18th and 19th century, with development of fertilizers like Ammonium Nitrate, pesticides, and other mechanized innovations like the development of tractors, and threshers.

Preservation
Limitations in preservation options reduced the transportability of food which being organic in nature starts putrefying in short time. The organic nature of most food either allowed it to be frozen or dried. Drying substantially altered the nature of the food, while freezing was expensive and exclusive. Food storage changed drastically since the 19th century, with Nicolas François Appert inventing canning in 1809, which contributed significantly to Napolean’s army’s mobility and Europe conquest. Appert himself didn't know how the process of heating canned food helped in its preservation worked, but was later explained by Louis Pasteur. This was followed by breakthroughs by scores of inventors contributing many small advances in cooling machinery leading to the perfection of the refrigerator. This allowed surplus food to be stored in its actual state for many days domestically, and also to be transported overseas on long journeys. Later innovations in packaging design also contributed hugely in optimizing trade.

Human Movement
Various events and inventions in other domains contributed greatly to the food industry, like globalization, colonialism, colonization, international trade and human migration. Globalization, which has its roots in the silk route trades across Asia and Europe, contributed in the spice economy, which thrived for hundreds of years. Colonization, starting with the Spanish conquests of the Americas, resulted in many new food items being introduced to Western countries. After colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They also took it to the Philippines, whence it moved to southeast Asia and then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the potato and tobacco to Europe. Similarly the British Empire introduced tea from China to Sri Lanka, India and Britain and the USA.

Colonialism and the industrial revolution also catalyzed an unprecedented amount of human migration the world over, which gave rose to new consumption requirements and opened up endemic food cultures to new markets.

Image: Ayan Ghosh at Gandhinagar and Paldi DCC2008 discussions

Alternative power
Shift from traditional energy sources like animal, human, wind and water to steam, coal, fuel and electric also revolutionized the way the food industry expanded over the last century and a half. The industrial revolution triggered the concept of the factory and the mass production of food. It also led to the invention of the railways, automobiles and lastly the aircraft. The last three are of major consequence, as it allowed surplus food to be exchanged between countries through exports and it also allowed fast and networked system of food distribution, thereby preventing widespread famines.

As a result…
However all the above mentioned factors have also contributed in a serious fall out of food wastage which is a result of the ability to acquire surplus food. Since we can acquire much more than we consume, its inevitable that there is a great deal of surplus in the hands of the upper classes in the first world countries who can afford such benefits on the basis of a higher disposable income. Previously we cultivated only as much can be consumed immediately, but the option of preservation has made us uncertain to the consumption amounts, since there is always back up.

In the USA
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) calculates 20 percent of the country's food goes to waste, representing an annual value of about $31 billion in lost resources. Such wastage is not productive, sustainable, or ethical. While food is being squandered in rich countries, 800 million people around the world often do not know where their next meal is coming from, 166 million children are undernourished, and 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

In Britain
Britons are throwing away £10bn worth of food that could be eaten each year. About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched - including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don't eat the leftovers. The complete £10bn consists of food that could have been eaten, not including peeling and bones, the researchers say. Tackling the waste could mean a huge reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking one in five cars off the road.

In India
Its a matter of concern even in India where it was announced in the Rajya Sabha in March 2008 by the Minister of State for Food Processing Industries (FPI) that wastage of harvested food items is estimated to be around Rs 58,000 crore at various stages of handling due to lack of adequate post-harvest infrastructure, cold chains, transportation and proper storage facilities.

Food = water
A new report by the Stockholm International Water Institute has determined that the wastage of food means wastage of a large amount of water. According to a report in Discovery News, given that crop production uses about 1,800 trillion gallons (1,700 cubic miles) of water a year, almost 40 per cent of which comes from irrigation rather than rainwater, that loss represents a lot of water. The report says that in the United States itself, up to 30 per cent of food is tossed out each year, worth about 48.8 billion US dollars, which is equivalent to flushing 10 trillion gallons of water down the drain.

Why so?
There are many reasons for the humongous quantities of food wastage. They vary culture to culture. Economy, social status, cultural habits all play a part, and many solutions have also been suggested in the past and continue to be done. Rationing food had been a popular concept in socialist countries. It is however an economic control, aimed to provide food to those who cannot afford it. Denying people who can afford to do so the right to food is never going to be accepted universally in a democratic political ideology.

However, I personally feel that the problem hasn’t been understood yet, and all solutions are working at a preventive level rather than a curative level. Waste food management is happening because waste "is happening". It is broadly accepted that completely eradicating food wastage is not possible and every effort should be taken in minimizing it. One possible source of finding the root cause of why we waste food I feel lies in our evolutionary past, and how it has shaped human psychology. Maybe somewhere within our subconscious the million years old hunter-gatherer psyche is winning over the thousand years old settler-cultivator psyche. One aspect of study that has been undertaken in this direction deals with how humans and all other animals behave with food, and is called optimal foraging theory.

Optimal Foraging Theory?
A central concern of ecology has traditionally been foraging behavior. In its most basic form, optimal foraging theory states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time. In other words, they behave in such a way as to find, capture and consume food containing the calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The understanding of many ecological concepts such adaptation, energy flow, competition hinges on the ability to comprehend what food items animals select, and why.

Furthermore, the absolute limits of the range of food types eaten by a consumer in a given habitat are defined by morphological constraints, but very few animals actually eat all of the different food types they are capable of consuming. Optimal foraging theory helps biologists understand the factors determining a consumer’s operational range of food types, or diet width.

At the one extreme, animals employing a generalist strategy tend to have broad diets; they chase and eat many of the prey/food items with which they come into contact. At the other extreme, those with a specialist strategy have narrow diets and ignore many of the prey items they come across, searching preferentially for a few specific types of food. In general, animals exhibit strategies ranging across a continuum between these two extremes. Recently, scholars have connected optimal foraging theory to prospect theory, noting that survival thresholds might be responsible for human attitudes towards risk.

So?
I am personally still trying to understand the full implications of the optimal foraging theory and how it is directly linked with global food wastage but I sincerely believe in its existence. Somewhere down the line, through a protracted history like I mentioned, the process of accessing food has got distorted too fast, which has contributed to this current phenomenon of over-consumption. Wastage happens not only in food, but in almost every other form of consumerist products, which is a thematic redundancy phenomenon in modernist and postmodernist society at large.

A huge shift has occurred at the options level and the time level, which has led to the disparity in the intake and outtake proportions. The handling time and search times required for access to food in the current urban set up is minimal, which means we gather up much more than what we can consume. The energy requirement levels have stayed the same, since humans have been more or less engaged in the same energy expedient tasks since cultivation started. What might have altered is the energy supplementary levels, which is a result of the consumption disparity. Our dietary patterns have changed so drastically since the dawn of agriculture (at least in the urban areas), that the amount of food required to meet the necessary energy levels have also been distorted. In most cases we consume more, to bridge this gap.

We fear that we might not be able to meet this shortfall,be there a crisis or not, and so the ones who can, they consume more than what they need. They are not to be blamed entirely, because the surplus they are consuming is being made available to them in the first place. Its a huge and complicated cycle of economics and ecology, but very little research has actually been done into the subject, or maybe I haven't myself delved into the subject in depth as yet.

Maybe this in itself is a design research subject which can be expanded on for addressing the cure rather than the prevention part. Maybe an apple a week can keep the doctor away, as well as one a day.

Ayan Ghosh
~

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

~ Gregory Bateson

A New Stone Turned

Image: Anindya Roy commenting on students presentations in DCC2008 Paldi01

“An unusual choice of career at your age, isn’t it?” This is a question I’ve been thrown in one form or another many a time by friends and acquaintances ever since I made a conscious decision to stop running behind the bigwigs of the Automotive world and instead, look a different way. I joined NID as faculty of transportation design at the age of 27. It is close to a year now since I joined and through this time I have been involved in various courses across a few disciplines. All through this time, like the murmur of monks in a monastery, I used to hear about DCC from students. The remarks didn’t sound so much like that of a course that was taught but a great journey to an uncharted place – revelatory, eye (and mind) opening, unforgettable, intense, tiring, rewarding – and one that would leave you changed somewhere inside for sure.

Just like when I hear of someone who’s been to Ladakh, and I haven’t, my first thought is, “I must go there myself and see what the fuss is all about!” What could be in this place that everyone who’s been to can’t stop raving about? With this curiosity built up over a period of one year spent at NID, one ordinary morning I decided to pack my bags and book my ticket, by replying to M.P. Ranjan’s email call for volunteer faculty. Brave move, knowing that I really had no clue about the course or its subject for the year, I had never read this blog and that I would be facing 20-30 students at a time, some waiting to hear great words of wisdom from this young faculty. The fact is that I was in it for really the same reason as the students – to learn about something anew. Well, the students do have grades to fetch as well but that’s another matter.

Image: Anindya Roy with teaching colleagues: DCC2008 Paldi01

It’s been a week for me on this journey and I’d say what has taken me by surprise is how much there is to unlearn before new learning can begin. It is an unavoidable situation having grown to this age conditioned by much focused education and exposure, the result of years of learning within limited context. What does it take then to outrun the legacy? This is where the DCC course structure takes on the avatar of a roadmap and students become the guides on a journey that never ceases to explore. It is through their brainstorming and structuring of gathered data that a wholesome picture starts to emerge within which one can find specific sites of interest.

Though initially what comes out may be a barrage of information with too many layers for the untrained mind to make sense of, it is within this very tangled web that multitudes of design opportunities lurk. In sessions that follow, much grey matter gets activated, sleep is lost and egos are put aside, reluctantly at times. Scores of minds aligned by a common goal can be a fantastic force. While I am yet to see results of some of the intermediate stages of the process, the direction gets clearer with every passing day. Having a bird’s eye view of the ongoing process not only is educating me (even as all the effort at ground level is being put in by diligent students) but also allows me to have an overview to reflect upon.

Image: Anindya Roy in DCC2008 Paldi01

This is about getting to know your context of work first-hand, meeting the people who matter and the people in whose life a little design intervention could go a long way, about designing not to satisfy the ego but to attempt to satisfy real needs. The relevance of this approach to a context as complex, rich and demanding as India is undeniable. Hopefully, many of us will carry the learning beyond the academic realm and remember it in our careers whatever they may be. A young bloke came to teach a few things and got taught many times as much in return. Not such a bad choice of career after all!

This is but my initial reflection on a new method of Design Thinking that I have had a chance to experience firsthand and in great detail. In the days to come of my involvement with the course and beyond I will be posting my insights, remarks and findings for all to share and comment on.

A personal Journey

Image: Harini at Gandhinagar during DCC2008

This is a personal post based on my reflections over the past four years. I have had the good fortune and a rare opportunity of acquiring a glimpse both sides of the DCC coin- First as a student in 2004 and now, as assistant faculty in 2008. The journey has been tumultuous and exciting with each day bringing new learning and growth.

The methodology advocated by DCC has become a way of life and is being utilized by numerous people across various walks after having assimilated it into the order of every day things. Four years ago, groups converged in the studio spaces at NID to weave our ideas of the concepts and concerns of design around the theme of globalization and the new order of the world. At that time not many of us possessed the foresight that one small course at NID spread over the course of a few weeks would change and shape the way we would all reason from then on- both collectively and as thinking individuals. There is a clarity that emerges from all the confusion, which calls for a new kind of thinking, understanding, questioning and constantly revaluating opinions and beliefs.

Image: Harini discussing brainstorming and at the presentations with Gandhinagar students

A few days ago, soon after this new phase of my journey began; I rummaged around to rediscover the thoughts and feedback I had penned at the culmination of the course in 2004. This is what it had to say – “When I reflect back on the entire course and all the rapid exchanges and brainstorming sessions there were many thoughts that kept surfacing through my mind and striking home. Many of us grow up with an exaggerated sense of our own self-worth and intelligence. Our spectrum is narrow, our tolerance level non-existent and our motto in life ‘My way is the best way, if not the only way’. Eating humble pie (with unceasing regularity) is probably the best way of learning one of life’s bitter truths and what should have been the Eleventh Commandment-‘you are definitely not as smart as you think you are (or even as smart as others think you are!)’” In hindsight and with slightly more lucidity now than before, I believe that was the result of a first encounter from very close quarters of group dynamics in action.

I trust that each person we meet or come in contact with, whether at home, in the workplace or otherwise have a definite part to play in our overall education in the subject of life. We can never walk away empty-handed after any encounter with the feeling of not having learnt something new. To this end each person’s background and imbibed values areof relevance in enhancing the experience of others. One of the richest experiences that life has to offer is of meeting other people from different arenas of life and the reciprocal exchange that arise between them- it appears impossible that one should ever give without getting anything in return. There is something to be learnt, whether positive or not, from every interaction with another. It also helps us to realize that there are always people to help us out with our own deficiencies. Learning to work as a team, to work with a team- a very challenging, sometimes formidable task but always a gratifying one. A time to share your thoughts and experiences and a time to learn from others.

Image Harini at the group presentations in the NID Gandhinagar Atrium.

My impressions of my first day at DCC class is etched in my mind- a little nervous and apprehensive but very eager and enthusiastic –to learn, to make an impression and to meet and make friends and broaden my perspective of the world at large- a daunting task by any stretch of the imagination. Having heard a lot about the course from numerous friends and seniors I was geared up to face the storm. Upon reflection I now feel that the whole experience has been one of the most rewarding ones till date –the experience of rubbing shoulders with some very resourceful and enterprising people, the desperation in meeting last- minute deadlines, of debate and boisterous argument, the feeling of pride in a job well done, your own growing awareness of your increasing confidence in yourself, the feeling of being part of a team or making a presentation which you have slaved over for hours- these feelings to me are the essence of professional development.

Two invaluable lessons that I take back with me at the end of all this are-firstly, never to go into the battlefield without being fully prepared and doing your groundwork thoroughly and secondly, to be truthful while admitting your ignorance- it’s perfectly acceptable to utter the words ‘I don’t know, but I will find out’. The feeling of being cut down to size is very deflating, but it does serve its purpose-it teaches you a powerful lesson you are not apt to forget easily! The more dogmatic we are, we consciously close shut many doors of opportunities that we could experience, learn from, draw strength and courage to go on to be a better person. After than, can there actually be an individual who doesn’t require a second chance?

Incubating Design Opportunities: DCC2008 Gandhinagar

Image: Team Punjab with their presentation of design opportunity thumbnails and scenarios on the theme of Food.

The week long incubation period for the exploration of design opportunities that the four groups of students had discovered came to an end today with the final review and presentation of the groups work at the NID Gandhinagar campus. Each group had explored various design opportunities using the format for thumbnail sketches and a brief outline and these were discussed at length within each group to look for value and limitations in each of these explored options. This process of articulation and review continued through the week although the class had got over by last Friday when the groups had captured many such illustrations that gave us a glimpse of what was in the minds of the individuals who had drawn them after a process of collective exploration, brainstorming and engagement with experts in the field using anthro-research approaches to clarify directions and define specific insights that could produce value.

Image: Team Kerala with design oppportunity scenarios.

The enthusiasm and committment of the groups resulted in as many as 500 individual design opportunity maps and these were arranged into categories by the teams and some new explorations were initiated on the basis of the insights that were drawn from the initial explorations and the results thereof. THis group was particularly enthused by the design opportunities discovered and the final presentations were a trace of this enthusiasm, and the teams were all present for the final review. Each group has been requested to make a scanned image file of each thumbnail sheet and share these with all the other groups and during the interaction session this evening at Gandhinagar we photographed all the students with their Design Opportunity Scenario sheet with a final request that they send in an email with a brief but effective textual description of their design opportunity scenario to the teachers. These textual notes would also be made available to all students through the NID server at gandhinagar just as the pictures would be shared with all students as part of the contemporaneous documentation of this course.

Image: Team Gujarat with their radial model of design opportunity thumbnails in a categorised map.

Image: Team Northeast with their offering after the incubation period of one week.

Each of these explorations will be shared in some detail in the days ahead as the emailed texts come in to supplement the scenario visualisations made by the students of all four teams.

Early Morning Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: Tired but not floored, work in progress early in the morning in the NID studios where four groups have spent the late night grappling with the categorization of all the data that was generated last night and in the evening rounds of brainstorming.

The studios were still quite empty with a few students coming in in small teams to get back to work and meet the 11.00 am deadline for the group presentations scheduled today. The signs of a new form of organization is seem in the materials strewn across the rooms and in the semi-finished work sheets that will be made ready after the breakfast sessions and all the students come back to the studios. Harini went across the studios at 9.30 am to bring us some insights of the work in progress and we do look forward to the major presentations later in the day.

Decoding DCC

Image: Preliminary Presentation in NID Gandhinagar Foyer. Panoramic pics by Ayan Ghosh

I am attending Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) a second time after 2004, when I joined the National Institute of Design. In 2004 I had a different maturity level and undertook the course from a student perspective, but now I see DCC from a larger holistic context, the reason why I am attending DCC 2008. On the first day (July 14th) Ranjan introduced the course to the five batches of new students of Lifestyle Accessory Design, Apparel Design and Merchandising, New Media, Toy and Game Design and Strategic Design Management and clarified their doubts on the objective, and content of the course.

On the first day among many issues that Ranjan touched upon while introducing DCC, one was regarding scratching the surface of information around us to understand and investigate an agenda from a holistic point of view, rather than forming opinions based on superficial data which we "believe" is true. I would like to comment on this aspect and elaborate it further. The view points are entirely my own understanding and is open to criticism and debate.

We take information for granted, which is acquired through a vertical thinking system of learning, received, or I would say imitated from school, family and culture, which is based on previously transferred knowledge gained through a system of error identification and elimination process, thereby aimed at the most convenient mode of survival.

Much of the information we know around us is a concocter of myths and stereotypes. On one hand stereotypes are important because they allow us to make quick decisions, and no matter how much we try to avoid them, they are unavoidable aspects of the cultural coding system, especially in India, which being a high context culture, much of information is implicitly recorded and understood.

For example our names carry so much information about us, which may not be true at an individual level, but that will be immediately used by the society around us to compartmentalize us and put us in some kind of established memory pattern, so that we are easier to recall later.

For example, if I say my name is Ayan Ghosh, it immediately establishes my ethnic identity of being a Bengali, and a Hindu one. This has been built up historically by other people whose surname were also Ghosh, like Aurobindo and Amitava, and who were all ethnically Bengali, and religiously Hindu. Being a Bengali will next stereotype me as being from Bengal, or more narrowed down, from Calcutta. Being from Calcutta will lead to a next level of stereotyping with historical, political and cultural associations with Calcutta, like communism, fish cuisine, and football. This process keeps continuing.

However, when stereotypes are assessed individually, it is easy to see that in most cases they are nothing more than myths. I might be from Gujarat, a socialist, a vegetarian and a chess player and still be a Bengali, but this idiosyncrasy will stay only with me. This is mainly because we form stereotypes based on our direct personal experience with only a very small fraction of the larger entity. We do not form a stereotype of a community after interacting with thousands of people from that community.

Even if we don’t want, our brain will start grouping patterns, and it is very difficult to change each persons’ personal stereotypes no matter how much of that might be a myth in reality. This happens mainly because change is seen as a threat to survival, and the risk involved in diverting from an established survival pattern. The information we carry in many cases needs referencing and collaboration to validate its authenticity, because in most cases we do not personally experience them. For example I didn’t see India getting independence on 15th August 1947, but I believe in it through a system of historical validation by people who personally experienced it, which doesn’t make the incident a myth, but a real event of consequence.

The roots of these myths are formed through information around us. Information is experienced through all our five senses, which maintains our consciousness, and thereby confirms our existence. They are therefore crucial in building an absolute sense of reality around us. Everything around us is information, and the brain through a process of systematic and complex codification understands this information.

Every code has an encoding and decoding system, which we have learnt through a stimulus-response process of imitation, repetition and error. This selection and rejection process leads each individual being subject to a different set of individual codes, and this results in all of us developing our own unique belief systems.

A belief system is what balances the meanings and proportions of rationality, humanism, ethics, morals, aesthetics and other abstract values within us. They are so rigid that challenging them proves severely detrimental to our emotional sanity and cognition stability. That does not mean that they shouldn’t be challenged, provided there is absolute conviction in the purpose for the change. Changing belief systems reshapes our entire perception of reality. However reality itself is immensely ambiguous, which is formed through our individual and communal understanding and pursuit of an absolute truth.

Image: Preliminary Presentation in the NID Gandhinagar Foyer

For example Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system was the established truth, which was perceived as real, and therefore the prevalent belief system for thousands of years till the arrival of the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in the 16th century. Copernicus's new and blasphemous heliocentric theory was published in the book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) during the year of his death (1543), though he had arrived at his theory several decades earlier. It redefined the notion of reality altogether and today, after 450 years it is an established truth. In Copernicus’s case, and later Galileo’s, they faced persecution, which was a result of severe cognition dissonance faced in accepting a new theory by the church and the junta. However, we saw how truth was determined not by an absolute value but entirely by the belief systems of the majority of the population, which is not constant, and subject to changes and challenges. The same challenge to established truth values took place when Charles Darwin published his seminal book, the Origin of Species in 1859, denouncing biblical creationism and proclaiming evolution through a process of natural selection.

Similarly, in approaching a design problem we must break, or at least suspend those prevalent belief systems within us. While countering design problems, we tend to carry a baggage of stereotypes, caricatures, prejudices and myths, which leads to a pre-conceived direction of thinking, which if followed might lead to disasters in the long run.

This reminds me of Sherlock Holmes explaining Watson the process of detection while solving a crime case. Holmes says he looks for clues first, not a suspect. He then observes, analyses, introspects and articulates on the findings to narrow down on the possible scenarios and finally identify the most likely suspect, which is reached through a process of elimination of the least likely scenarios. He compares this process with how Scotland Yard goes about by identifying a likely suspect first and then looking for clues, which will implicate the unfortunate suspect to the crime, which in many cases leads to the real culprit being overlooked.

Therefore it is important that we approach design thinking through a process of analyzing, reasoning, observation, introspection and articulation and remain as objective as possible in our approach. This also means that we need to suspend our system of vertical thinking as well, to allow us to laterally spread our thought processes through visualization and imagination.

For me, standing on a visually flat world and arguing it is round, like what Galileo did, is nothing but a brilliant example of the lateral thought processes. He did it, because he had the imagination to visualize the world from space, much before Yuri Gagarin went up in 1961. However, by suspending the vertical system I do not mean ignoring it completely. Off course, Galileo had the rational conviction to back his idea.

The vertical thinking pattern is necessary to generate quick information based on previous knowledge, but to find new insights we should also look laterally, and seek solutions not only through arguments but also through an alternative way of looking at things, and most crucially, through imagination, which should be the strongest skill set of any designer. Only through such a system would be able to translate each problem into opportunity areas. Gagarin witnessed one thing, which Galileo didn’t imagine, which was expressed in the following quote:

“The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.”

I guess at a macro level design is ultimately aimed at creating, sustaining or increasing convenience and efficiency. Not necessarily only in humans, but also in the animal kingdom and environmentally. As a result, each design intervention, which we feel is making a major difference in the convenience levels of the end users, is implicitly appreciated as a successful model. Contradicting this assumption, historically there are myriad instances where convenience in one area has led to severe inconveniences in other areas, maybe not always in the short run, but in the long run. This happened because convenience or efficiency is not a constant universal truth but is again, what the majority believes in. If the context changes, so might be the convenience of the majority.

Image: Presentation by Punjab Group

For example, the invention of the automobile and indeed one of the most significant inventions ever, the internal combustion engine in 1859 by Etienne Lenoir. It leapfrogged an era of alternative energy replacing animal, steam, wind and water energy sources with fuel energy. Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Henry Ford did enormous service to humanity by immediately identifying this potentiality and implementing them at a global level through mass production of automobiles and motorcycles, and perfecting the assembly lines, thereby raising new benchmarks of speed and quality.

However, a hundred years later, it is the pollution which has been created by the enormous levels of carbon dioxide emissions that has been produced in this meantime by automobiles, which is now leading to serious global warming. Within just fifty years of its invention, in 1951 Elma Wischmeir became the millionth American to die on the highway. Nowadays millions of people (between 23 to 34) are victims of road accidents caused by automobiles around the world each year. Huge amounts of metal have mined out of the earth to meet the ever-increasing supply chains. Was all this taken into consideration at the time of the discovery of the automobile, or were this seen as minor inconveniences in the attainment of the larger goal of mobility?

Image: Presentation by Kerala Group

There are many more such instances, which makes me skeptical of the real value created out of new opportunities. I feel it is very contextual and extremely relative, depending on whether we have the foresight to fully understand the consequences of its implication. I might be solving some problem in the short run, but in the long term it might have a butterfly effect which might be cataclysmic. In the case of the car, it has solved one convenience: mobility. Instead it has created havoc in multiple domains like safety, environment and resources. So where does the benefit of its invention fit in? I personally feel that each solution itself is not an end to the process but rather produces a new process itself. It is not a line but a circle, with the problem and the solution running around each other rather than being at the two ends. I feel a design solution creates a new problem or multiples of them.

Going further back, Johannes Guttenberg made the first information revolution by inventing the printing press in 1454, which created a huge global requirement for paper. Paper still forms one of the most heavily manufactured items of daily consumption worldwide, and also one of the most wasted. Although it increased literacy, record keeping and communication, it also resulted in the clearing of huge tracts of forests to supply pulp. Although it is biodegradable and recyclable, still it has created severe pressure on the tropical rainforests around the globe, endangering several species in the process.

Image: Presentation by Northeast Group

Similarly the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel in 1867 for the purpose of mining and blasting for road construction has become one of the great killers over the last century and a half. The cell-phone might have revolutionized telecommunications but it has also led to subsidiary rise in health risks, privacy, crime and terrorism. Computers might have revolutionized information accessibility and communication, but it has allowed the flourishing of pornography, cyber crime, hacking, internet fraud, and severe psychological, ergonomic and cognitive stresses.

Coming back to the comparison between the vertical and lateral thinking formats, for example if we reach a wall, following Aristotle’s philosophy of reductio ad absurdum, we can either break it down brick by brick to move ahead. Or according to Edward de Bono, we can dig below the wall to come out on the other side, or we can get a ladder to climb over it, or keep following the wall till we reach a gate. This ability to generate alternatives to address a problem is the most crucial aspect of a creative design professional and needs to be sharpened as a skill by regular practice.

Image: Presentation by Gujarat group

I personally feel that is what DCC initiates students into. Breaking of existing stereotypes and looking into newer insights. Learning how to value even the most exceptional cases which we might otherwise overlook in catering to the majority. In case of existing stereotypes, the onus would be understanding the reasons for its existence, and to what extent they are valid. It is a process of deconstruction, reconstruction and reorganization of our established neural networks and experiencing the difference it makes to our thinking.

The subject of food as a primary area of focus I feel is a very apt one, provided the global shortages being faced of late. Roti (bread) constitutes a basic survival icon along with kapda (cloth) and makaan (shelter), and it is so omnipresent that we generally do not think much about its massive implications in almost every other aspect of our existence. This exercise will give an insight into the various cultural associations involved with the eating habits of a place and the dynamic forces that affect them at the marco, meso, micro and maybe also the meta levels.

More posts to follow,

Ayan Ghosh

P.S: I also would like to refer to Ranjan mentioning about the role of images in the design process, which he confessed, he had reservations on its impact. As an aspiring photographer, I myself have internally and externally debated the purpose and ethics played by images at a level of addressing and solving problems. Their role seems passive since it lacks physical dynamism, but that tension is triggered by the psychological, emotional and compositional quotient the image generates, making it indeed one of the most powerful metaphors of change.

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.

1. Northeast Hills of India: Design opportuinities for Water.

1. Northeastern Region of India: Design opportuinities for Water.
The team chose to focus on 12 specific design opportunities that each of the team members had identified as potential applications for water based design explorations for the region. This approach left out many of the exciting possibilities that had been discovered earlier in the sketch stage but somehow the group decided to move in a much narrower area of focus. Perhaps the decision was influenced by the limited time that was available and this gave us the platform to critique their approach since it seemed to miss out on the macro potentials that were seen in the original sketches. Further the team seemed to get fragmented in their approach and therefore failed to leverage the potential of a group think that was possible at this stage of the exploration and articulation.

2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water

2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water
The Kerala team worked together as a close knit unit and produced a very large range of alternate approaches all of which had been classified and structured for the group presentation. The format that had been chosen too was very exciting and full of possibilities since the task was to develop a publication in the form of a manual that could capture and disseminate all the selected design opportunities that the team had discovered as part of their exploration.

In keeping with their task they produced a concertina folded book that could double up as a wall chart and the other side of the wall chart was a huge poster that called for sustainable use of water lest there be a water WAR in the south. The news from the South is quite disturbing with the Karnataka and the Tamilnadu squabbles for the use of the River Cauvery’s water and this dispute has been going on for so many years now. In spite of all the expenses that have been incurred on this dispute on legal and political costs the State and Central Governments have not applied their minds to the possibility of investments in innovation and exploration of the kind that this group has suggested in our class. I wonder when we will learn as a nation that imagination and exploration can find lasting solutions if they are used in a cooperative mode. This was a great show of group solidarity and the result really raised all our expectations for the area of design action in the future by such group action which is very positive.

3. Himalayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water

3. Himalayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water
The Himalayas team explored all the ideas that had come up during the earlier phases of their design opportunity search and they decided as a group to focus their efforts on the building of a specific business opportunity with an integrated set of water based uses on which they could focus. They too had narrowed their field quite dramatically when the chose to focus on the building of one hotel chain to deal with the climate and terrain potential of the Himalayan foothills which was their field of play. They proposed a new hotel chain which would work on the development of ecological uses of water in a sustainable manner and for this objective they proposed many specific strategies and product solutions that could be developed and applied in the chain of hotels that they propose to build and operate as a sustainable business venture in the future.

4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water

4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water
Rajasthan is a desert state with a huge and recognized water scarcity problem and the team addressed the issues at hand with all the seriousness that it deserved. The range of illustrations and the levels of strategies that they proposed were stratified at the individual level, the community level, the State governance level and at the National policy levels, all well integrated and expressed in their group presentation to the class. The wall chart was huge and very detailed in their illustration of each of the solutions that were offered. The very interesting offering was the creation of a communications strategy that used new institutional infrastructure that could bring interested villages and children together so that the various issues of water could be addressed by the people in a participatory mode. The group presentation was rich and extremely expressive.

5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water

5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water
The Maharastra group prepared an illustrated book of many pages, each richly illustrated and containing texts that explained the concepts. These were organized into groups of concepts that were arranged by the strategy that the group chose to focus on and they converted the whole document into a digital file that was presented as a slide presentation to the class using a digital slide projector. The images were impressive due to the scale but the sequential nature of the mode of presentation removed the possibility of the creation of an overview that the other presentations could give, and this is a trade off that technology tools make us take during such presentations.

Design Scenarios: Water based Design Opportunities

Image: A visit to Calico Museum as part of the DCC course in 1999 by Debashree in an assignment created to teach scenario visualisation, learning by doing.

Background: Scenario visualisations in Design
Scenario visualisations can be made at any stage of the design journey. In the early stages these are typically rather abstract and with a low content of details, although some parts may be vividly expressed if these components or parts are already clearly conceptualized due to either historical reasons or if the larger scenario is being around this part which is already. Design visualizations can cover many attributes of the system that is being modeled. Some could show the structural and formal attributes of the system while others can go on to include an expression of several intangible aspects as well as those that can be seen and felt. These can also include the relationship between the components of the system and help give us an overview of the total system which is a perspective that would need to be considered when taking major decisions at the design stage itself. Many strategic decisions need to be taken at an early stage and these scenario visualizations provide the framework for appreciating the particular solution that is on offer. Several alternate scenarios can be examined before taking a particular decision and some decisions may not be reversible without incurring a huge cost or effort and therefore these need to be subjected to much advance planning and participatory modes of decision making in a democratic framework. Our cities and its future can be determined by a design process that is both visible as well as informed by expert action if we were to adopt a way forward that could accommodate such processes that may be required to make visible major infrastructure offerings as well as details of cost and impact assessments, all done in a manner that can be appreciated by the common man in the street. This means that the language of discourse would need to move from economic models in an abstract mathematical formulation to a more visibly appreciated modeling system that can show and tell the intended structures and the affects on our lives. It is here that scenario visualization in the form of picture stories or rich picture representations can make a huge difference to our understanding of the complex phenomena that go into many such projects of public good.

In our attempt to teach the art of scenario visualization we devised an assignment that could get the involvement of an entire class of design students at a high level of motivation while undertaking these experiences. The introductory phase of the scenario visualization assignment has the student sharing with the class, in one composite rich picture, an introduction to themselves in an attempt to show who we are. This assignment is the first of many visualization tasks done by the design student jn the DCC course and here they are expected to introspect and identify aspects of their lives that have significantly contributed to shaping their attitudes and abilities as they are today. Students are them asked to express their imagination in the form of images in juxtaposition on a single sheet of paper which they could use to tell their story of themselves. This is a first experience in show and tell about something that they are very familiar with already, themselves. The next stage is the experiencing of an interesting space or event in the city which can be done as a group and after the immersive experience the students are aslked to represent the experience in all its facets, again as a single rich picture representation that can be shared with the whole class. This time the event or space that is visited is common for all the students but it becomes clear that each student brings back their own point of view that is unique and which is shaped by their past experiences as well as their belief systems and cultural roots when it comes to styles of representation chosen. Going from a familiar but usually ignored representation of the self to a common space with different points of view are quite revealing when taken together for a discussion.

Image: DCC2008 students admiring Debashree's 1999 scenario artwork in my office today.

Calico Museum Visit and the DCC Course
The students are then given topics that they could examine in depth through the processes of group brain-storming and modeling in order to make sense of the complex interplay of factors that influence the situations that are being studied. These processes too lead to visual modeling of a variety of kinds and at the end of these collective journeys the students build a model that helps categorise the forces that influence the situation as well as discover a metaphor that can give meaning and a memorable setting for the structure that is discovered by the group. These structures are not sacred truths but are tentative offerings that can be discussed and debated leading to appropriate modifications, but as they stand they represent the current understanding of the situation and this does bring a great deal of clarity to the complex situation that is being handled by the group. In the DCC class of 1999 we asked the students to visit the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad and after an immersive experience of that visit they were asked to make a rich picture scenario of their visit with all the details shown in one large format picture. The experiences that were sequential are now represented in a spatial manner with images juxtaposed and expressed on one single sheet and the variety of expressions were truly staggering. At the end of the major assignment the students are once again asked to show the design opportunities that they had imagined and this time they are to express a scenario of a pure imaginative landscape and an expression of the possible future with all the associated details that would make it both viable as well as desirable. This is a great introduction to design scenario visualization that can be used in all attempts to model the future solutions and make these visible to an interested and informed audience with a certain degree of credibility.

Image: DCC Blackboard with the assignment description as a structure model.

Water based Design Opportunities for India
This year we have assigned the mapping of Design Opportunities with Water in each of five geographic regions of India. Each student from the respective group would choose one specific design opportunity in which they have a personal conviction and through a process of imagination, dreaming and exploration build a visual scenario that can be shared with the class as an image in a show and tell mode of presentation. Each group would meet in a round table presentation for a per review and feedback session where the visual scenarios would be presented and based on the feed back from the group members each student would send in a 200 word email to describe their scenario and the specific design opportunity that they have developed for the future keeping a 15 year time horizon for having built an enterprise to roll out the design into the real world. We look forward to seeing all the presentations and to sharing it with the world through this blog in the near future.

For further reading look at this paper on Design Visualisation from my website. (pdf file 691 kb)

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)

Design Opportunity Mapping: Coastal Maharashtra India

Image: Terrain model to capture and present Design Opportunity Mapping for effective water conservation and management in Coastal Maharashtra, India by the DCC team.

The Coastal Maharashtra team used a terrain model to locate all the design opportunities that they had arrived at as a group using the small A5 size format that was provided to them. Each member of the team presented their ideas to the class and this was preceded by an overview of their categorisation of these opportunities. Then teachers too gave their comments and the critique from the class suggested ways forward from here.

This method of working has been found effective in getting a deeper understanding of the macro and micro issues and opportunities for design as part of this course at NID. Each group spends time brainstorming, researching and exploring collectively as well as individually before the findings that may be intermediate in nature to the rest of the class. Each group shows interesting insights that are discivered along the journey and these form a cumulative learning for the whole class since all five groups look at diffetent regions or areas of focus within one macro problem area at a time.

DCC2008 Course Abruptly Terminated:

Image: DCC2008 Course Abruptly Terminated: Foundation classroom at 9.30 am and at 12.00 pm today

I have terminated the DCC2008 course for the Foundation class today since very few students had turned up to class in the morning when we were to have the scheduled presentation of the groups on the design opportunities in the area of water in rural India. The task was important but the habit of not coming on time seemed to get in the way. Rashmi and I decided that we would come again at 11.00 am, after the morning tea break and start with a lecture on Design Opportunities and the students present in the class were informed of our intention and they were requested to message the others to come for the lecture. At 11.00 am we found about 40 percent of the class present so we decided to call it a day and retreated to my office from where I sent out the mail to all students and marked copies to my faculty colleagues as quoted below:
Quote:

Dear Students

I am very disappointed with the presence of students in the DCC Class today especially since we were to have a presentation of the Design Opportunities on what designers can do in the area of water. We had a very inspiring presentation from Dinesh Sharma about the water harvesting system that he has designed along with the posters and postcards made to promote the idea in schools. We also had Sumiran talking to the students and sharing with all of you the village opportunity mapping project that the Gandhinagar students had done last semester in the Data Visualisation course with me.

However today when Rashmi Korjan and I arrived at 9.30 am we had a handful of students in the class out of a strength of 75 and we had to defer the presentation to 11.00 am. I had informed the students present that we would have a lecture immediately on Design Opportunities and the various Disciplines of Design but to our utter dismay the class strength was less than 40 percent when we came up at 11.00 am. This just will not do at NID, or in any other school. I am requesting the Chairman Education to relieve me from the onerous task of trying to teach this batch about Design Thinking if we are to continue the education programme in such a lackadaisical manner. Count me out.

I spent the morning posting the work done yesterday on the Design Concepts and Concerns blog but I fail to appreciate this casual attitude to coming to class and participating in the group tasks. Some students have been regular and committed and I am indeed sorry for them that they have to face the consequences that are not of their doing.
http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com/
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com/

I did enjoy teaching this course over the years but perhaps the world is changing fast (24x7) malls and all and so is NID and I may ask the Education to find another way out for this extreme fiasco. I am sharing this mail with my colleagues at NID and a copy to Chairman Education for their consideration and advice.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
14 March 2008 at 11.35 am IST

--------------------------------------------------------------

Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group (DST, Govt. of India) (2006-2008)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242

email: ranjanmp@nid.edu
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
blog: (http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com)
education blog: (http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com)
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com

---------------------------------------------------------------

UnQuote
In the afternoon six students visited my office, in pairs, to tell me that they were sorry but we spent some time discussing the symptoms of the student action or inaction and I asked them to spend time in the library to look at resources of past student work on water and development. We will need to meet together sometime and explore how this course can be salvaged and taken forward and I do hope we get help from our faculty colleagues as well as our senior students. I find that the dialogue between the seniors and the freshmen has dwindled and very little exchange seems to be taking place in the corridors and the BMW or the basketball court, all spaces for informal learning at NID. This too may need to be corrected and this break may be a blessing in disguise if we are able to get the processes of sharing and interaction started again in real earnest. I will have a word with my colleagues and seek their advice about how we can move forward from here.

M P Ranjan
14 March 2008 at 8.20 pm IST
posted from my office at NID