Design Scenarios for Food Security: DCC2008 Gandhinagar

The four groups at Gandhinagar had a week to make their individual scenario visualisations that was based on the thumbnails that the groups had explored in the previous week in a visual brainstorming mode, each in a huddle in their respective studios or under the tree in the back of the mess block where Punjab group had located themselves.

Each of the groups are shown here as thumbnail images and a bigger image of the individual scenario will be posted when the group members find time to send me the email of the supporting text which is still awaited.
Click on each image below to get an enlarged view of the scenarios. Punjab:

Image: Punjab group and their individual scenarios for design action in India.

Image: Kerala group and their imagination for the way forward as individual scenarios visualised and shared with the class.

Image: Northeast group with their mountains of ideas culled into individual scenario visualisations based on their own convictions for the action going forward.

Image: Gujarat group with their real business like models for rapid deployment of food based scenarios based on their very rich model and exploration as a group.

The four groups in Paldi – Uttarakhand, Goa, West Bengal and Rajasthan – too will be working on their group thumbnail brainstorming and over the weekend on their individual scenario in consultation with their group members in a peer review and supported process, in other words with a little bit of help from their friends. We look forward to their presentation in the NID Paldi Foyer on Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 5.30 pm.

Late Night Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: Groups at work late into the night sorting and organizing the discovered words in order to find a meaningful structure that could adequately provide a shared view of the understanding developed by the group members during their team brainstorming sessions.

The four groups worked in their respective spaces in the SDM studio, PD studio, Drawing studio and the Old Canteen space to develop a structure through the categorization of all the words that they found in their group sessions. Using cards and post-it stickers the groups argued late into the night till they achieved a form of shared perspective on Food and the specific region that had been assigned to them at random. The students discover the dept of knowledge that each of them harbors in their lifetime of exposure to places, media, events, people and all their daily experiences with food as a very personal and closely held layers of experience of a lifetime.

Image: Groups leading towards the creation of models and structures that could show their shared understanding of the subject at hand, Food in a particular region of India and the various attributes and connections that could be useful going forward in the design journey.

Harini Chandrasekhar who is helping Rashmi and me during this course went around the studios at various times during the night and also helped negotiate late night access to the studios from the main gate security carried her camera to give us these images of work space and action that the teachers would not see when the groups met the next day to make a presentation. We have been using this form of photo documentation for the past ten years ever since we got the first digital camera that changed the equation between cost and volume of pictures. My first SONY, a Cybershot 707, a 1.7 MegaPixel camera was among the first digital cameras at NID in 1998 and in that year it helped me record as many as 50,000 images of students and activities in my class and across NID which I have been sharing with our students as a tool for reflection on the progress in the class. We have used many such cameras in the years past and now NID has hundreds of cameras moving about if we were to include the phone cams that our students carry and capture images with. An image aided pedagogy took firm root as part of the DCC course and at the end of each batch all the students are offered all the images in a reduced resolution so as to fit on a standard CD-ROM. Today we offer all the images in full resolution on DVD-ROM’s as well as place all the images in real time on the NID server called UNSECURE which is accessible to all our students and faculty and these have become collectibles for some interested students and faculty.