Visual Narratives: Learning from the Field

Rich Pictures in the Process of Understanding the Design Journey

Prof M P Ranjan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof M P Ranjan

Uttarakhand Group: Mandi as Metaphor

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor for their presentation.

The Uttarakhand Group was the first to complete their model by the evening today so we decided to have their presentation while the other three groups would have theirs tomorrow morning. The team worked out a way to reuse their Himalayan Mountain range model by using it as a backdrop to locate the wild life and fauna of the region while the main exhibit was that of a Sabji Mandi or vegetable market through which they tried to explain the current level of understanding about Food and the chosen region in the context of design possibilities going forward.

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor with the teachers included.

The Mandi metaphor was however not used as effectively buy the group to make their presentation as it came out in the discussions and critique that followed the groups presentation. According to the comments from the teachers it showed a lack of an articulation or visualisation of relationships that formed the core of the concerns that the group had indeed identified and expressed as very interesting images of islands of concerns that were arranged on the backdrop. The four main headings of Production, Distribution , Consumption and Impact did offer the group an adequate framework for linking the various sub-groups and issues that were in the field of vision but the audience felt that they missed showing the linkages between all the issues covered there.

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor as the class presentation progresses.

Further the lack of detail at the next lower level of the structure was also pointed out in the arguments and comments that followed. The Mandi visual was quite effective in getting a feel of the place and the context as a whole and I used the metaphor of the Constellations to show that association of star groups were given meaning by showing the invisible lines that gave the groups its form as a visual symbol which made it memorable and recognisable in the rich ground of all the other stars. Each illustration was rich and when the team explained the model it was clear that the team had come a long way forward in their understanding of both Food as well as the context on the ground in the Uttaranchal region through their meetings with experts in the field, but the group failed to tell us who they met and how the insights were actually collected and put together in their model. In all the group efort was appreciated by the class particularly since this group was able to meet the very tight deadline and come through with a fairly high degree of effective representation and discourse.

We do look forward to some rich presentations from the other three groups in the morning tomorrow. The order of presentation will have the Goa Group making their presentation at 9.30 am and this would be followed by the other two between 10.30 and 12.30 pm tomorrow. The afternoon session is for the next lecture on Design Opportunities after which the groups will start work on their next assignments dealing with Design Opportunities in the area using the formats that have been developed for this purpose.

Information from the Field: Presentations by Groups

Information from the Field: Meeting Experts in the Field

Punjab

The Punjab group occupied the NID Gandhinagar Auditorium as their presentation space and transformed it into a truckers paradise with a mandi ( a market) and a dhaba (a roadside eatery usually on the highway) on the side of a highway with the front of a truck at one end and the back of another at the other wall, both connected by a line of trucks marked on the ground, each representing a particular aspect of the theme, Food and Punjab economy. The group had earlier done their brainstorming to articulate what they know about the subject as a group and they had built a model and transformed it into a metaphor that could capture the essence of what they had discovered that they know. Based on this model they developed a research strategy to search for ‘experts in the field” who were accessible near Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar or those who could be reached in the brief time available by phone or through the web so that they could fill in gaps in their understanding of the context as well as obtain insights that they could use in the next phase of their design journey which would deal with the identification of design opportunities in their chosen space. The larger than life image of the truck front was anthropomorphized with the turban of a Sardarji, the Sikh driver who would represent Punjabi persona for the rest of India. The back of the receding truck at the other end of the room had panels that helped categorise the key issues that the groups had discovered and prioritized after their meetings with the experts, people from local dhaba, Gurudwaras and from Punjabi households near their school.

While the team efforts at visualization was highly appreciated by the per group reviews the presentation had the feel of a White Paper used by Planners. Here the critique focused on the depth of macro- issues that the group had brought to clear focus but what was missed was the texture and feel of the micro aspects dealing with food from Punjab, the taste the content and the opportunities that these represented for design action in the future.

Kerala

The Kerala group persisted with their Boat House image for their second presentation and on the wall of the house-boat they had a structure mapping the various relationships that they had discovered during their engagement in the field with numerous Malayalees living and working in Gandhinagar. These people from Kerala had an association of about 1500 people mostly working in the Government of Gujarat and some who acted as service providers retailers and provisioners for the community from Kerala to meet their special needs. The structure was far improved version of the one they had presented in the first phase but still lacked the particular details that were so critical for design understanding. The group did attempt to make a list of design opportunities but the cloud and birds in the sky in one corner of their model was not enough to capture the richness that lived in their minds but was however not visible to the others outside the group. The group did develop a good deal of discussion with their presentation and it was becoming evident that the whole class was getting clued in on the finer aspects of design discourse since there were lesser questions for clarification and more incisive comments on the subject and content of the presentation from the class participants.

The impressive image was indeed huge in scale and the bananas and coconuts used in the diagram did capture the feel of Kerala from a distance but the finer aspects still eluded the group in their representation although the descriptions made by individual members did show a much deeper understanding in their minds but this did not show up on the image. This was pointed out to them as a missed opportunity in the attempt to show and tell. Words alone may not be as expressive as those supported by image scenarios that could deal with the form along with the structure while the story unfolds as the presentation progresses.

Northeast

The Northeast group also took the first tentative steps of building a terrace cultivation model in the first presentation to a more expressive model of the terraces using a three dimensional construct to represent the fields on the hilly landscape and with a backdrop of hills to represent the potential and the findings from their foray into the field to meet experts. The group had visited several local institutes in search of people from the Northeast and through this they did connect with some new and interesting insights about food and the local economy. However the approach did not help the group visualize the finer aspects of their findings since the model did not have any images dealing with the words that they had used as sign boards that were stuck onto each layer of the terraced fields in their model. Like the Kerala group they too had succeeded in making a well categorized structure of their findings with each zone in their model dealing with one major category but the visualization opportunity was however missed. Further as the team members made their presentation each of them would read out from a list in hand and they did not use the model as a prop for their show and tell which made the presentation less memorable for the audience since although we had a huge model in front of us the group did not use it to make their presenation. However such failure was useful for the teachers to make the critique which is good learning for all the class.

The group did emphasise the huge cultural diversity of the region and the diversity of food types and the range of tribes of the region, which represented a great opportunity for exotic offerings from the region as a whole. This group had an area that was less known about and with fewer experts to be found at short notice and they however had to do a lot of imagination to fill in the gaps in information from the field.

Gujarat

The Gujarat group was the most fortunate on the one hand since they were immersed in the region that they had to study but they were also disadvantaged by the short time that they had to do their research. The presentation of the group used two powerful images, one of a dancing Garba Girl in her traditional dress of Gagra and Choli with a Dupatta and the other with a map of the region that was overlapped with some of the key industries and infrastructure that contributed to the food economy of the region. This model was particularly expressive and the team was able to use the images to good effect in making their presentation memorable. The various parts of the dancing girl were used to categorise their findings about the food habits of the Gujarati and also about the various food types that the region had to offer. They explained their findings with a great deal of conviction about the organization of the food types and then went on to map out the areas of opportunity for the Gujarat region in the whole spectrum of Food related economy that includes the dairy industry, the fishery industry and the vegetarian snack food industry which uses the specific advantages of the Gujarat geography, culture and location as well as the entrepreneurship of their people.

The Gujarat team presentation was particularly rich since they were able to transform the class understanding of the use of personas in the capture of insights from the field. They met up with several well chosen individuals who were modeled in the form of personas and the story of these individuals helped capture the abstract information in the form of real and tangible insights that were informed by a particular context in which each of them were situated. So Induben, Amit Patel, Nilesh, Bhavana and Tasneen each offered a rare but coherent insight that the team was able to bring back to support the arguments that the team had to offer during their show and tell session in the class. The Amul Girl featured in their model just as the SEZ that is now the talk of the town in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad and the Gujarati thali and the Farsans or fast food of Gujarat all had their place in the map that the group had on offer, a rich and visually stimulating insight indeed.

DCC2008 Students in the NID KMC: Subject Water

Image: Foundation stufdents in the NID Knowledge Management Centre looking at a variety of published and archival resources about their theme, WATER.

The DCC2008 Foundation batch spent the day in the NID KMC carrying out research on the various categories of resources that are available in the Library which is called the KMC for short. They looked at the variety of resources that are available here after having put together a list of keywords and having broadly dividing the field into manageable areas amongst the team members, at least those who had agreed to participate, I did not see all of them in the KMC when I did my rounds with the camera. Some went to the Computer Centre and checked out Google and Wikipedia as well as other web resources and yet others met faculty at NID for very specific questions that needed to be addressed.

I look forward to the meeting with the class tomorrow and to an intensive work session during the week ahead and through this I do hope that we can build up a credible inventory of design opportunities in a massive list that is also organised and presented in a manner that we can share with the rest of the Institute and in the process influence future Diploma Projects at the NID with some of them being done in this critical area of water resource conservation and the culture of water for the future. This is indeed the very first stage in the design process, which is finding and sensing design opportunities and deciding what is worth doing and what can be done with the available resources and constraints, through the application of strategy and imagination and the designers sensibility, all part of the design journey.

Information Strategies for Research: Their role in Design Thinking and Action.

Information Strategies for Research: Their role in Design Thinking and Action.

A variety of information would be required as we go forward with a particular design initiative. In this case we are looking at water as a subject and at the role that it could have in facilitating people living in the five selected zones across our country. We have taken this as a subject so that as a group we can engage with a process of articulation, clarification and research that would help us understand the field of design and in particular design opportunity.

Water has many forms and numerous uses and it is a critical resource for human existence. However it is not taken very seriously and we are seeing wide spread pollution of our water resources as well as gross misuse by individuals and industry alike. This shows us that there are many opportunities for design action in this space since for each problem that we are able to recognize and articulate we can offer many different solutions with the application of our imagination. The assignment was therefore a method through which all the students could understand how a particular area of focus could be explored by a group and from this how we can discover numerous design tasks that can be done to help solve one or other aspect of the problem. This will of course be seen that the issues to be handled could be small scale and fairly clearly articulated problems or large scale and extremely complex problems. It is only when we have an inventory of challenges along with an inkling of what we can possibly do in this situation do we have the beginnings of a list of design opportunities that deal with this.

While we try and tackle such wide ranging design problems we would necessarily have to deal with many kinds of knowledge as well as many disciplines of design to try and address these issues successfully. Some may well be outside the scope of the fields that each one of us may be capable of handling with our limited knowledge and skills but this does not make the problem either irrelevant or something that cannot be solved. This is where the role of imagination comes in to play and where conventional wisdom gives up we have seen repeatedly the emergence of break-through concepts emerging that can help look at the situation in a new way and this may open up avenues for new classes of solutions. Further, each design discipline could take up a particular design problem and find different approaches to address these towards a lasting solution. For instance the solution could be in building awareness amongst the users and not just in building new tools and processes for society to use. Awareness building could be through addressing the information needs of children with books, illustrations, films, plays and multi-media offerings or through reaching out to policy makers through traveling exhibitions, websites and visually rich presentations that have a real impact on the mind and that can bring a new understanding of the complex situation at hand and therefore help in a decision to be made. At this level the design actions can be very political while at other levels it would be seen as the application of the skills of composition, colour and form in a sensitive manner that the designer is always expected to do by virtue of their training and sensitisatioin to issues and outcomes that are desirable.

The information needed is quite varied and can come form many sources and each source would require the design student to develop a different skill in managing during research. Research from books would need the skill of working with keywords and in the use of indexes and library resource maps such as access books and encyclopedias and dictionaries. A good place to start research is in text books from a particular field and in some cases when the subject is unknown to the researcher it may be wise to start with childrens books on the subject and move from there to the more specialized and scholarly works. One could make a list of thought leaders in any given subject and today it is very easily provided by a quick review of the intrernet resources and in this case the Wikipedia could be a great source to start research with a set of key-words as a starting point. In the age of information getting new data is very easy but making sense of data is the real challenge. This is where meetings with users, subject experts and domain level experts could be a great help. Students could go out of their class and meet real people who are likely to provide insights about the subject and in design this is more important that tons of information. All the information thus collected by the students working in groups would need to be organized and structured into an information model that can be shared with all the class.