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.

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.

Gandhinagar in the Rain: DCC2008 Presentation

Image: Final presentation of Design Opportunity explorations by all four groups in the NID Gandhinagar Atrium.

The vehicle fiasco did come to our aid today in making a change of venue and an impromptu rescheduliong of our presentation to Gandhinagar campus and all the students were stranded at Gandhinagar and both the busses were parked at Paldi and the driver had a day off being a Saturday!! The student coordinators forgot to inform the Admin about our presentation and then we had phone calls at my office in Paldi at 10.00 am the time when the presentation was planned when we last met at Gandhinagar one week ago.

Since the final presentation is an important part of the process of learning design thinking the teachers who had assembled at my office decided that we would go over to Gandhinagar for which we requested a car after many phone calls to Gandhinagar and the Paldi administrators. Harini, Ayan, Anindya and I left Rashmi behind since she could not accompany us to Gandhinagar, a big loss for the styudents since her feedback would have been very insightful and sensitive. We are now at Gandhinagar and the presentation will start at 2.00 pm and we have requested all the students to be ready with their groups as well as with their individual design opportunities so that the show and tell session can be organised in a way that the learning can be complete. Each student is also required to send us a brief note by email about the story in their Design Scenario Visualisation so that some of these could be posted on the blog for all to see and discuss further possibilities.

We are eager to see what the students have done so far and I was hoping that the Paldi students could also see what the Gandhinagar colleagues had achieved in their exploration of the DCC Theme, FOOD, Inflation and the Economy, each dealing with a selected area of the country, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Gujarat. With one week given for imcubation and group discussion we are sure that we will get to see a rich exploration of various dimensions of the chosen theme and I do personally look forward to the afternoon session, planned after the lunch break in a few minutes from now.

We drove in the rain from Paldi to Gandhinagar and on Ashram Road the traffic was pretty heavy and with the light drizzle the humidity was high and the temperature very uncomfortable particularly since the aircon system seemed to malfunction, but later towards Gandhinagar the weather turned and more rain came down and with the driving speed we had a good airflow through the windows but with some degree of wettness due to the spray. On the whole a good ride and since we were eager to meet the students some discomfort is acceptable. The rain is all around and the presentation is planned in the main building in the central Atrium that will start in another twenty minutes from now.

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 Regions and Teams: Brainstorming and Structure

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

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

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

KERALA

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

PUNJAB

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

NORTH EAST

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

GUJARAT

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

Focus Groups for Food: DCC2008 Teams Assigned

Image: four volunteer coordinators and team leaders in conversation with the class teachers before the team selection process in class at NID Gandhinagar auditorium.

Four teams have been formed with the four volunteer coordinators selecting their teams from all five disciplines participating in the DCC2008 PG course at Gandhinagar this semester. The areas of focus are Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat. Each of the teams have started the first assignment of discovering what they already know about the chosen areas of focus as well as the theme of Food, Inflation and the Indian Economy which is their meta focus. The teams have started the process of iterative brainstorming and discovering an acceptable structure of the field of focus and from this structure they would be able to share with the rest of the class their collective understanding of the chosen subject and the given context, just as they would have to do with any new design assignment dealing with the discovery of future solutions to several pressing problems at hand.

Image: Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat team members in their respective studios working of the first stage of the assignment through brainstorming in a group.

The brainstorming task would be followed by catgorisation and group would then looking for a suitable structure that could bring meaning to the group as a whole, a negotiated and agreed structure for the design domain at hand. This would then be worked upon to give it a visible face in the form of a metaphor that could be memorable and could capture the sensitive aspects of the subject as well as include the framework of the discovered structure that has been developed by the group. This model would have areas of uncertainty and areas of ignorance, which the group would address at a later stage. However in this phase the emphasis is in discovering what the group as a team knows about the subject at hand and about the context in which these would need to be placed. The presentation of the groups findings are svcheduled for tomorrow morning and I do look forward to learning a thing or two about food in these exciting regions as well as about the potential approaches that could be used to address some of the looming threats and opportunities that this sector has to offer to the design community to work with.