DCC2009 Water Paldi: Ice, Steam & Drops

Ice (Frozen) – Steam (Hot) – Drop (Wet) : Many forms of water to joggle the imagination

Prof M P Ranjan

The theme for DCC 2009 continues to be Water even though the precipitation has improved in the delayed stage of the monsoon in India but the damage has been done and many farmers and village inhabitants have lost their means of livelihood and they feel the crunch when the dry spell continues beyond a point of no return.

Image01: DCC2009 BlackBoard at the opening session at Paldi for the fourth batch of PG students from Ceramic Design, Furniture Design, Graphic Design and Film and Video Communications. Thye brainstorming session and participative exploration of the question of “What is Design?” resulted in a large list of words that students brought up during the session.

The session itself was lively and many of the words were accompanied by a brief explanation and with some examples that could clarify the context in which these words were being offered during the class discussion of the subject of understanding design as we know it today. We lost one day in this two week course since the opening Monday was a public holiday due to ID celebrations. However we felt that we could still forge forward and in the evening the students were asked to form three groups and try and categorise these words into a coherent structure that would make sense to themselves as well as to all of us.

Image02: Three models were created by the three groups (as yet unnamed and identified only as Group 1, 2 and 3) and they presented the structure that they had evolved overnight through group sessions and the three groups had different models to offer.

Group 1 had chosen the Newtonian colour wheel to try and arrange the words and they had a dramatic presentation with the colour wheel that was mounted on the ceiling fan!! And at the end they turned on the fan and we saw WHITE!!, at least in the centre…. The Group 2 used the NID symbol as their metaphor and for some reason they added a lot of gears in the diagrams and many of these did not fit each other, but their logic was impeccable and based on their dialogues that led them to describe the stages of design as – Need, Imagination & Decisions – NID and to add to the image they had a base that stood for Context and an outside gear (which did not fit) but stood for Change. Group 3 had a flow chart that was logical and echoed Prof Bruce Archers model of the design process and these transported us back to the early 60s and the mid 70’s when the design methods movement was taking shape with the thought leaders – Archer, Jones and Alexander – gave us interesting views of design as they had gleaned during their research and deliberations in the early days of design methods.

At the end of the presentations we drew lots to decide which of these groups would have the themes assigned for this batch (DCC2009 PG Paldi B4), namely – Ice, Steam and Drops – the sub-themes under water that they have to investigate through a process of sense making and understanding development. The process includes articulating what the group already knows about the theme, based on their three types of memory that have been built over a lifetime of experience. Direct experiences, Related experiences and Imagined experiences. Sensory knowledge, Knowledge acquired from others and from sources and the fantasies from their own imagination and dreams of the past. Tomorrow we will see the first stage presentations of all three groups and I look forward to it.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009 Water Bangalore: Rivers, Lakes & Aquifers

Rivers and Streams, Lakes and Ponds, Aquifers and Wells: Flowing, Standing and Underground

Prof M P Ranjan

Image: Composite view of three groups of Bangalore DCC students across three stages of their explorations of the theme of the course, Water – Riivers and Streams, Lakes and Ponds, Aquifers and Wells. Top row: Aquifers and wells, Middle row: Lakes and Ponds, Bottom row: Rivers and Streams

This was a very stimulating week for me at Bangalore with the wonderful weather and the daily rains in the evening time. I was also multitasking and working on my paper for the Istanbul Conference in October 2009 and I used the weekend to prepare my first draft and crystalise the research that had been going on over the past two months or so. The teams from the three disciplines at the NID Bangalore joined the course and there was a great deal of enthusiasm that was visible and all students participated with huge contributions both individual as well as collective. The results were visible and the theme of water across the three chosen areas of focus that was given to the students of DRE, DDE and IID at Bangalore were dealing with water on our land: Flowing, Standing and Underground

All three assignments were carried out with great enthusiasm and the results were remarkable. The groups explored the structure of the problem and started as usual with what they already knew in their lifetime of experience through a process of brainstorming and articulation followed by many iterations of discovering structure and finding the categories that could make sense of all the dimensions that the groups had identified. The second stage was very rich with expert interactions in the city of Bangalore and field visits to get first hand feel of the issues and perspectives in the domain of water and its uses and the effects on both environment and people. The third stage of building design opportunities was quite massive with each group producing over five hundred sketch concepts across many categories of action that they felt would be needed and could produce value. These were presented and the last assignment of individual development of one design opportunity for more detailed exploration and scenario visualization was taken up on the last day of the class. Seeing the 1500 thumbnail concepts of how water issues could be addressed with design was indeed stimulating and we need to capture these for further work in the days ahead. However I had to leave town for Jaipur on Friday morning to be with the IICD, Jaipur at their second convocation on the 12 September 2009. Back at NID Ahmedabad on Sunday morning I am awaiting the images from this visualization task at Bangalore and I am sure we will see 45 rich concept explorations that are both imaginative as well as rooted in practical realities that we all face today. I look forward to seeing the last stage soon with data feeds from my co-teachers at Bangalore, Nijoo Dubey and Priyanka Choudhary.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009 in Bangalore: Water again: Lakes, Rivers & Wells

Prof M P Ranjan

Bangalore Group starts DCC with Water as their theme with focus on three subjects of 1. Lakes & Ponds 2. Rivers & Streams and 3. Aquifers & Wells.

Image01: DCC blackboard and white board after the discussion on what is design and a few design experts known to the student group. Most of the words were contributed to by students as part of the discussion on the question of “What is Design?” and who are the designer experts that you have heard about.

This helps break the ice and a good deal of discussion about design, its attributes and activities as well as the disciplines that it draws from are discussed as part of this session. It also helps set the stage for the set of assignments to follow.

Image02: View of the Class in the NID Bangalore conference room during the first session

Three groups were formed by assigning one student to each group from the photo list that is available in such a way that each group has and even distribution of members from each discipline. At Bangalore we have three disciplines at the PG level, namely, Design for Retail Experience, Design for Digital Experience and Information and Interface Design.
The session at NID Bangalore was conducted in the Conference room with black boards, white boards and digital projectors used for the lecture presentations. The modules of Understanding Design (download pdf file) was followed by sharing the IDSA lecture titled “Giving Design back to Society: Towards a post-mining economy”. The models used were explained and after the lunch break, after much delay we reassembled and formed the groups. I intended to show the students my EAD06 lecture titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education”, however fate intervened and the power supply failed us and we switched back to the white board and continued the description of the assignments and the team formation process. Lots were drawn to make the assignment of the groups to the chosen subject truly random. These presentation pdf files can be downloaded from the links above and below here:
EAD 06 presentation pdf file and eight linked quicktime movies all as one single zip file 53 MB in size

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping: Experiencing Synthesis

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping: Water in our lives across sectors of action

Image01: With a large image of the planet Earth and an exaggerated drop of water at the centre the water in industry team grouped their design opportunity thumbnails in four broad clusters. The individual scenarios were then drawn up and presented with each member coming forward to explain their concept and the associated scenario illustration.

The assignment of exploring and discovering a large number of possible approaches and opportunities in the product, systems and services space that impinges directly or indirectly on the area chosen by the group may be a good way forward, particularly since they would have gone through at least two rounds of exploring the field and understanding its dynamics and its structure. Through this assignment the students get a feel for the early stages of design thinking and action, particularly in visualizing potential design opportunities and in experiencing the articulation of scenarios in the formulation of design ideas and avenues for action. The structure of the design situation becomes clear through the brainstorming and categorization assignments that have been carried out by the groups and these have been shared with the whole class. Having done this and after having experienced the sorting and organizing for a good deal of time the student is quite clear in the mind as to what the particular sector holds and offers as well as what as an individual they would like to focus their subsequent efforts.

Image02: The design opportunities in the domestic use of water was shown in the form of bubbles from a fish, not a very effective image, but it helped the group organize their thumbnail representations into four or five broad clusters. The group members then came forward and showcased their individual scenarios with this large image as their backdrop.

This is an assignment that gives the group and the individual student an insight into how design opportunities are visualized in a number of iterative stages and it also gives them an insight into the role of external models and discourse with colleagues in the process of design exploration and conviction building when the process of form and structure discovery is still in progress. Visualisation with the use of draft thumbnails is introduced to the students at this stage. Since we are looking at quick and expressive external images that could capture a gist of what is passing through the mind of the student this stage does give all students a glimpse into the minds of their colleagues and it is a revelation when a huge variety of concerns get disclosed that are not usually present in the verbalizations and dialogues within the group.

Image 03: The group dealing with water in public spaces came up with an illustration of a railway train and they used the clouds of smoke from the train’s chimney to cluster the design opportunity thumbnails that they had developed as a team. This was then used as a backdrop to showcase their individual design scenarios to the rest of the class.

The variety that emerges in the expressive form of what may be seen as one single word concept is another lesson to be learnt here. Many student produce huge variety of concepts based on the same starting point and it is a clear showing that in design individual expression can be influenced by a very large number of personal factors as well as biases. With the use of a format provided all the students of each group settle down to make sketch proposals for what they felt could be an opportunity in the particular sector or area of work. In this case the students worked as groups looking at possible design opportunities in the four areas of focus that were assigned to them, namely, the role and impact of Water in the following areas of focus:
1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image4: The last group dealt with water in agriculture. They used the literal clouds on top to show the raining down of design opportunities in four broad clusters or groups of ideas as design opportunity thiumbnails cascade down from the clouds above. The categories that they used include the farmer, the Government, water and issues, the headings unfortunately did not tell us very much about the contents below.

The individual scenarios were carried out on DIN A3 size sheet of paper so that the students could have adequate space to explore the idea through a number of iterations but not all the students understood the need for sequential drawings and the manner in which their thoughts could be captured as they occurred on a large sheet of paper. However after the presentations their understanding of the process of visualization and discovery was better that when they began, but still a long way to go, and this would need constant practice. Design learning is also a function of knowing and doing and the internalization of the process and the emergence of designerly ways of thinking and visualization can be seen to have begun but not as yet fully achieved. Individual student visualizations are shown in the images below and these are categorized into the four groups that they belonged to as listed in the image caption below.

1. Water in Industry

2. Water in Domestic Use

3. Water in Public Use

4. Water in Agriculture

Image 05: Stills from an online video offered by Nature Magazine about the water hot spot developing in western India with severe water stress and ground water depletion in the States of Rajasthan, Punjab, Harayana and Delhi which also happen to be the food bowl of India.

While the DCC course has been addressing the various issues of water in our lives across many domains and verticals we have constant news flows about the shortage of water coming from many sources. The latest one is the result of a six year long satellite based study conducted by a consortium of scientific institutions led by NASA. The alarming video can be watched at the Nature Magazine website at this link here. I have also made a separate post on my Design for India blog to raise the issues that this holds for the design community in India and how we can rally to address these real needs on the ground and how well we are currently prepared to face these realities. The blog post on this issue can be seen here at this link below.
Design for India

Prof M P Ranjan

Insights from the Field: of "experts & "visual narratives".

Meeting “experts” and making “visual narratives” from the field

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image01: Four teams dealing with Water: Industry, Domestic, Agriculture and in Public Use – in front of their models that show the current level of understanding after having met experts in the field over the long weekend of research in the field.

Teams came back from the field work with rich insights about the topic that they had gone out to investigate through an active contact programme with “experts” in the field. These “experts” are not an academic category but include those people that the team members were able top locate who had a considerable amount of experience in the various sub issues that the team was seeking to learn about.

Image02: Views of the Water in Domestic space presentation showing the models and the rich elplanations made by the team members about the issues and perspectives that they had gleaned from their field research and meetings with experts.

Design uses knowledge that is available and what is available is processed deeply to bring a degree of understanding from which the design mind can launch the search for design opportunities, all visual, both ion the mind as well as in the visualisations that abound in the process that is used to bring clarity and to discover structure and meaning. The four groups met hoards of people in their search for experts in their particular domain and they came back enriched with new insights and many new discoveries and a fair degree of clarity about the domain that they had set out to research.

Image03: Team Industry had a rich visual narrative along with a fairly comprehensive structure to explain their findings from the field.

Learning about team work and about the value of images in this form of research was the key take away for the student teams at this stage of the DCC explorations. The metaphors made by these groups stil failed to capture the richness that was to be seen in the structure as well as the process diagrams from which the team had journeyed through. Perhaps a function of time available and the other activities that competed with the course, such as the Monsoon Fiesta, that coincides with the course at this time in the semester.

Image04: Views of the team presentation from the Water for Public Use.

Image05: Views from the Water for Agriculture team where for some reason the team has chosen a mechanical metaphor rather than a more appropriate organic one.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

Water in our Lives: Gandhinagar DCC teams address water again - Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image00: Blackboard at Gandhinagar DCC 2009 session where students responding to the question of “What is Design?” came up with a whole host of words that were listed as the session progressed and the end result was a fairly wholesome list of terms that could be associated with both the design process as well as with design learning.

Continuing with the theme this year of looking at water from many of its critical dimensions the teams at NID Gandhinagar were assigned the following areas of emphasis for their own journey of exploration and discovery of design and design learning.

1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image01: Industry: Team of students looking the theme of Industry came up with these offerings as they brainstormed and organized their discovered words and concepts in a manner in which the team had understood the subject. Their structure was quite rich but their metaphor did not quite make the grade.

Image02: Domestic: The team dealing with domestic issues and perspectives came up with a very rich metaphor to capture the issues that they had discovered from their exploration of their own memories of the subject of water in their own lives.

Image03: Public Use: The team dealing with the Public use of water with a focus on urban applications came up with a very powerful expression of the human body to capture their understanding of the systems of relationships but their structure was not yet fully evolved and the model did not show the relationships although the seeds of the possibilities were touched upon.

Image04: Agriculture: The model was once again a human body but this time more like a Scare-crow in the field which may be appropriate for the subject of agriculture that they were dealing with. However the structure left out many gaps that we think shows the gaps in our own urban understanding of the realities in the rural situations today.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Storage, Sport and Awareness

Water in DCC2009: Storage, Sport and Awareness

Prof M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Storage, Sport and Awareness: Results of Assignment One – What we already knew as a group – Brainstorming, Discovering Attributes, Articulating Structure of What we Know, Building a Model of What we Think we Know.

Image01: Group One worked on Storage and Delivery issues and perspectives with Water in our lives.

This group had a faint element of structure in their presentation but the form was that of a tree and many parts of the tree were used but most of their efforts were on the leaves and left many opportunities open for interpretation.

Image02: Group Two worked on Sports and Festivals that use Water in a major way and looked at the impact of their activities on water and that of water on the culture of sport.

This group had a well executed and imposing form of a tree (again) with the roots covering the sports and the leaves dealing with the festivals and the axe in between the trunk symbolizing the problems. The structure was polarized into two broad parts leaving scope for improvement in the next round.

Image03: Group Three worked on issues of Awareness and of major issues with water and methods of dealing with them.

This group had a scattered structure since they tried to use colour alone as a organizing principle and their metaphor of a space view with meteorites in motion around a symbolic planet failed to provide a structure that could support a meaningful expression and the form too was weak in showing relationships that the groups was talking about but failed to show in the connections on the model. The next round should show the way. I thought that this group too had a tree – but this time from the top view – I told them so from my point of view.

Image04: The Big Tree at NID as seen from the second floor window by each of the three groups must have influenced their decisions and the models offered above.

All groups had settled for the easy metaphor by using a tree or space without much structure and a good deal of feedback came up in the presentations and discussions from both students as well as the faculty team of Rashmi, Shashank, Sumiran and Ranjan, which I hope has provided a platform for rich learning by doing.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009: Water in our lives

DCC2009: Water in our lives

Prof. M P Ranjan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. M P Ranjan