DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability

What is Design in the age of Global Warming?

DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability
Prof M P Ranjan

Image: Foundation class of 2008 batch at the start of DCC2009 this morning in the new extended classroom.

The year has passed and once again we start with a new group of students in the NID Foundation programme who are looking at the Design Concepts and Concerns Course with interest and apprehension. We talked about this today in class and passed the mike around to hear from the students what they had heard from the NID grapevine about the course in the, good and bad, and the discussion was lukewarm. That is till we came to the current topics of interest, in the news, around the world and in India and about their awareness of these events and happenings and its importance to design education and action.

The ice was however broken when we talked about Slumdog Millionare, the movie and its effects being discussed in the media and in blogs about films and the Academy Award nominations. Heated debate followed and it gave us a window to show that on all issues we could hold different positions and some of these could be deep seated and others could be swung in one way or another based on the new data that was presented as well as the quality of the arguments offered in the debates that followed.

Image: DCC2009 class black board discussing “What is Design?” in the age of global warming and setting a stage for the theme of Sustainability.

The blackboard that emerged as Rashmi captured the words that emerged from various efforts of the students to try and define design show the slant that we have chosen to give this particular module. Students would be engaged in ‘visual sense making” as described by G K VanPatter in his NextD conversations and the focus of the course would be on the theme of Sustainability which we had started working on earlier this year for the World Economic Forum at the Design Charette in New Delhi followed by the NID workshop on Sustainability that culminated in the preparation of five posters on the theme which have been sent to Davos for the event on 29th January 2009 which we shall watch with interest. We talked about Victor Papanek and his visit to NID in 1979 as well as the India Report by Charles and Ray Eames in 1958 that makes this the 50th year of its writing. This gives us an opportunity to look back and look forward at India and its need for design in the context of the global financial meltdown as well as the global warming that makes the sustainability debate all the more important for all of us. The other words on the black board are self explanatory or can be cross checked on wikipedia and by google search..

Students have been asked to write their own version of the blackboard discussion and we hope to share some of the more interesting ones here on this blog tomorrow. We closed the day long session with the distribution of the two papers that I had prepared about this course, the first in 2002 for the Design Issues journal called the “Avalanche Effect” (download the paper as 55 kb pdf here) which was unfortunately not carried in the India issue that was published later and the second called “Creating the Unknowable” (download the paper as 50 kb pdf here) which did get accepted in the peer reviewed conference EAD2006 in Bremen, Germany in March 2005. We showed the Davos posters to the students briefly and we will discuss these in greater detail as the course progresses into the theme of sustainability in the days ahead. We propose to form groups tomorrow which will look at what the students already know from their lifetime experience about the topics assigned to them and the chosen topics are very political indeed, at least at the level of popular slogans in Indian politics – Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijili, and Rozgar – which stands for Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment in Hindi.

Image: A sneak preview of the five posters on sustainability which were sent to Davos was shared with the DCC2009 class.

Let us see how this course develops as we go forward from here. Promises to be exciting indeed.
Prof M P Ranjan

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.

Nature of the Design Process: Systems Thinking at NID

Nature of the Design Process: Systems Thinking at NID

Image: Four stage model of the Systems Design process.
Rather than following a single big idea I believe that designing is about following a number of related concepts and in exploring the opportunities that the design space offers you. It is about the insights that your own imagination brings to the surface as you continue the journey while sensing the environment and the situation that surrounds the particular opportunity. This is why the outcomes are so unpredictable but if you persist and remain sensitive to the insights you will eventually develop a set of convictions that will prompt you to act in a particular manner and then subject these explorations to a number of tests as these are evaluated in the progressive stages of the design process.

In my model of the design process, which I teach my students at NID during the Design Concepts and Concerns course, I offer a four stage model where the User Research leads to Scenario Visualisation and this will bring to the surface many ideas and concepts that can be shared with users and others as the work progresses. These concepts and models can be subjected to debate and discussion as well as detailed modeling and testing till you are ready to invest time and effort as well as develop the basis for obtaining the costs to detail out one, two or more of these scenarios and subject these to further testing, all usually done in rapid succession. So, in this way designing is an action oriented work where research is invariably interspaced with action of modeling and discourse as well as a good measure of discussion and debate based on which your insights and convictions would develop more fully and you will then make some decisions about directions and goals that need to be reached. Both goals and possible solutions as well as means of achieving the goals are co-developed or co-evolved as the work progresses.

The third stage is Concept Development which takes a substantial amount of time and money in a business situation. Here the detailing of some promising concepts are taken up in a systematic manner and this can take a good deal of time effort and cost and the fourth stage is to develop Business Models that can help realise the concept in the real world. I have these models on my website and you can download these as pdf files if you wish from the site below from the Design Theory section of the website:


By the way I have posted another story today on my blog about my experience in Madras in 1974. Take a look. This an the previous posts show case studies of design action in the real world and the impact these can have on a business situation, particularly in a small scale industry setting.

What is Design? What can we know about it and what can we not and why.

Design is neither Art not is it Science. So what is it?

Image: DCC Black Board of class discussion today with students from five PG disciplines at NID
Students are requested to send us an email written in their own words (about 500 to 1000 words max) as a response to the class discussion and their own understanding of the subject. Try and explaon the subject to a 12th standard student and use examples from your own discipline to illustrate any point that needs to be explained.

One of our students from the Bangalore Centre has sent me his views as a blog post and you can see the post on this link below:
Bellare Samir Deep has made the post on his blog "I talk about design! Sad but True.", take a look. Send a copy to Rashmi and to me and if you wish to your faculty as well. Kindly place the words DCC2007 in the subjectline for easy categorisation of your message in my mail box.