Design Opportunities and Water: DCC2008 nears closure.

Design Opportunities and Water: DCC2008 nears closure.
The five teams worked hard and presented their groups explorations and concepts for the explored and identified Design Opportunities that they saw for enhancing the sustainable use of water in each of their regions. Each group chose their own style of presentation and each had a specific focus when it came to content and emphasis of the presentation and these were influenced by what they felt was critical for the specific region that they had taken up as a group.

The presentations extended over two days, on Wednesday and Thursday last week but when it came to the last group it seems that the energy levels of the class had dropped to a real low and only the presenters and a few others were available and present in the class for the fifth and the last presentation. So once again, the scheduled class session was abandoned and we had a series of discussions in the office but the teachers decided that the final team, The Maharashtra group would make their presentation with whoever was available and record the same on the voice recorder and on digital images. However, the teachers abstained from attending since so many of the classmates choose to absent themselves. The students did have their presentation and a visiting faculty from Poland, Alexandra Giza, a Graphic Design teacher from the Northern Illinois University was present along with a few other interested students and the Maharashtra group made an excellent presentation, after all.

The other groups who had completed their presentations earlier included the following groups in the order in which they are listed below:
1. Northeast Hills: Design opportuinities for Water.
2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water.
3. Himalayayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water.
4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water.
5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water.

The images of the group presentations and a brief description are listed below and can be accessed from the hyperlinks provided in the list above.


Digital pictures of all stages of presentation as well as a digital voice recording have been placed as usual on the NID server so that they can be accessed by all students for future reference and for the contemporaneous course documentation that has been a practice as part of this course. This kind of documentation gives the students and teachers access to material on which they could reflect and ponder and the learning is very deep indeed due to the rich recall of details that the medium affords. Now we have the blog which is an extension of the strategy but all the pictures and voice files are made available to all students in the form of recorded DVD that contain the full resources of this course. This is the first year that we have been able to share this material on the DCC blog and we look forward to an active exchange of ideas from other teachers in numerous design schools across the world.

The next assignment that has been given to the students has been listed below where they are required to explore and develop an individual scenario representation and share this with their peers before making the submission of the final artwork to the teachers for a final review and evaluation as a conclusion to this course. We look forward to a highly motivated response from all the students and their individual scenarios will be shared on this blog next week.

1. Northeast Hills of India: Design opportuinities for Water.

1. Northeastern Region of India: Design opportuinities for Water.
The team chose to focus on 12 specific design opportunities that each of the team members had identified as potential applications for water based design explorations for the region. This approach left out many of the exciting possibilities that had been discovered earlier in the sketch stage but somehow the group decided to move in a much narrower area of focus. Perhaps the decision was influenced by the limited time that was available and this gave us the platform to critique their approach since it seemed to miss out on the macro potentials that were seen in the original sketches. Further the team seemed to get fragmented in their approach and therefore failed to leverage the potential of a group think that was possible at this stage of the exploration and articulation.

2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water

2. Kerala Rainforest: Design opportunities for Water
The Kerala team worked together as a close knit unit and produced a very large range of alternate approaches all of which had been classified and structured for the group presentation. The format that had been chosen too was very exciting and full of possibilities since the task was to develop a publication in the form of a manual that could capture and disseminate all the selected design opportunities that the team had discovered as part of their exploration.

In keeping with their task they produced a concertina folded book that could double up as a wall chart and the other side of the wall chart was a huge poster that called for sustainable use of water lest there be a water WAR in the south. The news from the South is quite disturbing with the Karnataka and the Tamilnadu squabbles for the use of the River Cauvery’s water and this dispute has been going on for so many years now. In spite of all the expenses that have been incurred on this dispute on legal and political costs the State and Central Governments have not applied their minds to the possibility of investments in innovation and exploration of the kind that this group has suggested in our class. I wonder when we will learn as a nation that imagination and exploration can find lasting solutions if they are used in a cooperative mode. This was a great show of group solidarity and the result really raised all our expectations for the area of design action in the future by such group action which is very positive.

3. Himalayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water

3. Himalayan Foothills: Design opportunities for Water
The Himalayas team explored all the ideas that had come up during the earlier phases of their design opportunity search and they decided as a group to focus their efforts on the building of a specific business opportunity with an integrated set of water based uses on which they could focus. They too had narrowed their field quite dramatically when the chose to focus on the building of one hotel chain to deal with the climate and terrain potential of the Himalayan foothills which was their field of play. They proposed a new hotel chain which would work on the development of ecological uses of water in a sustainable manner and for this objective they proposed many specific strategies and product solutions that could be developed and applied in the chain of hotels that they propose to build and operate as a sustainable business venture in the future.

4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water

4. Desert Rajasthan: Design opportunities for Water
Rajasthan is a desert state with a huge and recognized water scarcity problem and the team addressed the issues at hand with all the seriousness that it deserved. The range of illustrations and the levels of strategies that they proposed were stratified at the individual level, the community level, the State governance level and at the National policy levels, all well integrated and expressed in their group presentation to the class. The wall chart was huge and very detailed in their illustration of each of the solutions that were offered. The very interesting offering was the creation of a communications strategy that used new institutional infrastructure that could bring interested villages and children together so that the various issues of water could be addressed by the people in a participatory mode. The group presentation was rich and extremely expressive.

5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water

5. Coastal Maharashtra: Design opportunities for Water
The Maharastra group prepared an illustrated book of many pages, each richly illustrated and containing texts that explained the concepts. These were organized into groups of concepts that were arranged by the strategy that the group chose to focus on and they converted the whole document into a digital file that was presented as a slide presentation to the class using a digital slide projector. The images were impressive due to the scale but the sequential nature of the mode of presentation removed the possibility of the creation of an overview that the other presentations could give, and this is a trade off that technology tools make us take during such presentations.

Design Scenarios: Water based Design Opportunities

Image: A visit to Calico Museum as part of the DCC course in 1999 by Debashree in an assignment created to teach scenario visualisation, learning by doing.

Background: Scenario visualisations in Design
Scenario visualisations can be made at any stage of the design journey. In the early stages these are typically rather abstract and with a low content of details, although some parts may be vividly expressed if these components or parts are already clearly conceptualized due to either historical reasons or if the larger scenario is being around this part which is already. Design visualizations can cover many attributes of the system that is being modeled. Some could show the structural and formal attributes of the system while others can go on to include an expression of several intangible aspects as well as those that can be seen and felt. These can also include the relationship between the components of the system and help give us an overview of the total system which is a perspective that would need to be considered when taking major decisions at the design stage itself. Many strategic decisions need to be taken at an early stage and these scenario visualizations provide the framework for appreciating the particular solution that is on offer. Several alternate scenarios can be examined before taking a particular decision and some decisions may not be reversible without incurring a huge cost or effort and therefore these need to be subjected to much advance planning and participatory modes of decision making in a democratic framework. Our cities and its future can be determined by a design process that is both visible as well as informed by expert action if we were to adopt a way forward that could accommodate such processes that may be required to make visible major infrastructure offerings as well as details of cost and impact assessments, all done in a manner that can be appreciated by the common man in the street. This means that the language of discourse would need to move from economic models in an abstract mathematical formulation to a more visibly appreciated modeling system that can show and tell the intended structures and the affects on our lives. It is here that scenario visualization in the form of picture stories or rich picture representations can make a huge difference to our understanding of the complex phenomena that go into many such projects of public good.

In our attempt to teach the art of scenario visualization we devised an assignment that could get the involvement of an entire class of design students at a high level of motivation while undertaking these experiences. The introductory phase of the scenario visualization assignment has the student sharing with the class, in one composite rich picture, an introduction to themselves in an attempt to show who we are. This assignment is the first of many visualization tasks done by the design student jn the DCC course and here they are expected to introspect and identify aspects of their lives that have significantly contributed to shaping their attitudes and abilities as they are today. Students are them asked to express their imagination in the form of images in juxtaposition on a single sheet of paper which they could use to tell their story of themselves. This is a first experience in show and tell about something that they are very familiar with already, themselves. The next stage is the experiencing of an interesting space or event in the city which can be done as a group and after the immersive experience the students are aslked to represent the experience in all its facets, again as a single rich picture representation that can be shared with the whole class. This time the event or space that is visited is common for all the students but it becomes clear that each student brings back their own point of view that is unique and which is shaped by their past experiences as well as their belief systems and cultural roots when it comes to styles of representation chosen. Going from a familiar but usually ignored representation of the self to a common space with different points of view are quite revealing when taken together for a discussion.

Image: DCC2008 students admiring Debashree's 1999 scenario artwork in my office today.

Calico Museum Visit and the DCC Course
The students are then given topics that they could examine in depth through the processes of group brain-storming and modeling in order to make sense of the complex interplay of factors that influence the situations that are being studied. These processes too lead to visual modeling of a variety of kinds and at the end of these collective journeys the students build a model that helps categorise the forces that influence the situation as well as discover a metaphor that can give meaning and a memorable setting for the structure that is discovered by the group. These structures are not sacred truths but are tentative offerings that can be discussed and debated leading to appropriate modifications, but as they stand they represent the current understanding of the situation and this does bring a great deal of clarity to the complex situation that is being handled by the group. In the DCC class of 1999 we asked the students to visit the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad and after an immersive experience of that visit they were asked to make a rich picture scenario of their visit with all the details shown in one large format picture. The experiences that were sequential are now represented in a spatial manner with images juxtaposed and expressed on one single sheet and the variety of expressions were truly staggering. At the end of the major assignment the students are once again asked to show the design opportunities that they had imagined and this time they are to express a scenario of a pure imaginative landscape and an expression of the possible future with all the associated details that would make it both viable as well as desirable. This is a great introduction to design scenario visualization that can be used in all attempts to model the future solutions and make these visible to an interested and informed audience with a certain degree of credibility.

Image: DCC Blackboard with the assignment description as a structure model.

Water based Design Opportunities for India
This year we have assigned the mapping of Design Opportunities with Water in each of five geographic regions of India. Each student from the respective group would choose one specific design opportunity in which they have a personal conviction and through a process of imagination, dreaming and exploration build a visual scenario that can be shared with the class as an image in a show and tell mode of presentation. Each group would meet in a round table presentation for a per review and feedback session where the visual scenarios would be presented and based on the feed back from the group members each student would send in a 200 word email to describe their scenario and the specific design opportunity that they have developed for the future keeping a 15 year time horizon for having built an enterprise to roll out the design into the real world. We look forward to seeing all the presentations and to sharing it with the world through this blog in the near future.

For further reading look at this paper on Design Visualisation from my website. (pdf file 691 kb)