Strategies for Jivraj Park craftspersons: Lecture for NIFT Fashion Design Gandhinagar

Lecture for NIFT Fashion Design Gandhinagar
Model: Body - Mind Map for design and development strategies.
Download the visual presentation titled "Strategies for an Innovative India" as a pdf file 3.7 MB

Fashion Design students at NIFT Gandhinagar

Model: Thick End of the Wedge as a strategy for creative and innovative supports from the Government of India.

Whiteboard from the 4th July lecture at NIFT.

Lecture at NIFT Gandhinagar: Diagnostic Research Strategies for Amraiwadi Cluster

White Board for the lecture at NIFT today with students and faculty of Textile design discipline

Concept Mela. Awesome conclusion for DCC2010

M P Ranjan

Six New Design Schools for India

Image: Groups of students with their models and metaphors to explain their concept for the six proposed design schools for their chosen regions of India. We hope that the National Design Policy administrators are listening

The "Concept Mela format was used again after several years at the end of this DCC class for the Foundation students at NID. Media showed interest and many visitors interacted with the students. They are preparing a package that will be made available to policy makers and stake-holders alike. This is an attempt to create the future in design education, see the paper, "Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education" (2005) download pdf file here.

M P Ranjan

Concept Mela 2010: Six Design Schools for India

Prof. M P Ranjan
Five years after the last major Concept Mela where NID Foundation students shared concepts for sector specific design institutions we have given the theme of designing six new schools for six regions of India – North, South East, West, Centre and Northeast regions.

Image01: Poster designed to invite feedback in the Concept Mela format at NID

The Concept Mela is scheduled to take place on 26th March 2010 in the NID Foyer and six groups composed of the 88 Foundation students from 3.00 pm tpo 6,00 pm IST. We look forward to a stimulating evening of presentations and discussions with visitors, students and faculty from NID and a number of other schools in Ahmedabad. The presentations will continue on the next day, Saturday 27th March 2010, from 10.00 am to 12.00pm.

Image 02: Students at work over the weekend at NID working on their respective concepts as well as in sessions with experts and teachers in their groups.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Business Models for Designers 2010: Learning from the Field

Learning from the Field
Prof M P Ranjan

Learning from the field as a part of the design pedagogy at NID includes a live assignment that provides training in observation and interaction with persons and situations from a particular context. Here, in this course, we asked six teams of students to visit selected situations in the city of Ahmedabad to look at selected street food vendors over a period of three or four days in which they would watch, interact, record through field notes and sketches and build models to refine their understanding of the situation being studied, all carried out in an iterative manner. In this case the business models of a category of entrepreneurs called street food vendors. This year, as in previous years, we assigned the six groups to the categories of street food vendors who would be active at this time of the year. These six include – Fruit and Juice vendors (Juicewalla), Tea vendors (Chaiwalla), Pani Puri vendors (Pani Puri walla), Pav Bhaji vendors (Pav Bhaji walla), Omlette vendors (Omlettewalla) and the Fried Bhajiya vendor (Bhajiya walla). Download presentation with linked movies and paper titled "Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education" presented at the EAD06 conference in Bremen, Germany in 2005 which describes the course along with a visual presentation and embedded slide shows inside the pdf show. Zip file 53.8 mb with pdf show and full text and linked movies.

Image01: Metaphor chosen by the Juicewalla group was Street Car Racing with pit stops and racing events that were supported with poster presentations of a variety of juice vendors in the city of Ahmedabad. the thumbnail images show how the team members came up to the models and explained their understanding to the full class.

Download pdf picture album of Juicewalla group PDF file 5.8 mb

Image02: The Chaiwalla group chose the metaphor of a Football match and they presented a dynamic image that had players coming in as cut-out images and made for a compelling presentation. The team wore team T-shirts and badges for a group identity.

Download pdf picture album of Chaiwalla group PDF file 12.6 mb

Image03: The Pani Puri group used the train of gears as their metaphor and theirs too was a dynamic show since they came in one by one and added a new yellow gear as they shared their insights from the field.

Download pdf picture album of Pani Puriwalla group PDF file 5.3 mb

Image04: A very Indian metaphor of a Masala Dabba or Masala Box for Indian spices was used by the Pav Bhaji group and the show went through many layers of unfolding from each spice sub-box. The lid too had some problems that were shared at the very end.

Download pdf picture album of Pav Bhajiwalla group PDF file 4.8 mb

Image05: The Omlettewala group chose the metaphor of a Music Boom Box and performed a skit to illustrate some features.

Download pdf picture album of Omlettewalla group PDF file 4.1 mb

Image06: Finally the Bhajiyawalla group stole the show by presenting an huge Ten Rupee Note using both sides of the note as their metaphor. Their explanation was that whatever happened to the costs of ingredients the Bhajiyawalla always managed to Price their product at Rupees Ten. Good insight from the field, a strategy to remember.

Download pdf picture album of Bhajiyawalla group PDF file 3.6 mb

Understanding Business Processes:
Building and delivering business models are now an integral part of our understanding of design in India. We therefore innovated this assignment in order to give design students an understanding of business processes. Groups of students are asked to study the work of local street food vendors and to conduct observations and interviews with numerous such service providers in order to understand their business processes and to map the same in the form of a presentation to the rest of the class. The local “Chai-wallah, the omlette-wallah, and other fast-food vendors on the streets of Ahmedabad become subjects of their study of micro-enterprises which have all the business processes and strategies of a multi-national, albeit at a much smaller scale, and at much more comprehensible scale of operation. Students build a visual model of their observations and findings along with a smattering of business terminology to explain the cash flows and business strategies adopted by each of these micro-enterprises and leads to a better understanding of business processes as an area of study. The presentations are used by the teachers to instruct and inform the students of the relevance of such studies and the possibility of scaling up this study to medium and large businesses in principle. This is perhaps a painless way to learn about business and the understanding exhibited by our students is quite remarkable.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC 2010: Foundation Batch 2009 -10

Convocation Week: Curtain Raiser Assignment

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image01: DCC Black Board generated through class brainstorming on the key words associated with “What is Design?”

Once again we return to the Foundation batch at NID to conduct another course of the Design Concepts and Concerns and this year we have as many as 90 students in the Foundation year two batches since the NID student intake has once again expanded this year. There is another change in the time table this year to accommodate the Holi festival and we have agreed to have this course in two parts with the first part as a one week module that coincides with the NID Convocation week in early December 2009 and the second part as a four week module that comes after the Holi festival during the month of March 2010. We have therefore changed the sequence of assignments and tried to use the presence of over two hundred NID graduates on campus at Paldi who have all come to participate in the convocation ceremony. This would give the Foundation students an opportunistic occasion to meet them in an assignment format that would help them discover and articulate something more about the fields of design that they themselves would be entering at the end of their Foundation programme at NID.

Image02: Course introduction to teachers, course content and teaching approaches recorded in class and supplemented with images from the class on day one looking at the students in the class. Part one of the session as a YouTube movie based on the voice recordings in the class. Part one.

Learning by doing and learning through team work are the two major pedagogic strategies that the DCC course uses and these journeys are documented visually and these images are made available for future reflection so that learning is a continuous process, like a slow fuse still left burning as the semester progresses. The course teachers, Ranjan, Rashmi, Gayatri and Shashank met together and decided to use the NID Convocation event to place the Foundation students in a context where they could work as a team and find out as much as they could and in an as deeply connected manner as they could the many dimensions of the design disciplines that were offered at NID through an engagement with what they already knew and through meetings with senior students and graduates from the disciplines that they were assigned to study in some depth. The time available was les than a week since the students had still to put up their Convocation display for the Foundation Programme as part of the series of exhibits that were planned across the campus at NID. They therefore had their tasks cut out for them to plan their time and divide their tasks and work as a team to try and first discover the contents of the disciplines and then work together to visualize these into a coherent model that would help them share their collective understanding of the chosen subject with the rest of the class and the teachers at the end of the assignment.

Image03: Part two of the voice recording of the first session before the group brainstorming session supplemented with images from the class, this time looking at the teachers. Part two.

The course started with a round of introductions to the teachers and a morning of discussion on the topic of What is Design? The black board was used to capture brainstorming responses for students and as the black board filled up with words offered by the students the numerous dimensions of design came out in the open, as an external map of what was collectively held in the minds of the class fellows. Some of the words were new for some while others were more or less common for a class of the NID Foundation Programme student who had completed one semester of basic design education that dealt with composition, drawing, colour, geometry and materials – all foundations for a design career – and they had many a discussion with teachers and seniors in their past months at NID, in a rich design learning environmemt. The first part of this discussion is recorded in the two part voice recordings that have been supported by images from the class in the form of a quicktime slide show, however here the black board brainstorming session is yet to follow and at the end of this session the class was divided into six groups, each assigned at random, by pick of lots, to one of the six design disciplines that could be broadly described by the terms listed here: 3D Products, Image and Graphics, Fibres and Textiles, Exhibition and Space, IT and New Media and Motion Picture and Animation.

Image04: Three groups as seen on day one and later after their model building based on their collective exploration of the chosen disciplines of design.

The student teams went into a huddle and prepared themselves for the period of field based interviews with NID graduates with the specific aim of trying to understand the various dimensions of each of the disciplines, their tools, processes, knowledge and skill sets and attitudes and finer sensibilities, that each of these disciplines would need to process in order to work effectively in the space that they usually worked in. This collective process of exploration, brainstorming, articulation and expression bring with it a sense of dep understanding of the subject at hand and the whole process is quite memorable for all the participants, if they have immersed themselves in the process over the limited time period that was available at hand. The week went by very rapidly and at the end we had six very rich presentations that were played out in front of the whole class, and each presentation was recorded in images and voice capture and these were all made available for the students as digital files placed on the DCC2010 server on the NID intranet.

Image05: Three more groups as seen on day one and later after they had completed their group assignment of building models of the chosen disciplines of design.

Prof. M P Ranjan

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