Design thinking kit used by participants of the Earth Workshop to develop concepts through brainstorming and visualisation cycles. The resources for this kit can be downloaded from this link here - Design Thinking Kit for Earth Workshop as pdf files set.
Student and craftsmen teams at the Earth Workshop design thinking session. Five groups used the Design Thinking kit and explored concepts on the visualisation sheets that were provided.
The day long session ended with the five teams making presentations of their concept sketches and scenarios before leaving for Kutch to work in a hands on manner with teams of master craftsmen at the Hunnarshala.
On their return to CEPT after five days in Kutch the team put up an exhibition of their explorations and proposed design solutions at the School of Interior Design's double height foyer and we had a de-briefing session that would help internalize the learning from the whole workshop and encourage reflection and documentation tasks that are to follow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This interactive multi-author space has been set up as an experiment in online educational interactions as part of the teaching programme at NID within the Design Concepts & Concerns course conducted by Prof. M P Ranjan, Rashmi Korjan, Dimple Soni, Gayatri Menon and Rupesh Vyas. Other faculty, students and invited contributors have been requested from time to time to join as authors to explore the various dimensions of design processes and its design opportunities in India. The major themes that inform this course are discussed in greater detail in our advocasy blog Design for India at this link.
While this space is moderated by Prof. M P Ranjan, the views expressed by the individual authors are their own and it does not necessarily reflect the official views of the Institute.
The day long session ended with the five teams making presentations of their concept sketches and scenarios before leaving for Kutch to work in a hands on manner with teams of master craftsmen at the Hunnarshala.
