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 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

Food across Communities: Macro Micro investigations in DCC

DCC2008 Paldi Group 2: PG Disciplines at NID: Graphic Design, Film & Video Communication, Furniture Design and Ceramic Design: Assignment one: Mapping the known universe of Food: Producers, Converters & Consumers.

M P Ranjan

Image 1: The Producer Group with their model of the production pyramid and the variety of food types at the circular base.

The last batch of students who are taking the Design Concepts and Concerns course here at Paldi campus of NID were asked to look at the theme of Food at the Macro level of exploration in three groups, each looking at three stages through which food travels from the land to our plates, from the point of Production, Conversion and then Consumption. This kind of Meta investigation is encouraged in all design journeys since it is a good point of departure for any design task to take stock of what we know of a particular subject or a theme that is being addressed and to try and map this territory as clearly as possible before embarking on a further journey of research and experimentation to discover what we do not already know. As a group process, this kind of articulation of what we already know about the broader contours of a discipline or a particular subject is very useful to discover the depth of understanding that is present with the group members as well as get a glimpse of regions of uncertainty and in particular the areas of ignorance, which could inform the later stages of research in those specific and identified areas.

Image 2: The Producer Group making their presentation to the class.

This batch was divided into three broad groups that included, Producers, Converters and Consumers, since the focus was on Food and we were keen that the groups would explore regions that were beyond the ordinary, to include areas of agriculture, nature and food production through the Producer focus group while the broader contours of processing, trade, branding and distribution could be covered in some detail by the second group which we called the Conversion focus group. The last group looked at the whole area of Food consumption lying at the far end of the supply chain by looking at the Consumer as a category along the long path from growing to eating. Each group went through the processes of brainstorming and categorization to discover and articulate what was known to the group and from these explorations they built models that could be used for a show & tell presentation about the insights gleaned from the whole process.

Image 3: The Converter Group gathered around their Sun metaphor with the long supply chain as a literal exhibit on the floor.

This batch of students came from the disciplines of Graphic Design, Film & Video Communication, Furniture Design and Ceramic Design, all post graduate students, from a variety of disciplines which brought a good mix of variety of skills and abilities to the group processes in this course. The three groups had an equal number of students from all the participating disciplines since the process of selection ensured an even mix in the composition of each team. Three coordinators volunteered at first and they then selected one team member from a particular discipline by turn till all the members from that discipline were assigned to one of the three groups. They then moved to the next discipline and selected additional team members by taking turns and all the disciplines were covered in the end. Each group had an even mix of students from all the participating disciplines and in the end we took lots to assign the three meta themes to each of the groups thus formed to ensure that the whole process was democratic and not pre-determined by any one including the teachers.

Image 4: The Consumer Group with their “Last Supper” metaphor to capture the huge variety of conditions of food consumption across India.

The three groups wee given a day and a half to explore what they already know about the chosen and assigned theme through a process of brainstorming and categorization and the group then built a structure that was based on the discovered words using a metaphor that best captured the meaning of the joint investigation that the team had discovered during their explorations of the theme. The producer group came up with a Pyramid of concerns with the hierarchy of governance flowing down to the roots in the variety of agricultural products on one side and dairy and poultry products and fisheries on the other two sides of the triangular pyramid. The circular base was strewn with images of all kinds of food alongside words that the team had gleaned during their intense explorations of the day before. The second group on the other hand made a sun like image that radiated from a soft centre in rings of growing magnitude before breaking out into rays that extended around the circle, each touching upon a key issue that the group had identified as being important for their analysis of the Converters in the chain of the supply of food in India and across the world. The chain was represented by a set of large paper links that formed a “Chain” along the ground from the sun to a remote location across the room. The third group used the metaphor of a complex dining table, almost a last supper, in their representation of various categories of eventual consumers, from the poor and the hungry to the rich and the affluent, each located at opposite ends of the table. The installation was set on the ground and words were literally sprinkled on the floor in meaningful groups and paper plates with images of food and chairs that expressed the status of the consumer by their form were the highlights of this particular display. The representation achieved by this group was quite stunning in effect as well as in structure.

M P Ranjan

Incubating Design Opportunities: DCC2008 Paldi 01

… Design Concepts & Concerns…

Incubating Design Opportunities: Food, Inflation and the Economy: DCC2008 Paldi 01

Image: West Bengal team with their huge Sun icon and the design opportunity thumbnail images distributed along the categories identified by the Solar flares, each named in an appropriate manner.

After trailing all the other groups and getting sharp critiques from their peers in the first two assignments the WB team has come back strongly to make a clear statement showing a huge leap forward in their understanding as well as their articulation of all the design opportunities identified and sketched by the group members. The model and the visual presentation was very powerful indeed.

Image: Goa team with their radial model surrounded by all the thumbnail sketches of the design opportunities shown as a horizontal display with the viewers traveling around the model to look at it closely.

Goa team continued their effective radial model and they offered a modified structure and this time to accommodate the categories that they have identified for their numerous design opportunities for the theme of Food, Economy and Inflation with reference to their chosen region, Goa.

Image: Rajasthan team in front of their display of design opportunity maps that have been broadly categorized into areas of concern and value.

Rajasthan team used the broad categories of Ecology, Awareness, Culture and Economy to arrange all the design opportunities that the team members had articulated during the thumbnail brainstorming and exploration phase. They are seen holding their individual scenarios based on an agreed selection arrived at through peer review within the team.

Image: Uttarakhand team in front of their display of design opportunity thumbnails in the NID Foyer and they hold in their hand their individual scenario visualizations.

Rajasthan team had an interesting categorization of all the design opportunities that the team members had imagined and articulated. These were divided into broad categories through a process of sorting and categorization and they used the categories of Education, Food Preservation, Community Development, Industry, Water (Mineral), Transport and also a special category for Policy and Legislation that was also proposed.


Image: Detail of Goa model and design opportunity thumbnail sketches

… Design Concepts & Concerns…

Late Morning Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: Work in progress with all teams rushing to meet the new deadline which has been posted at 2.00 pm.

Groups have reassembled after the break and working almost non-stop with a few hours of sleep over night. The metaphors are taking shape and the structure is being frozen by each of the groups exploring Food, Inflation and the Economy as the major theme for the brainstorming assignment.

We will assemble again at the studios after lunch and take group photographs of all team members in front of their presentation models and then move on to the review of each presentation by turn. The first group to finish and report will have the first go with the presentation. We look forward to it.

Early Morning Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: Tired but not floored, work in progress early in the morning in the NID studios where four groups have spent the late night grappling with the categorization of all the data that was generated last night and in the evening rounds of brainstorming.

The studios were still quite empty with a few students coming in in small teams to get back to work and meet the 11.00 am deadline for the group presentations scheduled today. The signs of a new form of organization is seem in the materials strewn across the rooms and in the semi-finished work sheets that will be made ready after the breakfast sessions and all the students come back to the studios. Harini went across the studios at 9.30 am to bring us some insights of the work in progress and we do look forward to the major presentations later in the day.

DCC2008 Paldi01: Brainstorming and Categorisation about Food

Image: Brainstorming at an early stage with varied levels of expression

The four groups have started the process of exploring what they already know about their chosen subjects, namely, Food, Inflation and the Economy with respect to the four regions that have been assigned to each of the four groups. The groups are working on the following regions as listed below:
Group 1: West Bengal
Group 2: Rajasthan
Group 3: Goa
Group 4: Uttarakhand

Image: Categorisation at an early stage with groups discussing possible approaches

As usual they all started with a fairly superficial list of words after a hour or two of discussions and when the teachers came around for the review they were all working on organizing the few words that they had listed out in the first round of articulation. This led to some discussions with each group when we stressed on the need for a greater depth in both the number of word ideas as well as the variety of concepts which would be only discovered if the lists were truly random and done in an intense session with active participation of the group. This led to a second round of brainstorming and this time a far more elaborate set of words emerged and some groups “got it” and they had a rich texture of concepts that could be seen strewn across the large page on which they did their brainstorming capture. Others still had the all dominating list-mania and found it difficult to abandon a lifelong learning of making lists in an organized manner, but this would change as the groups met each other and saw the difference in the approaches and what it did for the richness of texture and content of the brainstorming sessions.

The groups have now started caregorising the discovered words and they are using both post-it stickers as well as index cards to sort and re-group the discovered words into some meaningful categories that they could use for the development of a structure that would have a shared meaning for all members of the group. The process is always full of debates and arguments but eventually time constraints lead to some form of negotiated settlements even if these are not fully satisfactory to all participants. This makes the design process a bit like the political negotiations that take place when contentious issues are being examined in mixed groups and a deadline forces the settlement of the matter in a form of truce with some give and take from all sides.

Image: Categorisation at a fairly developed stage, more cards and several sub-groups discovered

Tomorrow the groups will be converting their found structure into a memorable metaphor that could support and enhance the reading of the subject and its content as a composite image that could aid both recognition of the core features of the categorization as well as the overarching theme of Food and the name of the region that the group is addressing. The choice of image and the use of its parts to map out the discovered structure will determine just how successful the group has been in translating the understanding from the structure to the making of a memorable image that will remain in ones mind and aid recall of all the subtle attributes and features of the explored subject, which in this case is Food, Inflation and the Economy in the context of the four chosen regions and also as an aid to look forward to setting a platform for the further work to be done to expand the groups understanding of the subject and the context in which they are located.

DCC2008 Paldi Batch01: Course commences today

Image: Four volunteer coordinators and views of the class in session at the NID Paldi Auditorium in the morning and the post lunch session.

The theme of Food, Inflation and the Economy continues into the second batch for this year with the first batch at Paldi forming their groups and commencing work on their first assignment, mapping what we already know from our life experience. The subject and theme is Food and the four groups are to look at four assigned regions of India, namely:
Group 1: West Bengal
Group 2: Rajasthan
Group 3: Goa
Group 4: Uttarakhand

The members were drawn from all the participating disciplines namely, Animation Film Design (AFD), Transportation & Automobile Design (T&AD), Product Design (PD), Textile Design (TD), RMIT Exchange Students (RMIT), and Strategic Design Management (SDM 2nd year batch). We asked four student volunteers to step forward and act as coordinators and each of these coordinators was asked to choose one member by turn from each of the disciplines so that each group was composed of students from all disciplines. Each group has 17 members including the coordinator.

The four groups will now sit together and brainstorm to discover what they already know about the subjects of Food and their chosen region with an aim of developing a meaningful structure that could aid their deeper understanding of the subject at hand. Once they have categorized the words into an agreed structure the group would develop a metaphor on which they can locate their structure before making a presentation to the whole class which is scheduled for Wednesday (day 3) at 10.30 am in the Drawing studio on the second floor at NID Paldi.

In the discussions and the lecture that preceded the group formation we were able to discuss the massive changes that have been taking place in our understanding of design, both at NID as well as across the world. I was able to touch upon some of the directions with the use of my prepared models and lectures such as Understanding Design, the IDSA lecture titled “Giving Design Back to Society: Towards a Post-mining Economy” (download here the presentation pdf 812 kb) and my EAD06 lecture titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” (download pdf file of the paper 50kb and presentation 4.1 mb here) which was a description of the DCC course as it is offered to the Foundation programme at NID and its evolution at the Institute over the years. This gave us an opportunity to discuss briefly the role of the Bauhaus and Ulm schools of design in the shaping of modern design as we know it today and how this has been further transformed at NID and through the work of design thinkers across the world. In particular we referred to the contemporary books by Klaus Krippendorff – The Semantic Turn, Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman – The Design Way, and the early work of John Chris Jones in shaping the whole area of design theory in the 60’s and through the mid 80’s as the movement in Design Methods and Design Processes. We used the Wikipedia entries on the subject by a quick web search using Google, very convenient indeed. I hope the students take the keywords discussed in class and connect with the larger history of design through their research on the web in the days ahead.

Reflections on DCC2008: Neeta Khanuja

Image: Reflecting on the assignments and lectures during the DCC course Neeta Khanuja has proposed this model of her understanding of the Design Process. Her description of the diagram is quoted below from her email message sent last night.

Exploring and being present to Reality:
Designing is something that cannot be done in isolation. As said by Ranjan in one of his lectures: Difference between a designer and an artist is that an artist works in isolation and comes up with a creation that is an expression of his inner self but a designer is the one who explores the real world and with his creative aspect comes up with an output that works as a solution to the real world problem. So exploring the real facts and knowing the present scenario initiates a designing process and is crucial in itself. This exploration can be done by observing and experiencing the real world. Talking in context of our DCC assignment that was food and inflation in Punjab, brainstorming, interacting with real world and getting insights made us present to the current scenario in Punjab.

Identifying problems and visualizing futristic possibilities:
On being present to the real scenario next step a designer is supposed to take is to figure out the reason for his research. This reason may be a problem that he tends to solve or it may be an urge to create something which is not there but has a potential to exist and which can have a positive impact on the current scenario. In our assignment in this step we identified current problems and futuristic possiblities related to food in punjab with a vision that 'Current problems and possiblities will lead to future opportunities'.

Following a procedural approach:
There is a specific process that is to be followed when it comes to designing. No solution can be designed out of the blue without the presence of a supporting
process. The process that we followed for our assignment consisted of three steps:
Brainstorming,
Making a structure,
Metaphor representation.
It is not a matter of concern that how many times a process is repeated but the point that matters is that the process is whole and complete within itself so every time it is done all the three steps should be followed.

Finding solution and visualizing opportunities for figured possibilities:
This is the step when creative aspect works at an optimum level. The output of this step is in the form of Design Opportunities. Design Opportunities can be looked upon
as fruit of the whole process. In context of our DCC assignment this step in itself consisted of two steps. First is figuring out design opportunities in a group. This will be the sum of all the ideas of group members. Second step consists of taking a design opportunity that inspires us as an individual, exploring all its aspects and coming up with a detailed scenario.

Giving a visual representation to the reached output :
As said by Ranjan: Visual Representation of one's concept is the skill that a designer should always possess. In our assignment we will end up in visually representing the design opportunity we picked up in a way that the concept gets conveyed to others with all the details and insights that we have for it.

With Regards,

Neeta Khanuja
NMD 2008-09

Decoding DCC

Image: Preliminary Presentation in NID Gandhinagar Foyer. Panoramic pics by Ayan Ghosh

I am attending Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) a second time after 2004, when I joined the National Institute of Design. In 2004 I had a different maturity level and undertook the course from a student perspective, but now I see DCC from a larger holistic context, the reason why I am attending DCC 2008. On the first day (July 14th) Ranjan introduced the course to the five batches of new students of Lifestyle Accessory Design, Apparel Design and Merchandising, New Media, Toy and Game Design and Strategic Design Management and clarified their doubts on the objective, and content of the course.

On the first day among many issues that Ranjan touched upon while introducing DCC, one was regarding scratching the surface of information around us to understand and investigate an agenda from a holistic point of view, rather than forming opinions based on superficial data which we "believe" is true. I would like to comment on this aspect and elaborate it further. The view points are entirely my own understanding and is open to criticism and debate.

We take information for granted, which is acquired through a vertical thinking system of learning, received, or I would say imitated from school, family and culture, which is based on previously transferred knowledge gained through a system of error identification and elimination process, thereby aimed at the most convenient mode of survival.

Much of the information we know around us is a concocter of myths and stereotypes. On one hand stereotypes are important because they allow us to make quick decisions, and no matter how much we try to avoid them, they are unavoidable aspects of the cultural coding system, especially in India, which being a high context culture, much of information is implicitly recorded and understood.

For example our names carry so much information about us, which may not be true at an individual level, but that will be immediately used by the society around us to compartmentalize us and put us in some kind of established memory pattern, so that we are easier to recall later.

For example, if I say my name is Ayan Ghosh, it immediately establishes my ethnic identity of being a Bengali, and a Hindu one. This has been built up historically by other people whose surname were also Ghosh, like Aurobindo and Amitava, and who were all ethnically Bengali, and religiously Hindu. Being a Bengali will next stereotype me as being from Bengal, or more narrowed down, from Calcutta. Being from Calcutta will lead to a next level of stereotyping with historical, political and cultural associations with Calcutta, like communism, fish cuisine, and football. This process keeps continuing.

However, when stereotypes are assessed individually, it is easy to see that in most cases they are nothing more than myths. I might be from Gujarat, a socialist, a vegetarian and a chess player and still be a Bengali, but this idiosyncrasy will stay only with me. This is mainly because we form stereotypes based on our direct personal experience with only a very small fraction of the larger entity. We do not form a stereotype of a community after interacting with thousands of people from that community.

Even if we don’t want, our brain will start grouping patterns, and it is very difficult to change each persons’ personal stereotypes no matter how much of that might be a myth in reality. This happens mainly because change is seen as a threat to survival, and the risk involved in diverting from an established survival pattern. The information we carry in many cases needs referencing and collaboration to validate its authenticity, because in most cases we do not personally experience them. For example I didn’t see India getting independence on 15th August 1947, but I believe in it through a system of historical validation by people who personally experienced it, which doesn’t make the incident a myth, but a real event of consequence.

The roots of these myths are formed through information around us. Information is experienced through all our five senses, which maintains our consciousness, and thereby confirms our existence. They are therefore crucial in building an absolute sense of reality around us. Everything around us is information, and the brain through a process of systematic and complex codification understands this information.

Every code has an encoding and decoding system, which we have learnt through a stimulus-response process of imitation, repetition and error. This selection and rejection process leads each individual being subject to a different set of individual codes, and this results in all of us developing our own unique belief systems.

A belief system is what balances the meanings and proportions of rationality, humanism, ethics, morals, aesthetics and other abstract values within us. They are so rigid that challenging them proves severely detrimental to our emotional sanity and cognition stability. That does not mean that they shouldn’t be challenged, provided there is absolute conviction in the purpose for the change. Changing belief systems reshapes our entire perception of reality. However reality itself is immensely ambiguous, which is formed through our individual and communal understanding and pursuit of an absolute truth.

Image: Preliminary Presentation in the NID Gandhinagar Foyer

For example Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system was the established truth, which was perceived as real, and therefore the prevalent belief system for thousands of years till the arrival of the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in the 16th century. Copernicus's new and blasphemous heliocentric theory was published in the book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) during the year of his death (1543), though he had arrived at his theory several decades earlier. It redefined the notion of reality altogether and today, after 450 years it is an established truth. In Copernicus’s case, and later Galileo’s, they faced persecution, which was a result of severe cognition dissonance faced in accepting a new theory by the church and the junta. However, we saw how truth was determined not by an absolute value but entirely by the belief systems of the majority of the population, which is not constant, and subject to changes and challenges. The same challenge to established truth values took place when Charles Darwin published his seminal book, the Origin of Species in 1859, denouncing biblical creationism and proclaiming evolution through a process of natural selection.

Similarly, in approaching a design problem we must break, or at least suspend those prevalent belief systems within us. While countering design problems, we tend to carry a baggage of stereotypes, caricatures, prejudices and myths, which leads to a pre-conceived direction of thinking, which if followed might lead to disasters in the long run.

This reminds me of Sherlock Holmes explaining Watson the process of detection while solving a crime case. Holmes says he looks for clues first, not a suspect. He then observes, analyses, introspects and articulates on the findings to narrow down on the possible scenarios and finally identify the most likely suspect, which is reached through a process of elimination of the least likely scenarios. He compares this process with how Scotland Yard goes about by identifying a likely suspect first and then looking for clues, which will implicate the unfortunate suspect to the crime, which in many cases leads to the real culprit being overlooked.

Therefore it is important that we approach design thinking through a process of analyzing, reasoning, observation, introspection and articulation and remain as objective as possible in our approach. This also means that we need to suspend our system of vertical thinking as well, to allow us to laterally spread our thought processes through visualization and imagination.

For me, standing on a visually flat world and arguing it is round, like what Galileo did, is nothing but a brilliant example of the lateral thought processes. He did it, because he had the imagination to visualize the world from space, much before Yuri Gagarin went up in 1961. However, by suspending the vertical system I do not mean ignoring it completely. Off course, Galileo had the rational conviction to back his idea.

The vertical thinking pattern is necessary to generate quick information based on previous knowledge, but to find new insights we should also look laterally, and seek solutions not only through arguments but also through an alternative way of looking at things, and most crucially, through imagination, which should be the strongest skill set of any designer. Only through such a system would be able to translate each problem into opportunity areas. Gagarin witnessed one thing, which Galileo didn’t imagine, which was expressed in the following quote:

“The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.”

I guess at a macro level design is ultimately aimed at creating, sustaining or increasing convenience and efficiency. Not necessarily only in humans, but also in the animal kingdom and environmentally. As a result, each design intervention, which we feel is making a major difference in the convenience levels of the end users, is implicitly appreciated as a successful model. Contradicting this assumption, historically there are myriad instances where convenience in one area has led to severe inconveniences in other areas, maybe not always in the short run, but in the long run. This happened because convenience or efficiency is not a constant universal truth but is again, what the majority believes in. If the context changes, so might be the convenience of the majority.

Image: Presentation by Punjab Group

For example, the invention of the automobile and indeed one of the most significant inventions ever, the internal combustion engine in 1859 by Etienne Lenoir. It leapfrogged an era of alternative energy replacing animal, steam, wind and water energy sources with fuel energy. Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Henry Ford did enormous service to humanity by immediately identifying this potentiality and implementing them at a global level through mass production of automobiles and motorcycles, and perfecting the assembly lines, thereby raising new benchmarks of speed and quality.

However, a hundred years later, it is the pollution which has been created by the enormous levels of carbon dioxide emissions that has been produced in this meantime by automobiles, which is now leading to serious global warming. Within just fifty years of its invention, in 1951 Elma Wischmeir became the millionth American to die on the highway. Nowadays millions of people (between 23 to 34) are victims of road accidents caused by automobiles around the world each year. Huge amounts of metal have mined out of the earth to meet the ever-increasing supply chains. Was all this taken into consideration at the time of the discovery of the automobile, or were this seen as minor inconveniences in the attainment of the larger goal of mobility?

Image: Presentation by Kerala Group

There are many more such instances, which makes me skeptical of the real value created out of new opportunities. I feel it is very contextual and extremely relative, depending on whether we have the foresight to fully understand the consequences of its implication. I might be solving some problem in the short run, but in the long term it might have a butterfly effect which might be cataclysmic. In the case of the car, it has solved one convenience: mobility. Instead it has created havoc in multiple domains like safety, environment and resources. So where does the benefit of its invention fit in? I personally feel that each solution itself is not an end to the process but rather produces a new process itself. It is not a line but a circle, with the problem and the solution running around each other rather than being at the two ends. I feel a design solution creates a new problem or multiples of them.

Going further back, Johannes Guttenberg made the first information revolution by inventing the printing press in 1454, which created a huge global requirement for paper. Paper still forms one of the most heavily manufactured items of daily consumption worldwide, and also one of the most wasted. Although it increased literacy, record keeping and communication, it also resulted in the clearing of huge tracts of forests to supply pulp. Although it is biodegradable and recyclable, still it has created severe pressure on the tropical rainforests around the globe, endangering several species in the process.

Image: Presentation by Northeast Group

Similarly the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel in 1867 for the purpose of mining and blasting for road construction has become one of the great killers over the last century and a half. The cell-phone might have revolutionized telecommunications but it has also led to subsidiary rise in health risks, privacy, crime and terrorism. Computers might have revolutionized information accessibility and communication, but it has allowed the flourishing of pornography, cyber crime, hacking, internet fraud, and severe psychological, ergonomic and cognitive stresses.

Coming back to the comparison between the vertical and lateral thinking formats, for example if we reach a wall, following Aristotle’s philosophy of reductio ad absurdum, we can either break it down brick by brick to move ahead. Or according to Edward de Bono, we can dig below the wall to come out on the other side, or we can get a ladder to climb over it, or keep following the wall till we reach a gate. This ability to generate alternatives to address a problem is the most crucial aspect of a creative design professional and needs to be sharpened as a skill by regular practice.

Image: Presentation by Gujarat group

I personally feel that is what DCC initiates students into. Breaking of existing stereotypes and looking into newer insights. Learning how to value even the most exceptional cases which we might otherwise overlook in catering to the majority. In case of existing stereotypes, the onus would be understanding the reasons for its existence, and to what extent they are valid. It is a process of deconstruction, reconstruction and reorganization of our established neural networks and experiencing the difference it makes to our thinking.

The subject of food as a primary area of focus I feel is a very apt one, provided the global shortages being faced of late. Roti (bread) constitutes a basic survival icon along with kapda (cloth) and makaan (shelter), and it is so omnipresent that we generally do not think much about its massive implications in almost every other aspect of our existence. This exercise will give an insight into the various cultural associations involved with the eating habits of a place and the dynamic forces that affect them at the marco, meso, micro and maybe also the meta levels.

More posts to follow,

Ayan Ghosh

P.S: I also would like to refer to Ranjan mentioning about the role of images in the design process, which he confessed, he had reservations on its impact. As an aspiring photographer, I myself have internally and externally debated the purpose and ethics played by images at a level of addressing and solving problems. Their role seems passive since it lacks physical dynamism, but that tension is triggered by the psychological, emotional and compositional quotient the image generates, making it indeed one of the most powerful metaphors of change.

DCC2008 Regions and Teams: Brainstorming and Structure

Image: Four teams of students, Punjab (top left), Kerala (top right), Northeast (bottom right) and Gujarat (bottom left). The names of each of the team members are listed below.

Four teams were formed to explore the theme of Food, Inflation and the Indian Economy from the perspective of what the team members already knew from their life experience. This was carried out through a couple of rounds of brainstorming that was followed by categorization and a process of finding an agreed structure that had a hierarchy of concepts that are arranged in a meaniungful manner. This structure is then reinterpreted in the form of a visual model that could be shared with the class as a whole and the Gandhinagar Atrium was chosen as the venue for the presentation and each team was assigned one wall space on the four sides of the Atrium.

The groups presented their findings by turn, Punjab, Kerala, Gujarat and then the Northeast. The class slowly warmed up to the mode of discussion since in the beginning they were not yet quite used to open discussion and debate in a constructive manner. However as the day moved on they became more vocal , asked questions and then started making comments and sharing insights and experiencing the peer review process that is so important to design understanding. Prof Klaus Krippendorff has often repeated his conviction on many online design discussions such as the dialogue of the PhD-Design list, that design is always mediated in language and as designers we will need to understand this dimension of the design discourse if we are to use the process effectively. In his book the Semantic Turn, he has developed this idea into a well structured theory of design that is still not understood by the design community at large.

KERALA

Sanjay Kumar (Coordinator), Abhishek Dwivedi, Kanika Malhotra, Gauri Kathju, Deepak Nanaware, Ruchika Sarda, Kirti Anand, Shambhavi Gupta, Shambhavi Gupta, Sharanya Rukmangadhan, Charuta Bhatt, Kabeer, Vidula Aher, Ritu Ganguli, Austin Davis, Pritesh Dhawle, Purvee Jain.

PUNJAB

Darshana Tatibandwale (Coordinator), Salil Bhargava, Jyoti Rani Rajput, Shuchi, Ramshi P Hamza, Rohini Shitole, Shubhi Shrivatsava, Neeta Khanuja, Swati Agarwal, Raghavendra Singh, Ankita Patel, Ishita Singh, Shakuntala Marndi, Sumeeta Chanda, Ashish Kumar, Kanika Bhadwaj.

NORTH EAST

Sanmitra Chitte (Coordinator), Prasurjya Phukan, Ananya Chatterje, Gavin Francis Remedios, Niharika Sethi, Amanjot Kaur Sandhu, Neety Rai, Shailaja Pahuja, Asif Kureshi, Sanjeev Gupta, Gauri Pandey, Janki Mallick, Nalini Bhutia, Swati Bhartia, Vikas Gupta, Venus Mehandiratta.

GUJARAT

Archana A (Coordinator), Priyadarshini Mohapatra, Vipin Singh, Xavier Dayanandh, Abhishek Maithul, Pranav Gupta, Ritika Mathur, Sagar Raut, Midhun Subhash, Chetan Sharma, Awantika Kumar, Fatima Jaliwala, Pranita Mujgelwar, Linda Lee, Pranjal Rai, Prarthana Ahuja.

Focus Groups for Food: DCC2008 Teams Assigned

Image: four volunteer coordinators and team leaders in conversation with the class teachers before the team selection process in class at NID Gandhinagar auditorium.

Four teams have been formed with the four volunteer coordinators selecting their teams from all five disciplines participating in the DCC2008 PG course at Gandhinagar this semester. The areas of focus are Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat. Each of the teams have started the first assignment of discovering what they already know about the chosen areas of focus as well as the theme of Food, Inflation and the Indian Economy which is their meta focus. The teams have started the process of iterative brainstorming and discovering an acceptable structure of the field of focus and from this structure they would be able to share with the rest of the class their collective understanding of the chosen subject and the given context, just as they would have to do with any new design assignment dealing with the discovery of future solutions to several pressing problems at hand.

Image: Kerala, Punjab, Northeast and Gujarat team members in their respective studios working of the first stage of the assignment through brainstorming in a group.

The brainstorming task would be followed by catgorisation and group would then looking for a suitable structure that could bring meaning to the group as a whole, a negotiated and agreed structure for the design domain at hand. This would then be worked upon to give it a visible face in the form of a metaphor that could be memorable and could capture the sensitive aspects of the subject as well as include the framework of the discovered structure that has been developed by the group. This model would have areas of uncertainty and areas of ignorance, which the group would address at a later stage. However in this phase the emphasis is in discovering what the group as a team knows about the subject at hand and about the context in which these would need to be placed. The presentation of the groups findings are svcheduled for tomorrow morning and I do look forward to learning a thing or two about food in these exciting regions as well as about the potential approaches that could be used to address some of the looming threats and opportunities that this sector has to offer to the design community to work with.

DCC2008 PG at NID Gandhinagar: Theme FOOD

Image: Day one at Gandhinagar for students for five PG disciplines of LAD, ADM, Toy, SDM and New Media. Class in progress in the old auditorium.

Over the past few weeks Rashmi and I discussed the theme for the DCC2008 PG class and we decided that Food would be an appropriate one for this year across all four modules to be conducted at Gandhinagar, Paldi and Bangalore campuses. Last Saturday we met again with Harini and developed the set of assignments and a tentative schedule for all the assignments to be handled by the groups as well as individually. The first assignment this year would be the one dealing with what we already know about a given subject to be discovered through a deeply involved process of brainstorming followed by finding a suitable structure through a negotiated round of debates and discussions on the discovered concepts and the making of a meaningful structure. This agreed structure would be further visualized in the form of a expressive model in the form of a metaphor that could be used to share the groups understanding with the rest of the class and the teachers. This presentation is scheduled on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 in the presentation space at Gandhinagar.

Image: Theme structure for Food and the rich texture of street food vendors in Bangalore City as captured by Rajesh Dangi on his blog Bangalore Daily Photo.

The preparation of the individual “Me Boards” would be done by each student in the evenings when the group is not in session with each of them taking time off to take a deep look at themselves with a particular emphasis on their belief systems and their known taboos. Based on this introspection they would create avisual representation of themselves using a composite image and word map that can capture the findings in a manner that could be shared with the class. This image would be then resolved into a high resolution jpeg image file either by scanning of an original artwork or by the conversion of the digital composite file that has been created in any software of their choice. This jpeg image will be deposited and submitted in a shared folder called DCC2008 on the Gandhinagar UNSECURE server for review in the class on 17 July 2008 when we meet again for the second lecture on the role and processes of information gathering in the design process.
The outline of our intentions in choosing this particular theme for this series of courses are stated on the two blog posts on Design for India. These can be accessed from these links below:
DCC2008 Theme Food: Design with participation and discourse
Food and AnthroDesign: Approaches and Attitudes for India

Design Opportunity Mapping: Coastal Maharashtra India

Image: Terrain model to capture and present Design Opportunity Mapping for effective water conservation and management in Coastal Maharashtra, India by the DCC team.

The Coastal Maharashtra team used a terrain model to locate all the design opportunities that they had arrived at as a group using the small A5 size format that was provided to them. Each member of the team presented their ideas to the class and this was preceded by an overview of their categorisation of these opportunities. Then teachers too gave their comments and the critique from the class suggested ways forward from here.

This method of working has been found effective in getting a deeper understanding of the macro and micro issues and opportunities for design as part of this course at NID. Each group spends time brainstorming, researching and exploring collectively as well as individually before the findings that may be intermediate in nature to the rest of the class. Each group shows interesting insights that are discivered along the journey and these form a cumulative learning for the whole class since all five groups look at diffetent regions or areas of focus within one macro problem area at a time.

Work in Progress: Rural India Models scheduled for Sunday

Images: Self reflection images on the class softboard that have been up for review and discussion as the class goes forward.
The first assignment that had most of the students articulating their life experiences and self reflection as a composite image was very exciting and provided a rich tapestry of image styles and disclosure levels all embedded in the A3 size paper images that have been on the softboard for the past three days now. There has been much discussion about each image in small groups of interested students and we will have a group presentation in class using projected digital images so that a large group can appreciate the story that would be shared by several of the students when we assemble again as a group later next month.

The students who braved and toiled to work on a holiday are here to share their unfinished models of their respective regional village economy models. Some I am told missed the photo session since they had crashed out having worked at night or that they had taken flight to meet their parents in the age of cheap air travel which brings Pune and Delhi within easy reach for some of them.

The final presentations for this assignment are scheduled on Sunday (tomorrow) at 10.30 am and we have proposed to have ice cream for all participants to celebrate the extended cold wave in Ahmedabad as well as the end of the first week of this module of the DCC class for the Foundation students. Those missing the presentation will also miss the ice cream and the great learning experience that the show and tell sessions provide. All students will now spend one week doing SLA classes (Science & Liberal Arts) and then another two weeks in the chosen village as part of the Environmental preception class. We hope that they will be able to test their groups models with the reality check that the field visits will afford them and that they will use this opportunity to speak to the "experts", people who live and work in the rural areas in the numerous occupations that they will see and interact with during their stay in the village in Gujarat. Although each group is dealing with a different part of the country, they will be able to get a fiirst hand feel of the issues and concerns of rural India and use these insights in their work and learning at NID in their move to becoming designers who are sensitised to the needs and concerns of a large part of India.

The five groups and those who were present in the class today were captured on camera and their semi-finished work is shown below with a brief caption to identify the region that the respective group had brainstormed and categorised all based on their own life experience that was available to the collective as a starting point for their journey during this course.

Image: Model and metaphor of Rural Desert Rajasthan

Image: Kerala Rainforest as a location for rural culture

Image: Coastal Maharashtra and its dominent rural ecology

Image: Foot Hills of the Himalayas as a reference for rural design opportuinities

Image: Notheastern Hill Region as a base for design action in India.

Design Opportunities in Rural India: DCC2008 for Foundation students at NID

DCC2008 for Foundation students at NID began this week and we have chosen to look at trades and occupations that can add value and create wealth in rural India through design in the age of the creative economy.

Image: Exploring and reflection of the self and the rich picture models produced by the students.
The time is here once again to start the Design Concepts and Concerns course for the batch of students in the Foundation Programme at NID. This year we have 75 students in the class and we have decided to look at trades and occupations that could be enhanced and value added by the use of design. Design can be applied to the creation of new products and services and it can be used to improve the efficiency and comfort levels of the people involved in the trades itself and also to the services offered by each of these. With the arrival of the creative economy we are sure that many of our traditional trades will reinvent themselves with the use of design and offer high value to both the practitioner as well as their clients. Some of these ideas are discussed in more detail on my blog called "Design for India".

Image: DCC Blackboard with the discussion on the area of models and their role in design research and action.
This time our course has been truncated to one week in the first phase and to three and a half weeks in the second phase with a gap of three weeks when the students will do the SLA course in one week and have two weeks in the field for their Environmental Perception course. We have therefore modified our course offering and packed two assignments in the first week, one dealing with exploring and expressing the self through a process of introspection, reflection and expression in the form of a composite image which can be used to share their own story as a rich picture model. This is the first of the many models that the students would build during this course. Most students did not know what we meant by the word “Model” in the context of design exploration and this gave the teachers an opportunity to explore the concept and all its dimensions in a lecture discussion session in the class yesterday after a brief introduction to the various dimensions of design as we know it today. The DCC Blackboard seen in the picture will show the gist of the discussions in class and the words were contributed by the students as the discussions progressed, they quickly grasped the meaning of the term and the use of models in the design of new and innovative offerings.

Image: Rich picture representations of their self image on display in the class softboards.
The students made rich pictures of their self-reflection and expression assignment. These are displayed in the class and each student was asked to share their story with three other students over the next three days. Based on this sharing they would be able to develop a text that each would send to one close relative (an uncle, aunt or even parent or friend) as well as to the teachers of the course and to some of their classmates and all of these would be documented with the digital image of their picture and be made available to all the students in the class. We hope that by doing this they would be able to appreciate the role that each one of us plays in shaping the design directions by the value systems that we hold dear and how these would shape the decisions that we made on behalf of others in our design journey. The design journey is one of exploration and research that leads to the gathering of numerous insights that are based on these current and past explorations and insights. Insights get accumulated over the journey and these provide a certain degree of conviction based on which our design decisions are invariably taken. These are not just based on facts but also on feelings and convictions that would be influenced by the philosophy and ideology held by the designer. The paper and the model on the Design Journey that I had written earlier this year was circulated to all our students and we will be discussing this paper in class as we go forward with the learning in this course.

Image: Students of the DCC2008 class attending the lecture discussion session on day two.
The second assignment is based on what the students already know in their conscious and sub-conscious mind about a given topic. This year we have decided to make the first week a sort of preparation for the field work that would be undertaken as part of the environmental perception course when all the students will be visiting a village near Ahmedabad and using this visit to sensitise themselves to design opportunities in the rural sector as well as give them a first hand exposure to the India reality on the ground. In this assignment they are divided into groups of fifteen students and each group has been given the task of exploring amongst themselves their understanding of an Indian village and its challenges and opportunities based on what they already know deep in their collective minds. The groups have been assigned the following five regional situations and the context that is established by the very incomplete description of the village type and location in the broadly defined regions mentioned below.

Coastal Maharashtra
Himalayan Foothills
Kerala Rainforest
Northeastern Hills
Desert Rajasthan

Image: Brainstorming session in progress
Students are expected to brainstorm and identify all the attributes of the village type in question and try and capture in as rich a picture as possible without necessarily doing any external research from books or interviews with experts which is reserved for another stage in the course. Based on their brainstorming and the key-words that the group identifies they are expected to sort and categorise these into an agreeable structure that would be meaningful to the group in the form of key-words and hierarchies that make sense. The structure needs to be as complete as possible and the areas of ignorance too may be identified at this stage. The students would then develop a metaphor that could be used to express the structure in a memorable format and that which has a contextual relevance to the team as well as one that would make sense to most viewers as well. They are then required to make a presentation and tell about their journey as well as their findings to the rest of the class in a well prepared presentation and show and tell session that would be done in the class on the scheduled time. This presentation is now planned on Saturday morning at 10.00 am in the classroom at NID. The sequence of presentations would be decided by the teachers. Besides these inputs in class as well as the papers that were distributed we have set up a server based resource on the NID server for digital resources that are available on the net. Links to world thinkers and experts in fields that impinge on the subject at hand are made available through this channel. For instance we have links to hazel Henderson’s website and to her papers on development economics which the teachers feel are very relevant to the task at hand. Similarly, the links to DOTT07, the Design Council UK, Kaos Pilot, NextD and PhD-Design list are some popular design and inspirational resources that are shared with the students in the class. We will add resources as we proceed with the course and students too would be contributing new links and resources as we go forward with the course.

Image: Student reflection about themselves shared on the softboard as part of assignment one, Self Image.