Scenario Presentation: Learning about composite images in DCC

Sharing the visualization of ones experience: Preparing for team work through articulation of ones deep insights and experiences.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Scenario presentation to the whole class on Saturday morning in the NID Foyer area. Forty six of the students had completed their work and come forward to share their experiences during their Environmental Perception course at Gundala, Hingolgadh and Bhoira villages in Rajkot District of Gujarat.

Scenario visualization was introduced to the class as a way forward in the early stage of design expression first to articulate an individual designers undestanding of a given situation or experience and in this case all our students had a recent exposure to a village having lived there for a week and interacted with local people in a rich context of sharing and learning. The effort to make a composite image of their week long interaction is an effort to reflect on their experience and to use the skill sets that have been acquired during the foundation programme in order to show their colleagues an exact image of what relationships and priorities each of them had perceived while they carried out their observations in the village.

Image 02: Two examples of scenario visualization from the Gundala group taken at random from the display softboard.

Each scenario was a rich representation of many elements and actions that the students had gleaned from their village exposure, some for the first time in their lives, and learning new things from the environment would be a lifelong task for a designer since in most cases we would be working at the cutting edge of change and in areas that are new and unexplored from which the designers are expected to make sense and bring some clarity to the fuzzy contexts through a variety of processes of sense making. Scenario visualization is one such sensemaking tool that we use as part of our work in the field with rich patterns of people and life actions that are filled with both traditions and change.

Image 03: Students from all three groups volunteered to make presentations and after the first round some were invited by faculty to come forward and share their scenarios with a rich discourse of their insights as well as intangible experiences and feelings. It is this rich discourse that makes design discussions so compelling and insightful to team members. This is also an opportunity for the individual to reflect on ones experience with an external model as an aide memoir and in the process discover deeper patterns that may not have been apparent when the scenario was being created in the first place.

Each student came forward with rich descriptions and some used the image to build another layer of description that added value to the story and showed their insights from the experiences in such a way that shared perspectives could be built with the whole group. What was striking was the different angles from which each student approached the same event or activity and in this discussion they could share their personal perspective with the other colleagues for the first time and the outcome is a multiple view of a situation and not a unitary view from a position of authority of any one individual. This is a useful bit of learning about a typical design situation with multiple approaches and outcomes possible and not just a single outcome as is expected in math and some science results.

Image 04: Hingolgadh village study team in front of their display softboard before commencement of the presentations. Those not present missed the interesting session.

The Hingolgadh team mapped out the contours of their village experience as well as several particular aspects that were highlighted as individual experiences. This is typical of design when many team members are able to provide a variety of insights that contribute to a new synthesis of the whole village while working as a team.

Image 05: Bhoira village study team in front of their display softboard. Those not present missed the discussions in the class.

Bhoira team too mapped out their individual scenarios and many elements and attributes overlapped with those identified by the other teams. However each village had some unique features and these were identified and kept as pointers for future reference as the course went forward with the major assignments that would follow.

Image 06: Gundala village study team was the biggest group but even here some students missed the presentation. Those who missed the event have been asked to submit the work on Monday for a final submission and we hope that they comply with the requirements of this assignment.

When we have a large group looking at one village we can clearly see the variety of perspectives that each of us can bring to a particular situation. This is a very valuable aspect of design learning and action, one which we had seen in the Calico Museum visit when 40 students had created such diverse expressions after one single shared visit to the Museum over one morning in the field in 1999 as shown in the previous post. This Calico Museum visit has been documented and a quicktime movie file with all the individual expressions of scenario as visualized by the group is available for download from this link below:
Calico Museum visit scenarios from DCC1999 class as a downloadable QuickTime movie file of 14.6 mb size.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Scenario Visualisation: Assignment on Composite Images and Mental Maps

Visualising the Rural Experience from the Environmental Perception visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala in one single half-imperial size sheet.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: DCC teachers reviewing the course strategy together and looking at books on sustainability before the class session starts on Monday.

We did not expect to see the full class on Monday since the long weekend was followed by two holidays on Tuesday and Wednesday due to Id and Holi. We therefore decided to have a lecture for those who would be present on Monday and introduce them to the idea of scenario visualization as part of the process of design and we introduced the Systems Model of the NID Way as an approach to design exploration and action. To see the model discussed in class the 4 page 1.1 mb pdf file of “Understanding Design Models” can be downloaded from here along with a paper as a 691 kb pdf file on “Drawing and Visualising Scenarios in Design” also from here. These resources will help in understanding how we use mental images to draw insights and the role that these rich external images help in forming a deep understanding of the context as well as particular items within, all in a organized pattern of relationships that eventually help produce meaning and make sense of the whole system.

Image 02: Environmental Perception course had all the Foundation students travel to the villages for a full week in the field. On their return the course teachers reviewed all the work done in the form of drawings and evaluated the student through a visible process. Each student showed their work in a compact display in the NID foyer over a three day period.

The Environmental Perception course has been part of the NID Foundation since 1976 and it has evolved over the years to help students understand the dynamics of learning from the field a number of complex attributes and relationships in a typical Indian rural setting. We have over the years used this experience to bring the fresh and intense exposure that the students have had into the Design Concepts and Concerns course as a real example to explore and examine in some detail. This scenario visualization assignment was tried out with special field visits to Calico Museum or to the city bazaar based on which the student was required to capture their full experience in a composite image that would show all the significant components of the experience as well as a scenario that was a whole image which could be appreciated at a glance. This year the students are asked to reflect on their field experience to try and fathom the visible as well as the intangible insights about design possibilities and use this reflection to build a scenario of their personal experience that can be shared with the whole class on Saturday morning.

Image 03: The DCC Black Board that shows the concepts that were explored in the class leading up to the setting of the scenario visualization assignment. The context is the DCC course areas of Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijlee and Rozgaar – Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment – all political issues as well as design opportunity areas for all of us.

The larger context of climate change and globalization trends brings us to the theme of this course which is to understand sustainability in the larger context as well as learn to think in terms of sustainable processes and strategies while we design for each of the pressing problems that challenge all of us in India today.

Image 04: An example of the Calico Museum visit scenario visualization (as a 14.6 mb movie) that was prepared in 1999 by Debashree as part of the DCC course. Each student had made their own version of the visit scenario and each was as different as the person who made the drawing. Debashree is seen in her picture wearing a white kurta and a polka-dot pant. This was one of the amazing expressions from that class.

Scenario visualization is a very individual form of expression and any style of drawing can be used and a wide awareness of Indian painting and drawing tradition is a useful asset in carrying out this task successfully. At the end of the Foundation programme at NID all students are usually quite fluent in drawing and visual expression and in this assignment the attempt is to be able to organize ones memories into coherent contexts and to arrange these into a composite image that can be used to tell a rich story about that particular experience. The scenario in its parts ahs rich detail and texture some of it in vivid colour and expression.

Image 05: The students who stayed back at NID sat through the three hour long discussion about scenario visualization and about the nature of design as we know it today. They shared with the teachers and the class many of their insights from the recent visit to the village.

We hope that the other students who have rushed back to meet their families will return refreshed and join the task of preparing the scenario visualization which is required to be done on half-imperial size paper set in the landscape format. Each student can make a rough sketch of the various parts of the scenario and much like a painter who makes quick sketches to shape the contours and details of a new painting, each student may need to explore both style and content on a series of doodles and then prepare the final layout of their scenario visualization on the cartridge paper for presentation to the class. The final presentation will be held in the NID foyer on Saturday 14th March 2009 at 10.00 am and some refreshments will be served. The class will meet for a lecture on scenario visualization on Thursday 12th March 2009 at 9.30 am and the following Friday can be used fully for the exploration and completion of the scenario of the village visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala during the Environmental Preception course last week.


M P Ranjan

Design Opportunities in Water: DCC2008 Assignment

Design Opportunities in Water: Looking at the five Indian village types as part of this course
Image: Furaat Water Harvesting system designed by Dinesh Sharma an NID graduate in Product Design.

Yesterday we talked about water and the need for the design community to look closely at this resource that is becoming increasingly scarce as population increases and we tend to use more technology to extract this very limited resource in an unsustainable manner. The key word is sustainability and with imagination and design creativity we can and must find ways to reduce, recycle, recharge and reform the manner in which we think about and use this precious resource. Anita Roddick in her book “Troubled Water” tells us how critical water is to sustaining human life. She says, I quote, “Water is more fundamental than any other substance on Earth: You can live three weeks without food, but without water you’ll be dead in three days.” UnQuote

We also talked about the conversation that Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist and author had with Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist association to promote peace in their book titled “Planetary Citizenship”. Here the attitudes that were needed to shape values, beliefs and actions for a sustainable world are discussed as an extended dialogue that covers insights form both authors from over 80 years of individual experiences. Their belief that the individual can shape a sustainable world is at the heart of this dialogue. Water is a repeated theme across the book and the need to conserve, share, and protect water as a critical human resource is repeatedly addressed across the many themes that are discussed by these visionaries.

We talked about the work done by Dinesh Sharma with the Furaat Earth Pvt. Ltd. In Ahmedabad over the past three years and used this as a starting point for our collective brainstorming about what the design community could do about this very critical resource, particularly for our village economy. The traditional wisdom of the manner ion which water has been used in the dry regions of Gujarat and Rajasthan have shown many sensitive and durable ways of conserving and using water for the benefit of society. These were also ecologically sensitive and have held the local populations in good stead for the past hundred and even thousands of years. The village pond is a critical method that has been used in all our villages to recharge the ground water as well as to hold surface water for use to feed cattle, for agricultutre as well as for washing and other tasks. The village wells are usually located near the aquifers that are fed by the ponds through a slow filtration process that works unseen below the surface of the pond.

We also spoke about two of our graduates in Baroda (Varodra), Mala and Pradeep Sinha, who have a textile design company which recycles and reprocesses all their water before it is let out into the environment in a high quality discharge. Pradeep had designed India’s first commercially available water filtration system using the Reverse Osmosis process. The e product was launched by the Baroda based company and soon thereafter Symphony took up the marketing of these products on a nation wide franchise agreement.

The task given to our student groups was to brainstorm and research the whole area and come up with design opportunities that can be taken up by seniors across all the disciplines at NID in the Industrial Design, Communication Design and Digital Design disciplines. The presentation is scheduled for the 12th March 2008.

Hazel Henderson’s concepts to guide students in the field

Image: Books by Hazel Henderson on Evolutionary Economics
Yesterday we met as a group to discuss the forthcoming Environmental Perception course that will take all 75 students of the NID Foundation programme to the Dolka Village/Town in Gujarat for a one week stay in the field along with their teachers as part of the course. The Environmental Perception course was evolved and innovated in 1976 by Professor Mohan Bhandari who was the then coordinator of the Foundation Programme at NID. It emerged out of the interest that NID faculty had for providing real life exposure to our design students to both urban and rural India at an early stage and as a context for the design process course that would be the culmination of the Foundation inputs at NID as well as for the project based education that was to follow.

The Foundation Programme in those days extended over one and a half years across three semesters, nay four, since each year had three semesters, two major and one summer semester as well. We had a number of meetings in those days away from NID to discuss the content and impact of the Foundation Programme and I was fortunate to be one of the teachers invited to participate in these meetings since I used to teach the course in Geometry for the foundation in those days, which was then called “Geometrical Construction”. The intentions of the meetings was to explore how the NID student could be sensitized to be a good designer as well as a wholesome human being who had the empathy to deal with the complexities of the Indian reality and we felt that the Foundation Programme would be the right place to start this journey. The other teachers involved in these meetings were Profs. Kumar Vyas, S Balaram, S Sethuraman, Mahendra Patel, Vikas Satwalekar, Helena Pehentupa, J L Naik, S M Shah, P M Choksi, NN Patel, Gitto Patni, Aditi Shirali, and myself. The meetings were facilitated by the Academic Administrator M G D Nair and moderated by the psychologist, late Prof Pullin Garg of the IIMA, Ahmedabad. In later meetings the group included Dhimant Panchal, Suranjana Satwalekar, and Krishna Patel who also started teaching in the Foundation in later years. Mohan Bhandari as coordinator had to balance a tight rope of many views and suggestions from the faculty participants and these meetings were a great source of learning for all the teachers involved.

This year the Environmental Perception course is being anchored by Chakradhar Saswade and Swasti Singh with the field involvement of Dilip Oza and Bhadresh Shukla. As the teachers of the Design Concepts and Concerns course we were requested to include in the first session of the course some elements that could help prepare the students to learn from the field. This brief also extended to the Science and Liberal Arts module that is offered to the students before they depart for their field study experience. This year we shared a paper by Hazel Henderson titled “21st Century Strategies for Sustainability” which I introduced to the students yesterday in class in a brief lecture that was part of the group briefing session about the objectives of the course as well as matters of logistics and behaviour that was expected from the students in the field. Hazel Henderson is a futurist, writer and economist who has written many papers and books which can be broadly called environmental and evolutionary economics and she is the creator of the Calvert-Henderson “Quality of Life Indicators” which looks beyond the scope of conventional economics at social and ethical issues at the heart of such a debate. Born in 1933 in Bristol, England she has been an advocate of evolutionary economics that is modeled on biology and deals with complex interdependencies and resource constraints which would help inform our students and provide them with an adequate framework to look at an Indian village and the social life therein. This is important since most of our students are from urban settings with very few who have life experiences from a village setting.

Hazel Henderson has in her very distinguished career written seven books on her ideas about economics and her papers and books are now available at NID for use by our students and faculty. Her concepts of the Economics of Love that accounts for unpaid work done in any economy by women and children usually are in most cases ignored by the rational economists who look at the GDP kind of metrics which may not give a correct view of village economics and therefore our students were advised to look beyond the obvious and at data below the surface with empathy and a sensitivity that would not upset the village folks in any way. This learning would go a long way to bring both sensitivity as well as the humility to deal with user groups and their particular issues and concerns and help the design student orient themselves to be of service to the complex needs of our rapidly changing society. Hazel Henderson’s papers can be downloaded from her website at the link below. Her Quality of life indicators include: Education, Employment, Energy, Environment, Health, Human Rights, Income, Infrastructure, National Security, Public Safety, Recreation and Shelter. Students could keep these indicators in mind when they draw the village environment and the activities that they see in the field and when they get back to the campus for the documentation and reflection phase they could model all these relationships from their first hand data rather than just from the books and newspaper reports that they would otherwise have had access to.

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.