Northeast Team shows the way: Design Opportunity Maps

Image: Northeast team offered several design opportunities and presented these in a categorised manner.

The format provided for the capture and sharing of the design opportunities were used by all the students groups for the first time and it seems to have worked as planned. This is a new pedagogic tool for providing a common framework for groups to collaborate and make a coherent presentation. The small A5 sized cards on which the students could individually draw their imagination of the particular design opportunity along with a brief description was used well by the Northeast group. They offered all the generated alternatives into a meta structure where the identified design opportunities were divided into five categories: Individual, Family, Community, Village/Town and Eco-System Level.

For the chosen subject of design opportunities with Water, this categorisation worked quite well and the students were able to make a very expressive presentation, working as a group. The other groups too presented their explorations and at the end of the day we had a large number of avenues that could be explored in this specific field across all the design disciplines.


The format that the students used is in an DIN A5 size and the artwork was made on a DIN A4 paper for quick reproduction using the photo-copying process. Having a format I think helped in bringing a sense of order to the presentations and facilitated collaboration at the presentation stage particularly for the difficult task of categorisation of all the concepts. The rest of the presentations will be shared in the next post.

Design Opportunity Mapping: Northeast India

Design Opportunity Mapping: Water in Northeast India and Coastal Maharashtra
Image: Northeast group presenting the lists of design opportunities for water

The NER group made a presentation yesterday and their list was broad but lacked visuals This meant that while the possibilities at a general level were listed they missed the representation of the particular form that they saw for each opportunity in their minds eye. In design this is a very important difference and that is why in design there are many answers and not just one way to do things since each designer and their client situation would have different specific constraints and aspirations while deciding the features and the form in which a specific item in their list would be transformed and delivered in the real world.

Even the larger posters done by the groups showed a symbolic treatment while the need when unfolding a design opportunity would be to get as specific as possible so that particular attributes in the possibilities and the limitations are addressed in each representation. There are therefore many possible interpretations possible for each expression and the designer must then make a judgment call while making the thumbnail expression that would capture the image in the minds eye. In order for the students to experience this process we evolved a format on which they could capture these thumbnail sketches along with a very brief caption and key words working as a team that would cooperate in building a large number of design opportunities and these would be categorized and presented to the class for each region that has been selected, namely, Kerala, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Himalayas and the Northeast, all villages here so that the macro variables are drawn from this regional constraint by each group.

Image: Coastal Maharashtra group mappong design opportunities for water
The format is yet to be tested and we will know later in the day how the students have been able to use the constraints offered by the format and how they were able to interpret that assignment that has been set for each team. After this presentation we will explore the nature of various design disciplines through a field interaction assignment and also the Business model assignment using local street food vendor models as their source of inspiration. The teams would return to the village economy with the insights gained from these two assignments and continue to work in teams with the assignments that follow.

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.