Goa Group: Fish, Boats and Beach as Metaphor

Image: Goa group with their massive model and metaphor representation with the Fisherman in the foreground and the Goa Tourist map and persona in the background.

While the Goa group had very rich palette of images to support their presentation it was their structure that was truly memorable. Using a radial structure they built their structure about Food, Inflation and the Economy with the Meta factors around the circle and the process questions along the radial axis. This gave them the possibility of using the rings to represent the various parts of their structure in a very interesting manner.

Image: Radial model of the rich structure by the Goa group with the Fish, Boats and Beach Metaphor with the Fisherman in the foreground.

The structure model was further strengthened by the use of small iconic images strewn all over the diagram that helped us locate the major ideas visually while getting an overview of the structure. The Move in understanding was huge. While the first presentation that was based on what the group already knew was skewed towards a sort of outsider view of tourist Goa the second round saw the group connecting with all the right kinds of people who can be called experts and this led to a huge shift in understanding.

Image: The Goa team making their impassioned presentation with all members taking the stand and making a pitch with a very high level of motivation.

The presentation which had all the team members participating was truly memorable and of a very high quality. In the teachers experience this is by far the best effort in many years in the PG programme at NID. I would request the students involved to make a textual note of their experience and to share this with all of us so that this experience can produce durable learning that Prof Bruce Archer had told us about when he visited NID in the early 80's to give the Sir Misha Black Award for excellence in Design Education to the then Executive Director of NID, Ashoke Chatterjee. He told us that experience by itself does not produce knowledge, but it is the reflection on experience that does create deep and durable knowledge.

This assignment is therefore a way for groups of individuals to first map out what they already think they know about any chosen subject through brainstorming and categorisation followed by rounds of modelling to find structure and finding a suitable metaphor to map the discovered structure for all to see and understand. The next assignment has the students sharing their understanding with real experts and through research and the process of modelling, finding structure and making a metaphor so that the findings can be shared in a coherent manner. This process also has the effect of clarifying the concepts in ones own mind as well as in locating insights that would drive the process of opportunity mapping and decision making as the design process goes forward.

The other two groups too have completed their second round which will be reported here later in the day. We need to meet today to review all the MeBoards, perhaps in the SDM studio and the final opportunity maps as well as the individual secnarios will be exhibited in the NID Foyer on Tuesday the 12th August 2008 at 5.30 pm IST. We have booked the Foyer space through the NID Academin Administration and we look forward to a live participation from faculty, students and invited guests.

Late Night Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: All four groups ready with their respective models, stucture and metaphor for the theme of Food across four regions of India. Uttarakhand (top right), West Bengal (bottom right), rajasthan (bottom left) and Goa (top right).

Working with very few breaks the teams were all ready for presentation by 2.00 pm in the post lunch session, a little behind schedule, but this is acceptable since it is the first time that these groups have worked together and much learning is still to come. The results are quite encouraging and in the evening we had completed the discussions and presentations of two of these groups, Uttarakhand and Goa. We will report in some detail about these presentations in another post. However for now, the two presentations were actively participatory with a number of students coming forward to make critical and constructive statements, a good sign towards a healthy peer review culture in the days to come.

Design journey-DCC-2008-PG campus

Image: Sonal Chauhan with Prof M P Ranjan in the DCC class at Gandhinagar.

It has been a great experience being part of DCC team.
This was my very first encounter with DCC as well as Professor Ranjan , since I have joined this institute very recently.
In My college days we had no opportunity to learn this course and it was added later for the fortunate ones. Being from the so called “Design Community” I believe that design is what you think you can do to enhance life, product, feelings, experiences, dreams or aspirations .But what leads you to design outcome is your approach towards it.

I must admit DCC-2008 has added a new dimension to my design approach. Though seating on the other side of the students, I was very much a student . But it was a dual learning for me i.e. student as well as faculty trainee( a new breed of Student).It was great to learn ways to achieve design solutions.

KNOWING THE UN-KNOWN – was the first assignment where focus was on the first hand data that one would have stored in mind consciously& unconsciously. Gathering that data (Brainstorming) and using it to make model structure followed by metaphoric representation - would have been quite a task for beginners. It was a process which would lead you more and more towards identifying unique design opportunities as you clear each step (read: assignment here). I have witnessed it that students had to work extremely hard and they were enjoying to dig more and more to gather data/information. Learning was so much from the student presentations that I felt like getting in to one of the group and actually going through the experience of making of that learning.( which, I couldn’t allow myself - with some block)

ME BORD – was more to identify ,analyze and assess our own self. Again knowing the unknown in a way. It was to know one’s love, pride, fear, mental block, inhibitions, strengths, weakness, commitments, dreams, policies, nature and other interests.
What was equally important here was coming with information/ideas and making it in to visual communication .We all know the power of words but this targeting power of images.( Image power) And it is so much true, that some times you cant have enough words to explain or express and same can be done very crisply with just one image.

Having open forum to debate , discuss and express views , at the end of every presentation involves further crisscross of data, brainstorm, a new emerging approach, people’s eye view and a lot more that (may be my dictionary would limit me with).
I relished that part of it more since, I was not part of group presentations and so the rich experience they have had.

Working hard and making people work hard – is something every student must have learned from DCC and so have I( all in good spirit).As working in groups have certain advantages as well as disadvantages. And DCC module surely adds those group dynamics and leader ship qualities to the students.

I wish i was there in each of the class gathering. Myself was quite a silent observer through out the class and would vouch for the constructive feedback that came in with each presentation, from the Professor Ranjan, Harini, Ayan, or student group themselves. I am thankful to all for sharing such rich experiences . My best wishes to Gujarat, Kerala, North East, Punjab groups for their final presentation and ahead.

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.

Late Night Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

Image: Groups at work late into the night sorting and organizing the discovered words in order to find a meaningful structure that could adequately provide a shared view of the understanding developed by the group members during their team brainstorming sessions.

The four groups worked in their respective spaces in the SDM studio, PD studio, Drawing studio and the Old Canteen space to develop a structure through the categorization of all the words that they found in their group sessions. Using cards and post-it stickers the groups argued late into the night till they achieved a form of shared perspective on Food and the specific region that had been assigned to them at random. The students discover the dept of knowledge that each of them harbors in their lifetime of exposure to places, media, events, people and all their daily experiences with food as a very personal and closely held layers of experience of a lifetime.

Image: Groups leading towards the creation of models and structures that could show their shared understanding of the subject at hand, Food in a particular region of India and the various attributes and connections that could be useful going forward in the design journey.

Harini Chandrasekhar who is helping Rashmi and me during this course went around the studios at various times during the night and also helped negotiate late night access to the studios from the main gate security carried her camera to give us these images of work space and action that the teachers would not see when the groups met the next day to make a presentation. We have been using this form of photo documentation for the past ten years ever since we got the first digital camera that changed the equation between cost and volume of pictures. My first SONY, a Cybershot 707, a 1.7 MegaPixel camera was among the first digital cameras at NID in 1998 and in that year it helped me record as many as 50,000 images of students and activities in my class and across NID which I have been sharing with our students as a tool for reflection on the progress in the class. We have used many such cameras in the years past and now NID has hundreds of cameras moving about if we were to include the phone cams that our students carry and capture images with. An image aided pedagogy took firm root as part of the DCC course and at the end of each batch all the students are offered all the images in a reduced resolution so as to fit on a standard CD-ROM. Today we offer all the images in full resolution on DVD-ROM’s as well as place all the images in real time on the NID server called UNSECURE which is accessible to all our students and faculty and these have become collectibles for some interested students and faculty.

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.