Scenario Visualisation: Indian Village as a visual panorama in DCC2009

Scenario images as a visual recall and reflection on a real experience.

Download the full set of scenario images from the class as an A4 size pdf file 11.9 MB size from this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.pdf) and as a quicktime movie of 24.2 MB size at this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.mov). Village name is used as a prefix followed by the student name and then the image number in both the pdf file as well as the quicktime movie.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: Thumbnail images of six selected student representations from the Bhoira Village group.

Each student is named in the caption and the prefix B stands for Bhoira followed by the student name and the image number. In the images that follow G stands for Gundla village and H for Hingolgadh village respectively.

Image 02: Another six images from the Bhoira group.

Image 03: Thumbnails from the Gundala village.

Image 04: Further six scenarios from the Gundala village.

Image 05: Six scenarios from the Hingolgadh village.

Image: 06: Next batch of six scenarios from Hingolgadh.

Download the full set of scenario images from the class as an A4 size pdf file 11.9 MB size from this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.pdf) and as a quicktime movie of 24.2 MB size at this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.mov). Village name is used as a prefix followed by the student name and then the image number in both the pdf file as well as the quicktime movie.
B – Bhoira village
G – Gundala village
H – Hingolgadh village
N – Ahmedabad city based villages (for those students who missed the village experience)

M P Ranjan

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

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.

Water Harvesting and Village Study Visualisation

Village Study Visualisation Water Harvesting: As a Case Study Presentations in the DCC Class
Image: Sumiran presenting his Village Study Maps and Models to the DCC class today.

The DCC2008 class was given a treat today with two very inspiring presentations from two NID graduates, Sumiran, a graduate from the SUID programme in Gandhinagar and Dinesh Sharma, a graduate in Product Design from the NID, Paldi campus. Sumiran shared the work of his team on the manner in which they carried out a village study in a selected location with the intention of visualizing the data in an expressive model such that it could be the foundation for a new web based system that could help understand the resources and aspirations of any village in India. The Data Visualisation team had chosen Sahpur village in Gandhinagar using Google Earth as a reference resource and due to many attributes that this particular village had for carrying out their survey. He shared the strategies that the team had adopted as well as the lessons that had been gleaned as insights from their experience. This reflective presentation was also intended to give the Foundation students a platform for their own reflection on their Environmental Perception experience at Dholka town as they went further with the various assignments during this DCC course. The whole area of design opportunity mapping and then modeling these in the form of an associated set of icons and symbols that were used to capture the insights on a map that had some basis for suggesting a new software proposal that could be applied to many other situations was explained as a case study.

Image: Dinesh Sharma explaining the concepts and business processes developed for the Furaat Rain Water Harvesting system that he designed for an Ahmedabad based company.
Dinesh Sharma on the other hand took the students through a very inspiring case study of the Furaat Water Harvesting system design and the business models that the company had explored to realise their design vision as well as their plans going forward. Dinesh told the group that the promoters of the company had come into this particular activity after the 2002 riots of Ahmedabad had completely destroyed their former business of tube well drilling and the two brothers had to literally build a new business from scratch. It is here that they started looking at water harvesting as a business opportunity as well as an avenue to make sense in society. They had approached Dinesh and his design-consulting firm, Isiliye Design, to help in cost reduction and product detailing to start with. However after he got involved the entire system was built from ground up as a new and innovative offering that addressed all the systems level complexities in a manner that the construction became simple, the costs were reduced at many stages of production, transport and maintenance and the product was made modular and easy to use and manage. Dinesh also spoke about the philosophy and ideology that has driven this project from the very beginning and the practical business aspects that were kept in mind while the projects were being designed and executed in the field. Today over 500 installations later a whole new set of insights have been developed and a lot of conviction about the direction have come about as well.

This presentation also came as a useful peg on which the concept of Design Opportunity could be understood by the students and the DCC model for perception and imagination was shared with the class. The rich Q & A session that followed set the stage for the follow up work that would be done by the groups of students and we look forward to their group presentations in class tomorrow.

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.