Design Week on Bangalore: “Design City” of the Future

Design Week reports on the “Design City” debate in London

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers

Image: Screen shot of the Design Week website reporting the success of the “Design City” Debate in London.

Adam Welch reporting from London has carried a report in the Design Week of 8 January 2009 about the Debate at the Design Museum in London that was held on the 15th December 2008. Adam Welch was amongst the audience that polled at the end of the four nation debate that involved Sao Paolo, Moscow, Beijing and Bangalore.

Read more about the event and the outcome of the debate on the Design Week website here.

Other links to the event are from previous posts on this blog at the links below:
1. The Design Cities Debate and pdf of presentation

2. Bangalore as Design City of the Future

3. BBC Radio features Bangalore and Beijing

4. Design & Politics: “Jaago Re” Initiative from the Jaanagraha in Bangalore

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers

Design for Politics & Good Governance: Electoral process and Design for India

Use of Design for Good national and Regional Democracy

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

Image 1: Jaagore.com website with an aim to register one billion new voters as part of the Indian democracy.

A new campaign has hit the regular TV programmes calling for an awakening of our youth towards the need to vote and be involved in the political process of the Local region, State and the Nation. The advertisment campaign is quite effective and I was curious to check what it held out as a promise for the youth to participate in individually and as a group. I have had my own problems with the electoral process since in the last General Elections I was unable to vote since my name was messed up in the electoral rolls and my ID card too had defects and worst of all my polling booth just could not be located all through the day in spite of trying several locations in our voting area.

Image 2: Jaago re TV Commercial from the YouTube offer.

I had tried to get my name corrected in a subsequent round of verification and I had visited a couple of schools to get my voter identity card reissued with a hope that the data would come out correctly but this too seems to have failed due to the clumsy manner in which the data collection was organized and I was on the lookout for another opportunity to correct this mistake.

Image 3: Map interface that is offered to locate ones house and from it ones constituency for the registration process.

This gave me the incentive to respond to the advertisment that appreaded on TV calling for new voter registrations which was launched in the public interest by Tata Tea Ltd and an NGO based in Bengaluru called Jaanagraha, and we were directed to a website called Jaagore.com, where the word Jaago means to wake up, a wake up call for all voters. The website proclaims a lofty ambition of registering one billion voters across 35 cities in India and so far at last look they had succeeded in getting all of 220839 people registered when I last checked the site. What I saw was encouraging. Someone had taken the initiative to use the web to reach out and build a system that could be of public good. However as I went further into the site I realized that while it was a technical success at the design level much still needed to be done if they were to reach their stated objective.

Image 4: FAQ about the voting process at the Jaago Re website.

I had talked about Jaanagraha, the Bengaluru based NGO in my London debate about the next Design City and they were here involved in another venture for public good but I missed the use of design that I had advocated which could make this effort both effective as well as be a great experience for the user. What I miss the most is the language tools that could enable non English speaking citizens to participate in this initiative and the site itself could use many layers of design engagement which could make it an offering that could stand the test of variety and complexity which this current offering fails to provide. Not that this cannot be done. The web is very forgiving and flexible and at any stage the organizers can give their audience an improved interface and a much better feel and performance if they used design along the way. However I still give this a thumbs up for the initiative and wish it all the very best in the days ahead and hope that design finds a way into this initiative somewhere along the way of success.

Image 5: Electronic Voting Machine – story of its design in 1988 at NID for the Election Commission of India.

This reminded me of the Electronic Voting Machine that was designed by the National Institute of Design for the National Election Commission way back in 1988. It was the preliminary user testing that helped embed many intangible features into the interface at that time when perhaps for the first time cardboard models of the voting machine were taken into the field by the design team to conduct semiotic tests of issues of usability, particularly with illiterate users, and this is what I believe has made this particular design survive the test of time and it is still functional and effective It took ten long years to introduce it into 10 percent of the elections and another long period to reach the 100 percent mark and be used in all assembly and parliamentary elections across India. Design is a sensitive process and not just an object that emerges at the end of that process nor is it the effect of technology alone since there are so many human and other factors that need to be taken into consideration which makes it a truly wicked problem, but one that can be tamed with imagination and sustained design action.

I do wish that the Jaagore web effort would follow this process through a number of iterations and reach the success that it deserves through the use of sensitive design thought and action in India. The people of India deserve this kind of attention and care. Design is indeed politics. Unlike the politics of opposition and negotiation that is practiced through the party politics of our times it is the the politics of proposition, consensus and conviction building that can be adopted by the leadership of the community. This is the message that I had conveyed in my London presentation at the Design Cities debate where Bengaluru was voted as the most likely candidate for the future title, if we get it right in the days ahead.

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

Design Cities Debate: Bengaluru at the Design Museum, London

Prof. M P Ranjan's papers

Design Cities Debate: Bengaluru at the Design Museum, London

Image: Opening slide of my presentation in London at the Design Museum pitching for Bangalore, nay "Bengaluru" as the emerging design city of the world, provided the design community and the local political leadership get it right in the days ahead.

I was invited by the British Council, London to participate in the Design Cities Debate at the Design Museum in London on 15th December 2008. On my way in here I wrote the following note to the DesignIndia discussion list since there was a raging debate already going on there based on the DNA news report that talked about my intention to speak about Bangalore as the potential Design City from India. The Design & Architecture team at the British Council had proposed this event to the Design Museum and it was through the support from the British Council in London and India that I managed to travel to London to participate in this exciting event.

My presentation slide show titled “Bengaluru: the making of a Design City” can be downloaded as a 2.4 mb PDF file from here


I quote my post on Design India below:

“Dear Uday and Friends…

I am sitting in the lounge at Sahar Airport and have some time now to respond to all the very interesting discussions that came out of this thread on Design Cities and now on the Design Capital.

I agree with you entirely that the concept of a capital based on a designer centric view is indeed an ego trip for the profession which is perhaps the last thing that we need to do in a climate of extreme lack of understanding of the core ideas of design as we know it today.

I was excited when the British Council in London invited me to participate in the Design Cities Debate to take place at the Design Museum in London on 15th December 2008 since this would give us an opportunity to explore the idea of design as it would and perhaps could apply to the shaping of a city of the future here in India. For me this was not a call to see which city had already arrived there or which one had the most designers and design related companies, however these would be an influencing factor, but not always relevent, since sometimes design is better off without designers.

Design for me is a basic human activity as well as a professional activity performed at many levels by a variety of professionals with their vast range of skill sets and an equally wide range of motivations and intentions, some deep and profound and some definitely shallow and short term, all of which may be needed and necessary based on the complexity and the context that is being addressed.

My approach was therefore to look at this as an opportunity to articulate what would be the attributes and necessary ingredients for a city to be called a design city of the future in India and then I looked at which city in my opinion could make the grade in the near future provided the necessary conditions and the public and political support could be mobilised to meet this end. All cities have the possibility to be called a Design City if they are able to meeet the conditions that I hoped to articulate in the process of this debate.

I chose Bangalore because I know it best and have been associated with the city from my childheeod visits in summer and I also see some very exciting things happening there that is far beyond the service provided by the practicing design studios, a sort of taking the design abilities and getting critical things done through the use of design thought and action in the public space. Here, I will comment that Poonam Bir Kasturi's Daily Dump is a shining example of such work that has the possibility not just to transform Bangalore but all cities in the world if the success here gets replicated in each local situation with the necessary local adjustments etc. Similarly the amazing success of Industree in mobilising 15000 women in rural India using local grasses and skills to provide fair employment and a hope for the future is another great example that is still work in progress.

Bangalore has also had two great scale building examples with R+K going to WPP and IDIOM joining Kishore Biyani and these show the way forward to meet the huge responsibility that design and designers have to deliver in India today. The other design entrepreneurs in Bangalore and the design schools for a platform that can catalyse huge change in the public space and for me this is very important. Design for industry has been harped upon for may years and I am not very impressed by these achievements. However social good that can reach the aam aadmi or the man in the street is still a far away dream it seems. The IT sector in Bangalore provides us an opportunity to use web2.0 tools to reach public needs be it services or local assiatance in local governance. Bangalore with the Janagraha and other public domocratic institutions are working together with design to help transform.

Yes, political will must be brought into the equation if massive change is to be achieved in geting the city to feel right for its citizens. The quality that Christopher Alexander has called "The Quality without a name", in his Timeless Way of Building", it is not Fashion but a durable and amazing quality that can be felt but cannot be seen or explained....

This for me comes back to the flower garlands that are made everyday in Bangalore and in many Indian cities, handmade strung flower by flower to make an ephemeral thread of fragrence that is worn on the head or offered in prayer on a daily basis. Nature has provided the abundance of flowers to Bangalore which is indeed the flower power of the world and the Rain Tree with its wide arching branches and its equally complex roots shows systems that we need to learn from so that our democracy can work as a designed offering to transform the city to a Design City of the Future. Bangalore can indeed show the way and I do hope that all our cities and villages will follow suit or take a runaway lead in a win win world of tomorrow.

With warm regrads

M P Ranjan
from the Clipper Lounge at Sahar
14 December 2008 at 11.55 am IST”

UnQuote

I am now in London and getting ready to join the other invitees from Brazil, Russia and China (The BRIC Nations) at an interview with BBC Radio at Bush House London and later in the day at the Design Museum for the Debate in the evening. I look forward to the event. More later.

M P Ranjan
Blogging from London
15 December 2008 at 7.30 am local time

Prof. M P Ranjan's papers