Design Thinking at Ahmedabad University: A new beginning for Indian education

Design Thinking at Ahmedabad University: An approach paper for a proposed course for undergraduate students

Prof M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University

Ahmedabad

August 2013

Why Design Thinking?

We have constantly been amazed at the great creative actions of humanity, which can be seen in their key inventions and major evolutionary steps that shaped human civilisation and these have been initiated by generations of unknown creators over time immemorial. These creators have helped shape our civilisation through their breakthrough contributions by daring to experiment and create in the face of social isolation and ridicule by the prevailing orthodoxy. They contributed by innovating at the edge of society as stated by Alexander Doxiadis when he talked about the blue dots and red dots that represented the typical settlements where the blues were the majority conformists and the reds the crazies who were ostracised and isolated till a paradigm shift in society helped assimilate the thoughtful and insightful contributions from these isolated creators. These contributions included small or major improvements and change in processes, tools, arts, crafts, everyday artefacts, houses and public structures which we have conveniently labelled as inventions and innovations long before we could recognise these contributions as heroic acts of design thought and action.

We now know that these are early design acts that were not properly attributed in our historic references so far. We are now beginning to understand that design thought and action was central to all these breakthrough contributions and that it is a basic human activity and ability at one level that is as old as civilisation itself. The other form is a new and modern profession, and this is created by the professional education of a designer who would be able and sensitised to feel, think, act in an appropriate manner in a rapidly changing material and social world in an industrial age. Today in an era of information access and digital processes has brought on new possibilities for design as well as enormous challenges and responsibilities that require an ethical and feeling attitude alongside a sharp intellect and able set of hands. Understanding design and design thinking today is a major challenge since it has so many forms and those working in a variety of domains exhibit capabilities and competencies drawn from a vast array of traditional disciplines that have been integrated into the skill sets of a particular designer in his or her modern form.

University education has become dominated by vertical specialisations with little connect between the various disciplines and the emphasis has been on development of knowledge resources and capability within each domain of study. However it is increasingly seen that to solve real world problems and emerging opportunities there is a need for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary attitudes and abilities to collaborate and think across various styles of thought and action to ralise innovative possibilities that are around us all the time. It is here that many educators across disciplines are turning to design thinking to bring these new attitudes and capabilities to the various domains of specialisations within an educational and university setting. The core processes and capabilities afforded by design thinking training are listed and stated below.

1. Understanding the Context: Framing Intentions and Goals

Learning to understand the context and the social, cultural, material, economic and political situation that usually leads to trying to get clarity from a very complex set of signals and processes from the real world that help provide the essence of a direction for design thought and action. This kind of learning, like many others, does go through several iterations but at the end of these multiple cycles the level of conviction and sense of purpose is usually very high in the task and the purpose that it represents. This early stage learning is at most times very fuzzy and a great deal of flexibility is called for to be able to cope with the ambiguity that accompanies this kind of design exploration leading to the building of some convictions that are supported by the faith of these experiences. Many a times this conviction can be a source of great frustration since few others have the same insights that the design learner has garnered from the unique situations that has been investigated in some considerable depth. Designers learn that these early stage sense data needs to be trusted and not abandoned too early and this is the foundation of an innovation environment in which they choose to work. Lifetime of experiences are harnessed through the processes of brainstorming and mapping of the context and the various elements that may impact the situation that is being examined with a very open minded attitude that is inclusive in nature rather than by being overly critical. All this exploration is done with words and images and these need to be modeled in a composite structure that captures both the structure as well as the form of the situation under examination and this model is a dynamic one as it develops and responds to new circumstances and information and insights. Insights about the context and the particular situation are the most sought after by-products from these early stages of design exploration.

2. Research, Knowledge and Insights: Plumbing Information Sources and Dimensions

Design learning needs to develop both attitudes as well as ability with tools of information access and processing. The process of design deals with access to information to many classes of information types which includes published and reported facts and speculations and also field based observations and self initiated experiments that are contextually mediated to fill gaps in the current information or for a direct confirmation of some reported fact or speculation which cannot otherwise be verified easily, to list only a small sub-set of the huge variety of information types involved in design investigation. Designers have drawn from all kinds of disciplines, from the humanities, sociology, psychology and language studies as well as from the sciences and technology fields,  various tools and techniques that were previously perfected within these disciplines over the years of specialised investigations and these would be available in published form as textbooks from each field of study. For example, tools and procedures on field-work and observation of people in the particular design situation, are drawn from the standard practices and work ethics and techniques of anthropologists, sociologists a variety of humanities experts and these have been adopted and used in numerous cases of design research that I know of. The field of design research is growing with many of these disciplines recognising new roles for themselves in the whole arena of innovation and design action that is becoming recognised as a valuable area of work globally. Design schools too are beginning to adopt many of these tools and processes as their own and building competence in their use and analysis. The purpose of these design research efforts however tend to be focussed on finding useful insights for the design action and decisions to follow rather than be focussed on finding fundamental truths and new knowledge as a final goal of the particular design research effort.

3. Finding Structure: Mapping of Resources and Opportunities

Design problems are better understood by juxtaposing factual and observational findings with new proposals and imagined possibilities that are visualised at an early stage in a what if mode of thought and action. New scenarios for action come up for active consideration and these also inform the design teams about the possible gaps in their information that need to be filled as they move forward. These conjectural models can be subjected to early analysis using a variety tools and frameworks to conduct such analysis. The hypothesis and insights arrived at in these early explorations drives further design investigation in the form of advanced scenarios of parts or the whole of the design situation or in the form of narratives and stories that cover both the micro and the macro levels of observation and visualisation of the stated and imagined need as well as the consequences and potentials that are being investigated by the designer. This too moves through numerous iterations till a selection is possible of a few major alternate courses of action that can be taken to the next level of investment planning and decision cycles, be it the sharing of these models with stake-holders, conduct of further focussed experiments or the building of expensive prototypes of parts or the whole product or business offering, as the case may be. This also applies to visualisations at many levels of expression from the abstract to the real, such as pre-cognitive diagrams, doodles and fuzzy sketches at one end, that are the preliminary visualisations created in many cases intuitively by the designer for themselves in the search for possible configurations and relationships of the various attributes of the solution to the other extreme involving expensive articulations of scenario in the form of detailed drawings, renderings and models and even real material prototypes in many iterations in a search for new and particular configurations affordances that resolve the many contradictions that exist in all design tasks. We can call this an analytical exploration of the design situation using visual tools and processes that generate external models rather than numerical or verbal expressions, although in some cases even these would be used in conjunction with the visual as well. Many of these models can be shared with large groups of critical participants to find gaps in the offerings and areas of improvement may emerge from the suggestions that are gathered in this process.

4. Communication of Concepts: Negotiating with Stake-holders

Designers need to develop an ability to make their concepts visible at an early stage and to be successful they also need to be able to communicate these effectively to a wide range of stake-holders as well. The ability to work in a team situation with many stake-holders with different areas of expertise is critical and using verbal, textual and visual discourses is an integral part of design thought and action. Design action calls for articulate expression of intermediate findings as well as expressive presentations of findings and results of concept explorations along with justifications of investments that would need to follow to make the concept a reality. Therefore, interactions with numerous stakeholders and in most cases approving authorities with whom the interactions are both critical and necessary for the task to progress to the next logical level of action with funding and other supports, calls for fairly advanced skills of communication and language use along with multi-media presentation skills. The learning involved is in communication, in seeking collaborations and in understanding the responses with empathy to the situation and the needs and feelings of the identified users. For major projects of public utility there is the added complexity of public discourse and politics of governance that would need to be negotiated and navigated with competence if the design teams are to be successful.

5. Ethical Frameworks and Holistic Models: Synthesis of Positions and Informed Decisions

Values and ethical positions are a part of all design choice making and these would come up at numerous stages in the process of design. Learning to accept and process the feedback from stake-holders into contact with constructive actions is a great leveller, and it brings the design thinker into uncommon scenarios on the cusp of great change and this could induce change in the individual themselves, since some of this feedback could be cultural in nature or outside the accepted frame of the designers frame of “personal ethics” – for want of a better term, which may be reflexive and transformative in both directions. The nature of design calls for the practitioner to be widely informed about both technical as well as socio-political matters and be able to use these in the context of the task at hand. There are many instances of the designer embarking on a new path outside the scope of the current task based on the insights and convictions derived from the learning experiences embedded in the design task. Today we are finding numerous examples of great complexity that may contain challenges of trying to bring sustainability and social equity into design tasks that may have in the past been considered a pure technical exercise. Awareness levels are high and public participation in such matters is also approaching high levels compelling designers to adopt methods that could make the design process less intuitive and more accountable and with public visibility at all decision stages, particularly for good governance in public expenditure. Documentation in such situations becomes doubly important.

6. Exploring Alternatives:  Developing Strategies and Details for Parts and Whole.

Learning to design leads to be open to vast range of alternatives and in decision-making choices from out of the numerous alternatives of parts and wholes that are the result of progressive visualisations and experimentations conducted in the progress of the design task. The definition of the task itself is open to review and many a times the investigations and design investments have veered of into an entirely new direction as a result of this kind of review which is quite normal in a design situation that is complex and previously less explored. The ability to develop alternatives calls for flexibility as well as the ability to generate prolific variety of expressions that can shape possible futures through the mobilisation of many types and styles of thinking for exploration and synthesis. Design thinking has many modes of thought from explorative, analytical, synthesis, abductive, categoric as well as reflective thinking styles at various stages as the work progresses.

7. Developing the Self:  Learning New Attitudes, Skills and Concepts

Design students need to be curious people and they should have an urge for constant learning about changes in their environment as well as in society at large. The ability to find what is not known and to quickly learn the principles or alternately to find those who can help them learn is a quality that is valued in a design and education setting. The constant self development that we see in what designers do in their search for new and interesting bits of knowledge that would be of value in the future on some not yet anticipated task usually within the frame of interest paths that each designer traverses over a career of continued learning to cope with the new and the unexpected in their usual area of work and areas that overlap their multiple interest paths. This calls for high degree of self-motivation and a sustained level of interest that can be supported when the task becomes both difficult and in many cases frustrating when no progressis easily visible on the horizon. The attitude towards learning is one of curiosity and with a constant search for excellence and quality in whatever is being addressed.

Design Thinking Course at Ahmedabad University:

A Course Abstract Paper for an elective course created for undergraduate & postgraduate students

Prof M P Ranjan

Independent Academic & Author of Blog – www.DesignForIndia.com

Ahmedabad

Course Title: Introduction to Design Thinking

Sessions: 30 sessions

Pre-Requisites: Offered to all students of Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programme at Ahmedabad University.

Objective: Broad based introduction to the processes and concepts of Design Thinking with a sensitisation to attitudes and action skills required to innovate and deliver new and compelling design concepts. Participants will be introduced to various processes and styles of Design Thinkingusing selected real world settings in the City of Ahmedabad — to explore, understand, structure and build new products, services and systems with the use of design and innovation processes. Help participants appreciate design thought and processes with a familiarity to key design thought leaders in the field through select readings, contemporary debates on issues and perspectives as well as online resources that are relevant and current. The assignments will give students an exposure to the hands-on minds-on perspectives needed for handling complex and wicked problems that are typical of design challenges and these collective experiences as well as reflections on these actions taken together will give them confidence to handle new and unfamiliar situations and use these processes and styles of thinking to create new and compelling offerings using design thinking as a way of living and action.

Methodology and Structure: This 30 session course is divided into 10 modules, each composed of lectures, discussion sessions on the Key Theme of each module and these are followed by structured non-prescriptive assignments for the students to work in teams to explore and discover the boundaries of the chosen task and navigate the complexities of the situation in exploring design opportunities through the set of structured assignments and learning to work in teams at the same time.

Course Content: Introduction to Key Concepts of Design Thinking through lectures, discussions, group assignments and presentations divided into ten major overlapping modules as listed below:

A: Key Concepts of Design Thinking

1. What is Design Thinking?

2. Styles of Design Thinking

3. Goal Seeking & Setting Research

4. Understanding Context

5. Visual Mapping & Resource Mapping

6. Categories and Trends

7. Compositions and Judgements

8. Opportunity Mapping and Scenario Visualisation

9. Communications and Reflection

10. Presentations with Business Models

(See supporting notes attached for a description of the design thinking models and stages as well as styles of thinking)

B: Opportunities for New/ Improved Services and Business offerings through design. Context City of Ahmedabad of 2015 - 2020

These are broad sectors within which there would be numerous specific design opportunities worth doing and these would be explored and developed as a theme each year depending on the context and current interest of the participating students and the imagination that they would unfold.

1. Food preparation and delivery                  9. Urban Farming Trends

2. Healthcare opportunities                          10. Garbage and Urban Hygiene

3. Urban Mobility challenges                        11. Web Enabled Services

4. Entertainment and then City                    12. Library & Knowledge Services

5. Public Spaces Utilisation                          13. Music Events and Competitions

6. Tourism and Heritage offerings              14. Social Networks for City Governance

7. Events and Festivals                                 15. Riverfront Opportunities

8. Education related needs                          16. BRTS support Services

And many more which would be developed as part of the early Goal Setting assignments in the early phase of the course.

Space and Facilities Required: Flexible space planning with appropriate furniture and lighting would be needed to conduct he various parts of this course. Lectures and presentation sessions would be for the whole group and depending on the total number of students the space requirements would need to be made appropriately. During each Module the groups would require access to lecture spaces provide with audio-visual facilities as well as clear wall spaces with white soft boards for display and discussion of posters simultaneously for at least five groups. Each group would be composed of 6 to 10 student participants and the class strength could vary from 30 to 50 participants each year. Each group would need a work space suitable for group processes in design thinking and preferably these tables and chairs should be stackable to clear the space for group presentations that would use the wall space around the design space.

List of key thought leaders and published resources: Design Thinking is a rapidly evolving field and more published resources are being made available each day as the field grows. We will keep a close watch on the evolving literature and suggest appropriate papers, books, web sites and discussion lists that the students can interact with as part of their course at the University. Being an introductory course, the selection will be governed by the material being suitable for entry-level students into the field of design and design thinking. However the University needs to invest in expanding their design related library so that these students can continue to use the resource long after the course in a continued learning setting and it would also encourage other students to think about using design as a key resource for their own projects and initiatives. We anticipate many such innovation initiatives from the student body once the course is set up and finds a place in the mainstream of the University offering.

Evaluation Criteria and Feedback: Students will be evaluated on both participation as well as performance. Participation will be on the basis of attendance and quality of participation in group processes. Results of group assignments will be graded for the group and not for the individual student. However, students not showing interest or effort in group processes would need to be counseled to ensure a level of learning that is wholesome and properly assimilated. The final presentation would be a public event and the concepts developed by the students will get live feedback from teachers, mentors, peers, as well as members of the community with whom they have interacted during the course. Attendance and individual participation tasks will carry a 40 percent weightage while group tasks would carry 60 percent.

Learning Outcomes:  Understanding of Design as an action discipline. Ability to frame complex challenges using design thinking skills and visualization of these for sharing with stakeholders. Familiarity with design concepts and tools with an introduction to key thought leaders. Familiarity with a vocabulary of design and innovation as they would be applied to a wide spectrum of opportunities and complex challenges.

Suggested References

1. John Heskett,Design: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2005

2. Jon Kolko,Exposing The Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods of Synthesis, Oxford University Press, 2011

3. John Thackara,In The Bubble, Designing in a Complex World, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005

4. Harold G Nelson & Eric Stolterman, The Design Way, Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World, MIT Press, 2012

5. Roger Martin,Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School Press, 2009

6. Kees Dorst,Understanding Design, BIS Publishers, 2006

7. Bryan Lawson,What Designers Know, Architectural Press, 2004

6. M P Ranjan,Design Thinking Models: A Primer, The Author, 2013

7. M P Ranjan, Design for India, blog : http://www.designforindia.com , 2007 to 2013

8. M P Ranjan,Academia.edu, Archive of Papers and Books by the author, http://cept.academia.edu/RanjanMP

~

Note for the record:

On 18 August 2013 the Academic Council of Ahmedabad University reviewed the proposal and accorded an in-principle approval to launch the course as an elective offered across several colleges of the University, This is a significant move since in India we have over 500 recognised Universities and the need for embedding design and design thinking into the 230 sectors of our economy is still a long way away, a journey that we started on this blog in 2007 on 14th June with the publication of our Mission Statement for the Design for India initiative.

Prof M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University

Ahmedabad

Download as PDF file here 

Design Concepts and Concerns: The Avalanche Effect from NID

Evolution of DCC course at NID: Reflections in 2012

Prof M P Ranjan

Image01: Models and lectures that were developed over the years for the Design Concepts and Concerns course at NID as they stood in 2005 as they appear in the EAD06 conference presentation at Bremen, Germany.

In 2009, Meena Kadri wrote about the course on her blog, “Random Specific”, and she sent me a link with a question – “Has not the DCC course evolved at NID over the past 40 years or so?” I sent her a brief note and then decided that the question could be answered at some length and perhaps some design historian or research scholar would be sufficiently interested in looking at the evolution of the pedagogy at NID which I do believe has made significant contribution to design education in India as well as in the world, much of which is as yet not appreciated due to a paucity of published references on the processes and personalities involved. Parts of this post appeared previously in July 2009 on my course blog named after the course – Design Concepts and Concerns – and here I am elaborating that post with reflections on what has happened after my retirement from NID and the directions that are being explored today by the institute and its faculty.

Image02: Cover and contents page of the Design Issues journal of Autumn 2005 dealing with Design and education in India.

The course as it stood then is documented at this blog site and through a couple of papers that I had written, first in 2002, specifically for the Design Issues magazine at the invitation of Martha Scotford who acting as a guest editor was compiling a collection of papers about design from India for the Design Issues magazine's volume on India. However, this paper that I wrote and submitted was called the "Avalanche Effect" and as luck would have it was not included in the final edited version, unfortunately. On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, after a long wait to hear from the editors I finally received a message from Martha Scotford about the rejection of my paper and I was at that time teaching at the BCDI in Agartala and I immediately posted the full text of my paper on the PhD-Design list which can be seen at this link here below: Avalanche Effect on the PhD –Design discussion list.

The Design Issues is a very respected peer reviewed journal from the MIT and the reviewers may have thought that the claims made by an unknown professor from India were a very tall order at that time or found some other shortcoming in my paper based on which it was declined. The journal came out with their volume about India and Indian design and this did not include my paper (“Design Issues: History Theory Criticism” volume 21, Number 4, Autumn 2005) The pdf copy of the “Avalanche Effect” paper can be downloaded from here as a 55kb pdf file.

Image03: Select pages from my presentation titled “Creating the Unknowable” showing the series of Assignments that are offered to NID Foundation students as part of their five week course on Design Concepts and Concerns.

However in the same year, in 2005, I wrore another paper about this course and my paper was titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” and this was also about the DCC course and it was accepted for a peer reviewed conference at Bremen Germany, the EAD06 coordinated by Wolfgang Jonas a design thinker at the Bremen University School of Design and I was able to share the DCC pedagogy and the underlying intentions for the first time on a public forum composed of critical design professors. (Download the full presentation from here as a 54MB zip file containing one pdf of the presentation and six linked movies inside one folder) Unfortunately, even here I faced problems of support from my own Institute. My travel costs would not be supported by NID authorities even though I was going to present a major course development done at the school over many years of experimentation and I had to bear the cost of travel myself. This does show how difficult it is to get support for design education in India in all these years when design thinking was being explored and refined through our teaching and design explorations, without much official support from the authorities that be. This lack of official support is captured in the title of my conference paper for the first National Design Summit in India called the CII-NID Design Summit that was held in Bangalore in December 2001. My paper was titled “Cactus Flower blooms in a Desert: Reflections on Design and Innovation in India”. Download that paper and the accompanying visual presentation from here as a 14.5 MB zip file containing three pdf files.

Image04: Thumbnails of OHP sheets used for the DCC course lectures in the late 80’s and early 90’s before the course was changed significantly in 1998.

Yes, to cut a long story short, the course dealing with design theory and design thinking has been evolving at NID for many many years from the original “Design Methods” that was first taught in its imported and refined form by Prof Kumar Vyas from the late 60’s and the early 70's for Product Design and then in the Foundation Programme and he was later assisted by Prof S Balaram and assisted by the young Dhimant Panchal. A variation in its title took place when the teachers of this course at NID started looking at processes within design in the 80's and it was then re-christened and called “Design Process”. A version of the course offered to Product Design students at the AEP Level was called “Product Design Process” and each discipline at NID had their own version of design theory being offered under different titles. In the mid 70's Prof Mohan Bhandari took over the Foundation programme after his stint of study and work experience in Germany with Professor Herbert Lindinger, a former faculty of the HfG Ulm, and he brought in the Environmental focus to the whole Foundation Programme but this course was still called "Design Process" and that was the case when I took over this course after his departure from NID in the late 80's.

Christopher Alexander’s papers and in particular his descriptive pages from his “Notes of the Synthesis of Form” were available at NID as cyclostyled papers, in a number of copies that were freely available on campus, which I had seen and I even had a personal copy way back in 1969 when I joined the Institute as a student in the first Post Graduate Programme in Furniture Design. These may have been here of many years before Prof Vyas’s course offerings and Alexander did visit India in the early 60’s as part of his research efforts for his first book that looked at an Indian Village as a source of inspiration for his theory about human settlements and design. It was only much later that I could understand the significance of Alexanders research since the Indian village held lessons of human evolution in an almost uninterupted manner in the Indo-Gangetic plains, a continuous evolution of over 5000 years that may not be found anywhere else on the planet. The cyclostyled papers could have been an early draft of his book which someone may have collected and shared with all of us in NID, I hope we get to know this background in some detail when the research about NID is conducted in some depth. There is however an official history of NID in the making and the deadline for its release has come and gone but there is still no sign of the book which has been a closely guarded secret even from members of the NID faculty who are not part of the inner circle of researchers on that project. The book - 50 Years of NID History – was "released" at the NID Convocation ceremony in December 2011 by the the then Chairman of the institute's Governiong Council, Salman Haider, as part of the Golden Jubilee launch but I am told that this was a dummy copy and a symbolic launch – very sly and a slight of hand; just to keep up promises made earlier - very disappointing indeed. I hope the book sees the light of day and we get to see it sometime soon.

Image05: Chart showing the evolution of the Design Methods and Design Process course in the 60’s and 70’s leading up to the formation of the Design Concepts and Concerns course in the 90’s.

In the mid 90's we changed the name of the course and called it “Design Concepts and Concerns” to bring focus to the broader issues that underpinned design action and learning. Some of us realised that ethical and value concerns and motivation with personal commitment are just as important as the tools and processes that designers use to address complex issues and derive suitable design offerings that could be the foundation for responsible design. This is a very brief statement on a long and involved process of course evolution at NID and that paper is still to be written. Many teachers worked with me from 1988 onwards. First it was Jatin Bhatt and Sangita Shroff who then went on to join NIFT. We then had Rashmi Korjan for a long time and Suchitra Sheth and Laxmi Murthy for a brief interlude. Since 1998 many teachers audited or assisted in the conduct of the course either partly or with full involvement and these include Alaxender Bosniak who now teaches in Germany, Dimple Soni, Meena Kadri, Bhavin Kotari, Harini Chandrasekhar, Bani Singh who teaches at NIFT Bangalore and many more that I will have to recall a long list of former students and faculty colleagues if the list is to be completed. Others on the faculty included Praveen Nahar, Ramakrishna Rao and Gayatri Menon in later years. In Bangalore, C S Susanth and Jignesh Khakhar, joined the course last year and we also had a senior student helping us in 2008 from the SDM discipline, Anand Saboo and so on. Many other senior students used to come in and hang out while the lectures and presentations were in progress and there was a rich discussion both inside as well as outside the course on the subjects being explored within the course each year since we had big themes and macro-economic concerns that were addressed, debated, brainstormed, modeled and mapped by each batch and each class producing a rich crop of design opportunities that were represented as visual scenarios that stayed in the mind for a very long time as a vision that cannot be shed easily, once it is found. Design thoughts and insights are not easy to forget if they are appropriately visualised.

Image06: Table showing the course structure and contents in 1995 when I had used this image to share the development of the Design Concepts and Concerns course in a presentation to the NID Faculty Forum as part of a course critique at NID in those days.

I purchased a SONY digital camera in 1998, my first really expensive buy, and the first one freely available at the institute and I used it to record all our classes in great detail. I have shared detailed digital pictures of the student assignments done during the course from 1998 onwards and developed the use of digital images as a source of extended memory for the students to revisit their experiences during the course. These images were shared with all students in individual CD-ROMs, one for each student to take away and when the NID server was set up these images were made available to the whole institute without any editing. Besides this sharing of images, there are many xerox documents in the NID Library of selected student notes and project documents from the earlier phase (from 1988 to 1998) that may need to be revisited. In that early phase we did project based assignments that were assigned to individual students and this was after a phase of lectures and group assignments about design concepts and methods and these projects were done by individual students and that called for individual guides which we fondly called the OPD (out patient department) and here we had Pradyumna Vyas, Vinod Parmar, S M Shah, P M Choksi, S Balaram and several others as project guides for the foundation students as part of the Design process course from 1988 to about 1998 when I dropped the individual project since it was becoming a ritual and not really contributing to any form of deep understanding in the student. The teachers who were guiding the students did not really contribute to a better understanding of the design thinking dimensions but were instead, I realised,  focussed on getting the students to deliver great solutions rather than them learning about the nature of design itself as the core activity and the aim of the project. From here on the course became more team oriented rather than individual focused and group processes and group grades became the norm much to the dismay of the Academic Administration, since I refused to give individual grades.

Shown above in Image04 are picture of an OHP sheet that I had used in 1995 to describe the design process and this is available for download as a pdf that gives the shift in content and assignments as it stood in that year which can be downloaded from here – Download OHP Sheets used in 1995 as pdf file - these are based on hand drawn OHP sheets that were used from 1988 onwards. On 15 August 2007 I had made a post on my other blog “Design for India” about this course and we have another description of the course and its intentions and effects at the link below: Design for India – Post on the DCC course.

Image07: Foundation students of the 2009 batch at NID created these models during the DCC course that showed us how India could get new design education strategies that could address the needs and aspirations of the various regions of the country. Six groups developed concepts and of these three are shown above. My last foundation batch at NID....

By 2002 the course was accepted for both the under-graduate foundation programme as a core offering as well as for all Post Graduate courses offered at the Institute. We started offering this course at NID Gandhinagar campus for the new disciplines of New Media, User Interface Design as well as for the Strategic Design Management students there. When the NID Bangalore campus was set up for three new disciplines this course was offered there as well and these are documented at each offering on the DCC Blog for those who may be interested in the details of what were the themes and the work done by the student teams – all documented in some detail there. I offered this course at NID till November 2010 when I retired from being a faculty at the NID. Last year the course was offered to all batches of students at NID in much the same way that it was designed and developed over the years. However this year I am told that the curriculum review process has decided to drop the course and to adopt the older name of design methods so that the teachers at NID could focus on teaching tools and techniques of design research and not get confused by the macro issues that have been the hallmark of this course since it was revised in the late 90's. The argument, I am told, is that foundation students may not be mature enough to address the complexities of the real world at the early stage in their education that and these would be better reserved for a later stage in their education at NID. Is NID education reverting to the design paradigm of the 80's? Only time will tell!!


When the Government of India announced the setting up of four new NID's in different regions of India it set alarm bells ringing amongst a group of NID alumni who expressed deep concern on the social networks and discussion forums in India. Almost organically a group came into existence and it was called the "Vision First" initiative. It so happened that all members of this group were NID alumni and they took up issues with Government and called for a national debate and discourse on whether the same model of the old NID at Paldi would be followed for all these schools or should we have a fresh think about where design is heading and this debate is documented in some detail at the blog set up by the group here –Vision First – a call for new design initiatives for India by a group of very concerned design professionals and academics from India. I do hope that both NID as well as the Government of India will listen to the voices from these design activists who have had varied experiences in design for development right here in India. Design Thinking and its application is indeed gaining greater acceptance in India as well as overseas. Management schools and research agencies are beginning to use design thinking to address complex problems and to search for solutions  to products, services and systems that make up our lives. Governments too are looking towards design and we will need to build capacity to respond to these kinds of opportunities besides the traditional capability of giving aesthetic form to products of industry and to create marketing messages for commercial ventures in the form of advertising and business communications. I have written about these areas and more needs to be articulated here. Some of my previous posts are listed here for easy access in the context of why the DCC course is important to nurture and take forward as it has been evolving at NID over the years.


2012 July - Design Thinking & Design Journey Revisited
2011 August - Design for Good Governance
2009 November - Design Thinking: The Flavor of the Month
2008 January - Systems Design: The NID Way
2007 December - Design as Research: The Path to Knowledge Creation
2007 October - Design Thinking: What is it?


Besides these posts from my Design for India blog here below I have linked several posts on the Design Concepts and Concerns blog that deal with the theory associated with this course.


2010 March - Business Models for Designers: Learning from the Field
2009 December - DCC 2010 - Foundation Batch 2009-10
2009 March - Scenario Visualisation: Indian Village as Visual Panorama in DCC2009
2009 March - Scenario Presentation: Learning about Composite Images in DCC
2009 March - Scenario Visualisation: Assignment on Composite Images and Mental Maps
2009 February - Business Models: Learning from the Field


The world of design and design education is moving inthe direction that we had anticipated in the DCC course at NID and we now see evidence of this is the new publications that are emerging from the West. I will draw attention here to one particular recent book that is available online with a good and interesting business model that makes it very accessible for our design students in India due to its attractive pricing policy for the digital version. The book that I refer to is "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving " by Jon Kolko, Austin Centre for Design, 2012 and it is a recent example of the emerging expanded approach to design thinking that is being explored and shared.


Returning to the idea of the "Avalanche Effect" and the claims that I have been making over the years in my papers and presentations about this course needs to be revisited and validated. I took over from Mohan Bhandari in 1988 and I remember that  Kiran Bir Sethi was in my early class and her document of the course and her design project are preserved in the NID library as a xerox document that I had placed there for posterity along with others over the years. Her "Design Process" project was on Design Education and there is no surprise for me that she is today running a school in Ahmedabad called Riverside School  that uses design thinking as a core for delivering the school curriculum and she is also the author of the world's biggest design education effort, Design for Change Project, with millions of children being introduced to design thinking at the school level. I call this phenomenon the "Avalanche Effect" and I see this happening all the time in design schools that encourage its students to think big and connect with the real world and address real problems and opportunities in the real world.
Prof M P Ranjan

Design Thinking: The Design Journey Revisited

Design Thinking: The Design Journey model and the Mind-Body model explained

M P Ranjan

July 2012

The Design Journey model was sketched out 2007 based on a conversation with one of my former students, Sumiran Pandya who came into my office at NID to seek some clarifications on the complexities of design thought and action. Sitting face to face with him, I had a blank sheet of A4 size paper in front of me and as I spoke I doodled the map and filled in terms and stars as we progressed with the discussion.

The design journey is explained through a metaphor of a “Stone in the Pond” when the initial intention is without much depth or definition but with a sense of what we would like to achieve, a direction, just like the first contact of the stone in the pond and then the ripples move out in ever growing circles till they reach the edges of the pond to return as waves that would also capture the contours of the lake as well.

In this model the journey is represented by two sets of co-located and forward moving lines, one red and the other black. The red line represents the state on mind and mental processes while the black line the state of the body as well as bodily sensations that closely coexist as we continue our journey of search, experiment, seeking and discovery as well as small and major insights that occur as we tend to engage with different aspects of the domain that is being examined and explored. These insights are represented in the stars that are marked on both the red as well as the black line since some insights are mental constructs while others may be bodily sensations that can have a tacit existence but may not be articulated in thoughts and in language easily. This journey is represented by the meandering paths in red and black shown in the middle of the page as emanating from the centre of the pond ripple. This is a sort of plan or aerial view of the journey or a map of the terrain that has been traversed as the design explorations progress.

Just below that representation is another path that represents the emotional status of the designer or design team, which is represented as a horizontal line moving in sync with the mind-body journey path in real time. This view is like an elevation view from an orthographic diagram and each point on this line would correspond to a particular point on the mind-body line represented above. The emotional journey also meanders up and down with hopes rising and some times soaring with the arrival of new insights or breakthroughs and at other times dropping down to a pit of frustration and utter dejection at times that could even lead to the project being abandoned for some time or altogether if there are no mentors present who could hand-hold and help the designer move forward and find future satisfaction or success. In some cases there could be a long gap between one stage and the next and many such breaks before final success is achieved, if at all. There are no guarantees in this activity and the designer needs to develop an attitude that can cope with ambiguity as well as cope with a lot of failure before a major breakthrough is achieved.

Design thinking is for me a form of embodied thinking when many particular thoughts are connected to some sense data that is carried in the body as a perception or even an unarticulated feeling that hovers over the body whenever that particular thought is accessed. This tells me that perception and imagination are intricately connected and they move forward in sync as we explore and develop design opportunities in search of viable design solutions and concepts. The process by which these design opportunities are developed would happen in the mind and body space, with real world explorations supported and enhanced by imaginations that I call inplorations for want of a better word. Inplorations have both mind and body characteristics since each held image would have both an imagined form as well as a felt feel. The softness of feathers and the hardness of stone are carried from our real world experiences to our imagined construct and these can be processed just as they can be experimentally explored in the real world. These explorations – inploration loops develop as design actions and these leave behind a huge body of intermediate products and by-products that are a result of both exploration and inploration alike. Concepts as well as discarded ideas are strewn along the design journey and very few designers pay heed to these by-products and rarely are these documented in the rust to find the final solution. For me these intermediate stages and its by-products such as doodles, sketches, mock-up models and draft prototypes all have great value in my research for understanding the design process in all its complexity. Similarly many imaginary by-products and sensations are carried in the mind for long periods of time before these are finally achieved in the real world constructs and the delivered products and services that the designers approves. These imaginary by-products also play a role in conceptual blends that will see several of these imaginary constructs being combined and modified before a few of these imagined alternatives are tested in real material at a huge cost of time and effort. The mental constructs take fractions of seconds to synthesize but their material counterparts may take years to accomplish.

This diagram tells me something about the nature of design opportunities, which explains why it is so difficult to explain your concept to a colleague or to a client since part of the attributes are lying in this imagined space and cannot be felt or seen by the viewer. This is an experiential part and in some cases future projections of scenarios of the idea that can be seen vividly in our minds eye quite clearly but are nor apparent to the viewer even if they are explained in great depth, the imagination that may be generated in such a dialogue with the viewer is that of the viewer and not of the designer, there is a mismatch. Design is not about the general principle but about the particular manifestation, which generates value, great value, and in most cases true value resides in the ultimate particular and not in the general concept at all. This is my grandfather’s chair and not just any old chair!! Very valuable, for me.

The insights that are garnered and assimilated in the conscious mind are shown as star points on the design journey map. These are harvested from all our experiences and gathered together as a string of such insight stars along the way and as they accumulate above in the mind and in our guts as favored thought sensations and feelings and these familiar ones contribute to the forming of deep convictions that are finally represented as a big star from which decisions are empowered and supported. Design thinking also goes through many styles of thought or modes of thought and each is used typically at a different stage in the design journey.

These modes of thought are quite distinct and each has their own mind set and associated attitude. These are described in some detail in my paper titled “Design Journey: Styles and modes of thought and action in design” and on my blog at this link here.

Download pdf of the Design Journey Report here

Previous post on Design Journey

This process moves from intentional thoughts through categorical, explorative and analytic modes to arrive at abductive, synthetic and reflective modes at different stages of the design journey and some modes are returned to as we move forward in iterative steps along the journey and revisit and verify earlier concepts and refine and elaborate some of these as we go forward in our search for a suitable fit to the problem or opportunity at hand or should I say in the mind of the designer. This also brings up for me the role of the designer and his responsibility in the whole process since only he can see parts of the scenario and some scenarios are so problematic it may be possible that these are held in abeyance as a result of their potential consequences.

In any case the designer has no control of the concept once it arrives in the real world as a prototype or even as a sketch manifestation since these are available for others to act upon and that is what makes design process a reflexive journey since others immediately respond and act on their own capacity in the face of a new design offering that may challenge their comfort or their position of strength in a competitive business environment. The response is usually immediate and in some cases even pre-emptive and the design offering fails to muster support since it is doomed by the consequences of the marketplace. There is no guarantee for success and even if a product or service is launched the success may only be seen in the market and not be tested in any lab or closed loop jury of peers and experts as all of them could be found lacking in foresight and prediction of what the market would actually support.

The last part of the diagram shows us that once the design offering is out of the designers grasp it enters into an orbit of its own that is determined by market forces and the real world complexities of social and political forces as well as economics, biases and taboos so that we cannot predict the outcomes and it could be a rearing success or an unmitigated disaster, as in global warming that is a consequence of many of our very thoughtful and so called successful design actions of the past. 

This is why such sensibilities are critical for a designer to hold and cherish and his ability to weigh these variables and concerns may be the answer for warding off future disasters. The designers thought processes are not unhindered nor are they uninhibited by his taboos and biases, we are after all human. This is what I tried to depict in the model of the mind-body map that I had developed to explain the process of innovation and design in exploring future possibilities and in addressing known and deeply held beliefs that may need to be processed before we are able to make a break-through that would show new and improved way of acting on our world and to try and improve what and how we do things in our world in the days ahead. Once we are aware of ourselves and our taboos we may be able to see “What if” and “What may be” which are fundamental to making new combinations that can be offered as possible opportunities on the design journey.

This model of Mind-Body map shows me that the resource maps that we are able to generate are inclusive only when we are able to transcend our taboos and discover resources that may otherwise be invisible to us when seen through the filters of our biases and socio-cultural taboos. Similarly imagined opportunities get processed through the design journey to bring back reformed design offerings that are synthesized and developed in such a way that they vibe with the context and add value to the social, geographic and historical situation that is being addressed. Value emerges when the combination of possibilities are fine tuned to the ultimate particular offering where the variables are in fine balance and there is a display of great value and an unfolding of value that is not measured in small quantities but in huge steps and in some cases quite disproportionate to the inputs that have been deployed. Cost has no relation to price and material has no relation to value, if the experience is wonderful that user is charmed and the offering is of immense value. It is My Grandfather’s chair!! Therefore it is not necessary for a great design to be a novelty for it to generate value but its particular manifestation may have the ingredients of immense value and part of that value comes from the viewer and not necessarily from the object or service that is being offered, the context matters just as much.

In this model I divide the mind space or canvas into three distinct zones, the Experential space, the Taboo space and the Propositional space. The Experintial space has all the collection of past experiences and memories including sensations that are linked to particular memories as an embodied memory and these are very critical for design thinking. These could include surface qualities experienced by touch, taste or smell when a material is handled or strength that is experienced in our guts when we bend a piece of material in the hands while examining its suitability for a particular application while the design task progresses. Designers touch materials all the time and file away insights about many of its qualities and these come memories flooding back when called upon to make a decision about making new choices while the design thought is in progress. The Propositional space is where we file away tentative models and diagrams of patterns that could resolve or partly develop design ideas and these are works in progress and can have many internal ideas generated through the proces of "inploration" that I have mentioned above. Conceptual blending is used to create many layers of alternatives and existing concepts and combined with new ones to make an array of alternatives from which informed choices are made. The Taboo space is also important and this is the blind spot of the designer and it influences the resource may since the taboos that the designer carries from childhood or from social and cultural practices may or may not permit them from even seeing available options since they may be a taboo subject in their culture or in their personal experience. Fear, beliefs and dogma all play a role and to overcome these is a huge effort especially if orthodox practices have been deeply ingrained in the designers mind. 


The 'flying magic carpet' in the model can be seen as that of the mind being compared to an infinite canvas or supple fabric with each star or dot representing one or a collection of memories in chunks that can be brought together as Shibori or Bhandani workers bring together knots in their fabric to dye a particular colour in the process of pattern making on cloth using the tie-dye process of patterning. While the tye-dye process take time to tie and form patterns the mind takes no time at all, or almost no time and at a heightened state of creative excitement we can do millions of such comparisons in a very brief period of time. Yes, motivation is important and the spirit must contribute to experience and skill. Responsible design is another factor that plays an important role in value formation but that may be the subject of another post. The body and mind are intricately connected and these provide us the embodied experiences that are critical for efective design thought and action.

Design Innovation of India presentation can be downloaded from this link here as a PDF file 2.7 MB