Food and AnthroDesign: Approaches and Attitudes for India

Image: The Indian “Thali”, a platter with a mixed set of offerings that are balanced and cooked to suit the occasion and the season, each region has its own varient and the exquisite food can be served on a leaf plate or all the way up the ladder in a silver one. Pictures sourced from Google image search for Indian thali.

This year the theme for the Design Concepts and Concerns course at NID Gandhinagar, Paldi and Bangalore deals with food. With rampant food inflation that has hit the economy over the past nine months and the looming threat of a runaway price of oil which has slowed down the world economy is a context in which we felt it would be prudent to see if a bit of applied imagination could help find new ways out of these pressing dilemmas. Indian food comes in a huge variety across many regional and climatic zones as well as cultural and social categories that has a long tradition behind the form and pattern of consumption by the people of these places. While there are many similarities across zones, the differences are palpable and give a sense of distinction through both form and flavours. These are influenced by a huge variety of factors both local as well as global, and the change in both tastes and habits are rapid as they are deeply protected by the same people across all age barriers. Can we understand these dynamics and apply this understanding to discovering new ways forward that can help the economy, the health of the population and solve many associated problems such as poverty, malnutrition and hunger in our society? We do believe that design and innovation can not just solve some of these problems but also address the larger threats of climate change and political inequity through a better understanding of food surplus economy and access to healthy food to all humans across the planet.

Image: Fruits and vegetables on the streets of Bangalore captured by an avid photo documenter, Rajesh Dangi, who shares his pictures on flickr rajesh-dangi’s photostream and on his blog called Bangalore Daily Photo.

Having said that, we can now look at the micro details of food production, distribution and consumption in our own locations and juxtapose these with global trends and changing aspirations of people. The tools that are used by designers are many and one of the significant new tools is called anthro-design or design-ethnography which helps us understand the finer aspects of human aspirations and behavior which determines to a large extant the choices that will be made by people to satisfy their needs. These can also help us understand the facts and fiction, myths and realities that we have to confront in the process of shaping alternatives that can be then decided through the group processes of politics and social and economic negotiation. The texture of reality is very important in design thinking and action and that is why designers need to go out and look at the reality even if a whole lot of information is available in the form of socio-economic study reports and market statistics. Imagine if someone told you that a street vendor made a living selling a few kilos of guava, mangos, or cucumber by offering a service of slicing the fruit with a knife and a sprinkling of salt and masala, a subsistence living that is. Where does the value come from which he can make a living? A service offered where it is needed and appreciated and that which is informed by the local knowledge of seasonality and local preferences for taste and nutrition and of course the economic reality that fruit is expensive in India and not affordable to most but desired by all. You will not find many market survey reports on these guys but they are all over our streets if we care to look. Rajesh Dangi,s pictures give us an honest view of this reality on the streets of Bangalore.

Image: Series of images from the Time Magazine story about What the World Eats. This is based on the research in the book titled “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” by Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio

The champions of anthro-design are growing in India and around the world and many new design companies and institutes are offering real research services to help understand the mind of the diverse user of services and products that is the foundation for any design and innovation programme. The discussion list called anthrodesign at yahoogroups.com is an active list that debates and shares insights about the skills and tools of the emerging discipline. Dori – Elizabeth Tunstall teaches the subject called Design Anthropology as an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at University of Illinois at Chicago . Her blog Dori’s Moblog, is full of insights and very informative podcasts about the subject. Our own graduates have been offering this kind of research as a service to their corporate clients both in India and overseas. Uday Dandavate, an NID alumni, had set up the company called SonicRim along with his teacher, Liz Sanders from Ohio State University. Manoj Kotari, founder of Onio Design, Pune offers trend research to their clients as does Locus Design, Pune handled by three NID graduates, Chandrashekar Badve, Milind Risaildar & Siddharth Kabra and in the South, in Bangalore the IDIOM, which is the biggest design office in India, offers these services with a focus on retail business services. IDIOM is founded by NID graduates Sonia Manchanda, Jacob Mathew and Anand Aurora working in concert with Kishore Biyani, the retail mega star in India, the founder of the Big Baazar and Pantaloon and the Future Group in India.

Image: Nokia Mobile Development Report prepared by Centre for Knowledge Societies in Bangalore. The digital version of the report can be downloaded from this link here as a 15 mb pdf file.

In Bangalore there is another compelling presence in this business which is the Centre for Knowledge Societies which was founded by Dr Aditiya Dev Sood. CKS offers such design research insights into local markets and populations by mapping their aspirations and visually capturing the fine texture of the local along with statistical parameters that can inform innovation and design action in a variety of industries. The CKS report for NOKIA on the Mobile Telephones in India and more recently their “Emerging Economy Report: Societal Intelligence for Business Innovation” that offers insights on populations in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Egypt and Keneya. This report is however a professional offering that can only be afforded by the multinational corporates however some information is available on the website. CKS has been in partnership with the Doors of Perception in assisting John Thackara in managing the DOORS events in India and this puts them in very good company indeed. John has been a impassioned advocate for design use at the local level and in his path breaking project DOTT07 with the Design Council, London took up Food as one of the thrust areas and his Doors of Perception too continues to promote the idea of local food and sensible consumption. Jogi Panghaal, an NID graduate and member of Doors, was the first design guru who sensitised us to the finer sensibilities of food in human society with his course offering called "Ways of Eating, way back in the early 90's.

Well, we now know that anthro-design both meaningful and also draws big money, and it is a way forward to sense and find attitudes and aspirations that lie below the surface and something that can provide us with design insights that no amount of hard facts and knowledge that science can provide. AnthroDesign is also something that designers do all the time to make sense of the world around them and to get an insight into the minds and emotions of the users that they wish to serve.

TATA’s One Lakh Car: Systems Failure on Indian Roads?

Image: An immersive experience at the trendspotting workshop at NID with Swedish and Indian students
We have been teaching systems thinking and design to several generations of students at NID. When asked what we should do to improve design education in India, Kishore Biyani answered that Indian design students were steeped in ideology and were bent on changing the world. He said, Six out of ten students coming out of design schools want to change the world and three others want to set up their own business, which leaves very little for the industry to choose from. This was an exchange that happened at the CII-NID National Design Summit in response to my question. This answer is not surprising nor is it alarming since we have been teaching our students to address systems level complexities while our industry is asking them to do a bit of aesthetic cleaning up of the mess that is being offered to India in the guise high quality and benchmarked offerings that meets international standards, whether it be retail or in automobile. Whose standards are we following? Have we asked our people what they need or are the advertising claims made by industry and the market buzz about growth and volume all that we need to be concerned about? In my earlier post on the CII-NID Summit in Bangalore I had called the TATA initiative as irresponsible and now I return to examine the alternatives.

It is not surprising that there is an uproar about the TATA’s one lakh car and the promise for a national grid-lock sometime soon which is coming from the NGO community and a small band of thinkers such as Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize, as quoted in the pr-inside.com where he says “…I am having nightmares” about the prospect of the low-cost car. Sunita Narain, Director of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), on the other hand is quoted as saying “the solution is not to ban the Rs 1-lakh car but to "tax it like crazy until it (India) has a mass transit system that can give people another cheap mobility option”. While its opponents rant and rave, the Nano from the TATA stable has its supporters too. Mritiunjoy Mohantyin, Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta) in his piece in Rediff.com titled “Why criticising the Rs 1-lakh car is wrong” argues…“…in my view, given environmental concerns and urban densities, India's mobility requirements are perhaps best met by a combination of mass transit systems and small cars like the Tata 'people's car.” He goes on to say “…perhaps the best solution for an efficient and environmentally friendly mobility policy for India is to focus on an affordable mass transit system and on small cars (including the Rs 1-lakh car).”

Nothing wrong with that point of view either. Disruptive innovations are the need of the day and if the low-cost small car is one answer while we must get our industry and government to invest in generating a number of alternatives that could be better aligned to the needs of the Indian consumer. Here is the rub. Very little investment has gone into examining the alternatives through sustained investments in visioning exercises at any level in India and we are running on the tread mill of everyday existence to have any time and place for design innovation exercises that could pave the way for informed choices that could be presented to our political bosses in order to make the decisions on levels of tax, regulation and a desirable quality of life for our people. It is assumed that more investment through FDI’s by companies in an unregulated market economy will somehow bring us disruptive innovations that will create the necessary differentiators through market processes of competition and regulation in the economy and here the main role would be played by investments in science and technology that can be measured, such as emission standards, safety and other parameters that would be subject of lab and field investigation using science and technology metrics. However the issues that would need to be examined are in my view not what is possible – which science and technology can answer – but to try and answer the big question of what is desirable – which is only possible through the creation and examination of several alternatives that are tangible and can be appreciated as projected scenarios in a format which can be apprehended by the common man and then these need to be debated and resolved in a democratic manner. Design scenarios can be developed for many of our society’s needs and aspirations and the product of the design journey will then be the shaping of our culture and not just the manifestation in the form of its artifacts and some scientifically measurable attributes. All proposals for new infrastructure and major development programmes must be presented in a visual manner that can be seen, examined and appreciated by the lay man and the man in the street before it is taken forward by administrators and politicians with their industry big-wigs who have the money.


The shift to asking what is desirable for our society raises a whole lot of other questions that cannot be answered through science, technology or engineering since there are those intangibles that fall outside the ambit of knowledge and enter the domain of feelings and values. This is where we have discovered and built our conviction of the need for looking at these situations in a holistic manner and looking beyond the artifact in isolation and the need to look at the systems level to study both impact and the consequences. If this understanding can be embedded into the offering the effect would be valuable by magnitudes in terms of the benefits that would accrue from the situation. We need both government and industry to join hands and invest in building use case scenarios that can be made visible to all stake-holders so that an informed debate can ensue before major decisions of infrastructure and direction are decided and this would apply to whether or not we need to heed to Sunita Narain’s suggestion of “tax it like crazy”. This kind of public examination should be an ongoing one since change is a continuous process and we would need to make a constant vigil on the feedback loops that are so important in a systems model to help separate noise from meaning and information travel through society. Last week we have had a group of Swedish students and their teachers camping at NID and during their stay they worked with NID students and faculty examining future scenarios for forecasting education trends in India and across the World. Prof. Peter Majanen lectured on “The Art of Trendspotting and Future Thinking” while Prof Ronald Jones addressed the notion that “The India Report was once a Micro Trend”. The Think Tank was truly interdisciplinary with students from four schools in Sweden from across disciplines traveling to India to work with NID students from across disciplines at the Institute in an immersive workshop format to look at India now through field exchanges and then at India in 2058 through immersive experiences. Their insights and findings were presented this morning at the NID Boardroom just as the TATA’s one lakh car was being unveiled in New Delhi today.

I do wish that Ratan Tata and the automobile industry as a whole had invested in numerous such scenario building tasks in our design, engineering and management schools so that all of us could have a glimpse of what would be the consequences of our smart management and engineering actions today and tomorrow. We can explore and envision desirable futures at a systems level where the mobility of every citizen is assured at a quality level that we can only dream of today. We need to set up these think tanks across disciplines in India and to examine the desirable alternatives in a transparent manner using the systems design processes and the envisaging methods that would reveal alternative scenarios that can then be placed before decision makers and the public for debate and necessary decision as we go forward. Vertical specializations cannot tell us much in such complex situations and we need to encourage collaboration across disciplines and for this to happen we need to set up platforms of collaboration and formats for engagements that could be applied to all 230 sectors of our economy using design as a common language that can be appreciated and acted upon with conviction and vision. Our National Design Policy will then be put into action in a manner that will bring benefits to all our citizens across all sectors of our economy. Let us become a nation with great imagination and provide leadership to the world in a sustainable manner.

CII-NID Design Summit, Bangalore 2007: Focus on the National Design Policy

The CII NID Design Summit 2007 was kicked off in great style by Uday Dandavate, Design with India, with the screening of two song sequences from Bollywood in the sixtees and from the current crop, the first showed Nutan doing a homely Garba dance and the other with Bipasha Basu in Omkara, a stark reminder that we have all come a long way since Independence. Yes, India is changing and we expect it to change even more rapidly in the days ahead since the world has just crossed the urban rural ratio going in favoutr of the urban settlements for the first time since the dawn of civilization.In the India Report of 1958 Charles Eames had warned us about the nature of this change. He says – ”… we recommend that without delay there be a sober investigation into those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life, that there be a close scrutiny of those elements that go to make up a “Standard of Living”. ……”. He goes on to say in an insightful manner that …” …One suspects that much benefit would be gained from starting this search at the small village level.”
We are now in the fag end of the year 2007, almost 50 years after the tabling of the Eames India Report, and at the CII-NID Design Summit we had a report from the CII National Committees on Design that was set up to discuss the proposed implementation of the National Design Policy that was announced by the Central Government on the 8th February 2007 and this statement was part of the conference handout. I do wish that this statement or recommendation could have been made available much earlier and to a wider audience of designers and industry and that these recommendations were debated and discussed to the extant that they should be if they are to become inclusive as well as effective. Vikram Kirloskar, Chairman of the CII National Committee on Design spoke briefly about the five broad planks that were considered by the committee and these are listed below:
1. Competitiveness of Industry by Design
2. Design for Culture, Society and Environment
3. Design for Education
4. Branding /Promotion of Design through Media
5. Design Policy implementation including setting up of Design Parks. Venture fund for design

No mention of the village that Eames had warned us about, but we are already 50 years ahead, so things must have changed on the ground, the population is streaming into our urban centres – but the big question is – is this the good life that Indians are aspiring to live? Is this so? I personally do not think so nor is this an inevitable direction, since we can design our future if only we set out to examine the possibilities, by design. At the end of the session on the National Design Policy I was able to ask a question to the Secretary, DIPP Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion who are charged with the responsibility of implementing the policy. I quote, “How are you planning to bring the other Ministries of the Government on board the National Design Policy since all of them need Design and not just Industry, particularly in the areas on Rural Development and Education to name only a few?” – unquote. During this session the member secretary of the AIDI (Association of Indian Design Industry) too offered to partner with Government in furthering the objectives of the NDP and the Secretary immediately suggested that the AIDI get in touch with the Ministry after the conference to initiate necessary action and set up a platform for such cooperation, and I do hope that the AIDI will act on this invitation and make sure that the voice of the design industry is an integral part of the ongoing dialogue on the NDP.

The other interesting sessions that I attended included the dialogue between Kishore Biyani and Bruce Nussbaum that was facilitated by Uday Dandavate. Kishore Biyani, it is evident from his submissions, is very clued in on what design can do for the retail industry that he represents and he has a clear conception of how he proposes to use design to face the huge diversity of India and the Indian consumer. He is one CEO who understands design and I do wish we could see more of his ilk following suit. Ratan Tata, on the other hand is a designer and architect, who was not present at the conference but his impact was certainly felt since there were whispers in the corridors of the great under 100,000 Rupee car (sub-one-lakh car for the masses) being talked about in awe and great respect. I however am surprised and not moved by such a shallow understanding of the transportation aspiration of the Indian citizen while Bangalore and its infrastructure is being visibly choked to the hilt by private automobiles and two-wheelers and the city and in particular, the axis road to the conference venue, is not able to take it anymore with the traffic inching along at a snail’s pace. It is here that the design policy should look at the macro level of the system and see how public transportation can be designed offered at a high quality and such irresponsible adventures as the “sub-one-lakh car”, a great feat of engineering however, are not foisted on the unsuspecting Indian villager and urbanite alike. We need to raise a debate and some of these questions are political, and these are design questions at a systems level. The Politics of Design as the Ulm School Foundation is now discussing it should inform National Policy, but is the Planning Commission listening?

Dr Koshy, Director NID, said all the right things and Bruce Nussbaum was duly impressed as he has stated in his blog-post at the Innovation section of the BusinessWeek Online. Shailajeet “Banny” Bannerjee called for new kind of leadership education for India using design at its core and once again Bruce Nussbaum has a detailed post on his talk at the conference besides one on his own keynote at the CII-NID Summit. In the second session two speakers held my attention. These were Ignacio Germade from Motorola who talked about design Transformation through innovation. His purpose for using design were clear and insightful as a four stage agenda as follows:
1. Discovering Opportunities – Need great processes in design thinking.
2. Facilitating Collaboration – Being good at storytelling.
3. Prototyping Propositions _ Making ideas tangible and visible to all.
4. Inside out branding – Not as icing on the cake since people want the cake and not just the icing.

Very stimulating indeed. The other significant talk of the morning was by Kingshuk Das from IDEO, Paolo Alto who talked about design connecting to the traditional wisdom of India and thereby creating great value, refreshing ideas that are both realistic as well as exotic. GK van Patter was of course stimulating but you can get his talk and the details of his philosophy from his website at the NextD site here. The NextD journal and the methods that he proposed are all available for review at their website link. There were some very boring presentations or should I say sales pitches by companies, which should not have been allowed by the organizers, and we must see that this is not repeated next year even if the companies concerned make a contribution or sponsorship to the conference.

Besides these the presentation by Uday Salunke, Director of Welingkar Institute of Management was very encouraging since now management schools too are looking seriously at Design and they with IDIOM are designing the next generation school called WE-School which we had a glimpse in Sonia Manchanda’s presentation. Of the case studies one stood out for its brilliance and excellence of execution and this was Lemon Design’s presentation by Dipendra Baoni of a new honey packaging and branding strategy that had created quite a stir at the conference. There were several break-out sessions but I did not attend these but I am sure that some of the other participants will share their experiences in the days ahead. In the final analysis it was a good conference, quite unreachable due to the remote location and horrible traffic at Bangalore, but a great meeting place for designer friends but with a huge gap due to very low presence of Industry CEO’s, which should be our objective for the next time around if design is to find a place in the Indian landscape alongside management, finance, science and technology.

I moderated a very interesting session (for me) along with Maoli Marur, Editor of Kyoorius Design Magazine where we had five Indian students and one international student who was working in India to give their insights about the future of design. I will leave it to others to comment on this session and I am sure that this should be a regular feature at the future summits and we must thank Uday Dandavate for insisting on having this event and makiong sure that it was not forgotten in the husstle and bustle of talking to Industry and Government.