What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Image 01: Thumbnails of slides used for the “What is Design?” lecture dealing with Dimensions, Processes and Applications.

“What is Design?”, will be a perennial topic since design is and will always be a moving target whenever we attempt a definition since it is always rooted in the present time and can only be understood and appreciated in the context of the “particular” place or location and a “general” description will need to take that into account as well. Each age will need to take stock of the definition and as we evolve so will design and hopefully our design ability. Design is one of our basic abilities, which we have used in more and more sophisticated ways as we evolved and enhanced our human sensibilities and capabilities. In the period of slow transformation through craft based processes of trial and error many of these sensibilities were refined and we could fall back on traditions to find our way forward.

Image 02: Thumbnails of the second part of the lecture dealing with design concepts and models that lead to our current definition of design as a basic human activity and this calls for a greater focus for the subject in our school education in the days ahead.

However in the post-industrial era reach and impact of our senses and abilities have been considerably enhanced by our multitude of tools and our externalized knowledge processes that we now have the capability of changing and impacting nature in dramatic ways, many of them undesirable, and our economic and social frameworks lag behind by a huge magnitude, that we are on the brink of failure as a species. Design becomes all the more important in this scenario and we will need to temper our dependence on science and art which has helped us evolve very rapidly over the past 600 years since the Renaissance if we are to face the crisis that this dependence is to be addressed.

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Podcast
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Code to embed podcast of lecture sent by Satya Murthy using MP3 file provided by me.

I had the occasion to speak to a group of school teachers as part of our programmes at NID and I prepared a lecture that was delivered to this group at NID the other day. The recording of the lecture is available here as a podcast at the link above which is of one and a half hour duration and the 2.5 MB pdf file of the slides used lecture can be downloaded from here at the links below along with an MP3 file of the lecture which too is available for download as a 45 MB file

Link to download the Podcast with images

What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (pdf file 2.3 mb download)
What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (MP3 voice file 43.8 mb download)
Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Rainwater Harvesting: Furaat Systems Design addresses many levels

Furaat Systems addresses many levels of design in Rainwater Harvesting

Image: Poster from Furaat Earth Pvt Ltd showing the systems overview
Science is the search for knowledge that we all depend upon to tell us how nature works and it is also the vehicle through which this knowledge is refined and tested through a process of hypothesis creation and peer evaluation. Technology on the other hand includes the methods, procedures and tools employed to use this knowledge into shaping dependable and predictable results. However it is rarely understood that generic design which is a natural human activity usually precedes both these stages in the creation of imaginative new products and solutions which may be at first intuitively and creatively apprehended into a workable manifestation and then refined by a process of evolution through multiple cycles as in the case of our crafts and numerous traditional applications. In the case of water harvesting systems in India we have a long tradition of applications that have been evolved through the fertile use of local ingenuity and hard earned insights over centuries of evolution and refinement.

Modern design on the other hand contributes to both knowledge creation as well as in helping in the application of existing knowledge in systematic ways to create compelling new solutions that include the multiple dimensions of economic, technological, sociological as well as the aesthetic besides addressing the functional and emotional needs of the user and helps meet the requirements of the task at hand in an elegant manner. This multidisciplinary quality of synthesis is unique to design innovation since it is a framework that enables each contributing specialization and the knowledge held therein to be brought into a particular configuration that opens the huge potential and inherent value in a manner that it can be harvested by a number of stakeholders in a manner intended by the collaborators. Design as we know it today is therefore a negotiated space and an expert procedure that helps unlock the value potential that is found locked within the particular situation. This unfolding has been the subject of much recent research by world design thought leaders as seen in their books such as Tomas Maldonado, Nigel Cross, Harold Nelson, Bryan Lawson, Klaus Krippendorff, Peter Downton, Roger Martin, Don Norman and others who have written books on the subject dealing with design theory and action. Many of them are members of the Design Research Society, which is composed of members who work in the area of design research and who have contributed to shaping the field in recent times through their writing on the subject. I too have many papers on design theory which try to explain the field and these can be downloaded from my website. In this particular post I am looking at how design has helped unfold value in the specific area of rainwater harvesting system and I will expand on this a bit later. In future posts I wish to look at many other fields where the use of design has made a huge difference and these too will hopefully help us see how design can be used across fields, and in my considered view India needs this kind of design action across 230 sectors of our economy.

Many places in Western India, particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan there are age old traditions of water harvesting that include both the significant forms in which this art is performed across the region. The balancing of the underground aquifers through the strategic location of small ponds and lakes near a village has served our villages well over the years in helping the people manage their water resources for a year round availability. However with a greater dependence on ground water utilization by pumping in both our rural as well as urban locations we have increasingly seen the water table receding year on year till we reach a crisis point of no return. Many of our regions still receive good precipitation during the monsoon season but due to rapid drain-offs from the catchment areas into the storm drains and rivers we see very little of this water being recharged into the underground aquifers since even the old lakes have now been filled up in the creeping habit of urbanization. Cities like Delhi and Chennai have been facing an acute shortage of drinking water and this crisis is being experienced in many other parts of India as well. The traditional wisdom of holding the rain water run off in shallow ponds near the village seems to be replaced by a new fangled dependence on the deep bore pump and the imbalance of the situation is now showing up in the water shortages in the near term and in climate change at the macro level. Sensitive activists have raised this issue in a number of public for a and some have gone further to use documentation and scientific arguments to show us the consequences of our continued use of ground water resources while not addressing the need for recharge both artificially as well as in the natural way as far as possible.

Great examples of traditional water harvesting systems exist all over Gujarat and Rajasthan. The best known and celebrated examples are the Step Wells of Gujarat in Patan and Adalaj near Ahmedabad. In Ahmedabad city, houses in the traditional Polls had used the underground tanks to hold clean rainwater for use through the year. Most traditional houses in the Polls were equipped with such a well-designed system of copper pipes and dark underground sumps sufficiently large to hold a full year’s rainwater supply for drinking needs. Gandhi’s house in Porbunder is a specific example of this kind of rainwater harvesting that was practiced in the Gujarat region. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi showed leadership in the awareness building activity through their book on traditional water harvesting systems called “Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems” that was published in 1997 by Anil Agarwal. The CSE has sustained its efforts at this awareness and legislation provoking efforts and studies over the years. As a result, today we can see many parts of India have new laws in place that make it mandatory to implement water harvesting systems in all new constructions and in some cases even in existing buildings. The CSE has published a “Water Harvesting Manual” with case studies from Delhi that provides guidelines for public action. However the creation of guidelines and principle diagrams to manage the flow of rainwater from rooftops and catchment areas without contamination into filter beds and then on to the storage or recharge systems is not sufficient to make it happen in a functional and a high quality manner in the real world. Each site needs to be planned and designed to meet the volume of run off as well as the storage or recharge capacity that the system should address. Alternately this leaves a space for several design opportunities for the creation of new products and services that can be offered in a professional manner by an entrepreneurial intervention. It is in the creation of such dependable and efficient as well as elegant systems does design come into play and this can demonstrate the value that is inherent on the situation, much of which is not easily visible to the eye of the perceiver.

Image: Furaat System under installation by two persons team.
It is one such offering that has been made by the Furaat Water Harvesting system that has been designed for the Ahmedabad based company by an NID graduate of Product Design, Dinesh Sharma. The company, Furaat Earth Pvt Ltd, was set up by the entrepreneur brothers Habil and Yusuf Attarwala with the intention of reaching action on the ground with a small investment rather than just talking about the need for awareness and local action. In the last two years over 400 installations have been achieved and this year has seen a growth in both acceptance and in business with over 500 installations being considered, each costing approximately Rs 30,000 and their message is being heard due to the value that they bring by the use of their successful modular design. The Furaat system can be used for both kinds of applications, that is, storage type or ground water recharge type of application. In the first case the system on offer can form the first stage of the collection and filtration process while a variety of storage types can be used downstream, and in the second case the modular units can be installed in a variety of capacities to recharge deep ground water reservoirs using deep bore wells as the preferred route for the ground water recharge process. While there are so many traditional and scientifically developed systems why are we looking at one that is developed by an industrial designer using the principles of design? This will become clear when we compare the features as well as performance across a number of parameters at the same time and see which ones stand the test of the harsh reality check that is done in the marketplace without subsidies of any kind.

Image: Details of the Furaat Rainwater Harvesting System
The product will have to meet customer requirements across these multiple attributes if it is to become successful in the marketplace. It has to be cost effective and this is achieved by the modular construction that is on offer. Two key components are used in the product – an octagonal horizontal component and a rectangular vertical component – each with a simple locator detail that uses spherical glass beads in a patented configuration to lock the components in place. These are made in high quality concrete castings with precision and durability and in the long run these offer reuse and recycling possibilities in case the location is to be changed in the future due changes in the underground water table characteristics or in new structures on the surface as the site is developed. This is a hidden feature that protects the investment and also significant is the ease with which the well components can be assembled, maintained and cleaned after a few monsoons. All water handling accessories too are made of industrial grade metals of high quality that provides durability, performance and filtration standards that are extremely high and the sand and gravel beds at the first and the last stage too can be cleaned with ease since the design affords easy access as it is like a step-well with the dimensions matched to human proportions for lifting, access and climbing as well as being secure in the quality of filter performance that is guaranteed by the company. The pdf file available at their website gives a poster showing areas of application and more details of the construction and the features can be downloaded from their site here. The modular construction gives the user and the planner flexibility in making the particular unit to suit the needs of the site condition as well as the available budget since a one level, two level or three level or even a multi-level unit can be made with the same basic components in a very short time. Installation can be completed in less than a day by one or two semi-skilled masons without the use of hoists or cranes to erect the well components. Ground water recharge if done carelessly can be quite damaging for the aquifer since it is easy to use artificial recharge to help introduce contaminants and surface pollution into an aquifer if the filtration process is carelessly handled.

Image: Postcards designed to reach the message of rainwater harvesting to school children
Water is serious commodity that needs great care and attention and we need a variety of systems that can take care of local variants from the point of view of precipitation, terrain, geological attributes as well as population stress and other factors. Design can play a great role in examining and building imaginative solutions that are economic, appropriate and culturally suitable for the particular location. John Thackara in his recent book review has strongly recommended a book on water management titled “Dam Nation: Dispatches From the Water Underground” by Editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole , Laura Allen, and Illustrator Annie Danger. This brings up another point for us since design need not end with the product in need but can extend to the graphic and systems devices and methods that are used to promote and build awareness about these systems in our wider population. Here the communications too could be designed and the Furaat team has produced posters, flash cards and other communications that can help bring awareness to local schools as well as to parents through their children so that eventually the action on the ground is both significant and effective. Water and its effective management is definitely one major sector that can benefit from design thought and action I would like to see that the Government to include it in the National Design Policy initiatives and just like this one neglected sector (from a design opportunity perspective) we have another 230 sectors that too need urgent public funding and design attention. John Thackara has called for a movement to be put in place to support "collaborative innovation in all public investment in the UK and we can certainly benefit if we can bring these actions to India across our vast landscape with its huge diversity of regional, climatic, biotic, cultural and geological variables that renders central planning so ineffective. The National Design Policy could take a leaf out of the DOTT07 initiatives of the Design Council UK and now the DOTT07 Manual is available online in part as a digital file and as a print product it is available at cost.

TATA Nano and Design Education Challenges for India

Image: NID students and faculty at the Auto Expo 2008 send back images of TATA Nano.
The TATA Nano is sexy and cheap; a potent combination when taken to market and that is exactly what Ratan Tata has done. Consumers and designers alike are enamored by the offering. Many designers on the DesignIndia list have chosen to praise Ratan Tata for achieving the price sensitive Nano which was unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi. I too admire the achievement in a qualified sort of way, particularly in automotive design, engineering and marketing and Ratan Tata has taken a step ahead of the Japanese car makers in offering a competitive price point with quality and having met the existing benchmarks for cars of this kind. The will surely be a different place from now on.

However I am afraid that at another level this will contribute to the growing mess that is now our Indian city and I would hold Ratan Tata just as responsible for that since he is among India's business leaders who has the means to make a real difference by working at the systems level and in influencing government to act responsibly as well. In the emerging world of Web 2.0 all of us are responsible and the clear cut separation of responsibilities that have been carved out for each in the era of industrial specialization, the separation of church and administration, and later the separation of industry and governance, have all but blurred to give us an online community that responds in an online democracy in real time responses. The theories of economics from the industrial era all hold that the consumer and market responses will somehow shape the events that flow in the free-market but I have some counter arguments for that and we are at a stage when we need to rethink our macro-economic theories and bring in innovation and design into the equation which is not being done nor has it been done at anytime in the history of man. Innovations were seen as individual pursuits or as business activities of individual companies that would need to be therefore protected by law so that future inventions could be encouraged in society. This may be so in the pre-internet era of poor communication but today we need a new paradigm and the open-source movement and the creative commons are helping rewrite the way innovations happen in our society but business still goes on as usual and countries compete, companies compete and individuals compete as if this is the only way forward for society since we are all victims of the Malthusian beliefs and the theory that he had proposed and we are not able to operate at any other level of imagination. I believe that we are entering an era of massive cooperation where our notions of competition will be challenged and will need to be replaced by new attitudes that foster a dialogue between the players and a whole new way of creating our future.

We need to explore ways in which we can get business leaders and politicians from all parts of India to listen to some of our dreams as well and the design vision can then be a driving force for the shaping of tomorrow’s cities. I have been working in bamboo for many years and we have several break-through innovations that promise to give a good future for our rural folks and we have numerous failures from which we have learned a lot about the material as well as about human behavior. Design for social good is a mission that can be achieved but too little is being invested into that direction because we do not have faith in that direction since it is not yet a measurable offering as science, technology and market offerings are in labs, tests and the market with a look at the bottom-line only. Companies such as Infosys are among the most respected ones in India, in my personal view, since they have exhibited extremely high ethical standards in all their operations but several other large companies in India cannot be included in their league of ethical operation even when the government itself is moving onto a regime of extreme transparency with the new Right to Information Act. Design is an act of faith and a matter of judgment. Faith by itself is not a bad thing if we can support it with insights drawn from experience in the real world and from our imagination of what can be achieved and what needs to be achieved. Blind faith, on the other hand, is to be feared since it fosters fundamentalism and extremism as a reaction. However, design thought comes in the first category, faith based on experiential insights and on informed intentions but it can never be subject of reason unlike science and technology. Therefore design looses out on every engagement that requires proof before it is accepted and in India huge investments are made in Science-Technology schemes while design has been left out and this cannot be the responsibility of the design community alone, especially since design can indeed offer real solutions if only we tried. Design good cannot be proved but it can be sensed and modeled or simulated and tested through that route, if only the necessary investments are made in that direction and when sufficient time is given to create the models that could be appreciated and apprehended first conceptually and then in more rigorous ways.

Image: NID stall at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi.
I have moved some distance in my journey in understanding design and I am now convinced that we need to take our arguments to the business and government without being apologetic in any way. Design is complex and while I can admire the engineering achievement of Ratan Tata and his team I bemoan the huge catastrophe that this will portend for all of our society and us in the days ahead. I have been thinking about the directions that we have chosen to take in our educational ventures and sometimes I feel that we need to stop and think a bit about both direction and speed. While a hyper-fast "mind to market strategy" may be a desirable activity for business success it could also be a sure sign of disaster for society if the direction of movement is wrong for the context in which it is applied. Speed and efficiency need to be tempered with relevance and direction that is desirable if we are to benefit from the speed and efficiency that is on offer by raising the bar and coordinating our efforts. I would have liked to see some imaginative public transport solutions rather than just some more sleek automobiles being exhibited at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi. Perhaps we need to take systems design more seriously and get all our disciplines to work together in the final years to show India just what can be done by a determined young team of designers, all moving in the desirable direction. This direction should come from our analysis of the Eames challenge that he had set in 1958, "what qualities does India and Indians consider to make a good life?"

The TATA Nano has raised many questions which need to be answered in this context and as the premier National Institute of Design we are just as responsible for our actions as is Mr. Ratan Tata as the senior Industrialist and businessman of India in the 21st century. I do hope that these matters are discussed at the Institute and in the design community in India since design at the systems level, which is being ignored by both industry and government for over fifty years now, since the Eames India Report was written and which led to the establishment of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, needs to be reexamined in the light of our current needs and aspirations as well as in the context of global warming and social conflicts of the day, for us to find direction forward from here.

There has been much debate about the Nano in the DesignIndia forum and the note by Sagarmoy Paul that Arun Gupta has so kindly shared with all of us at NID and it is just one such debate that is in progress there which can have a wider participation within design schools across the country.

Image: City Tablet – A concept scenario for socially accessible transportation for our cities by NID student Varsha Mehta in the DCC class.

Image: Water Focus – A concept scenario of water based alternate transport for Indian cities by NID student Vinay Jois.
I would like to share here two design opportunity visualizations that were prepared by two of our students in the last semester as part of their Design Concepts and Concerns course at NID. They were looking at mobility options in the city and came up with scenario visualisations based on the insights that they had garnered in their group brainstorming and research in this very short foundation course in design. I propose that such socially relevant challenges be taken up at the systems level in senior years in our design schools and that these be funded and supported by our industry and government agencies who are looking at the whole area of transport design in India. Such assignments could be conducted in a collaborative space that is carved out from a new partnership between design, engineering and management schools in the same city and there may be other possibilities to get several multi-disciplinary teams together, if there is a will to do so.

Will the design community pursue the government and industry to make this happen? I do hope so for the good of all of us. Perhaps it is also time to explore new theories of economics that is informed by the possible use of disruptive innovation as a way forward not just as a market driven mechanism of competition between nations, companies and individuals in the WTO framework but a new order that is based on open-source ideology of cooperation and community based innovation particularly for innovations of objects, services and infrastructure for public and social good. This can only happen if we are able to take the understanding of design and layer it with a new theory economics and politics of innovation that can be set in motion in a cooperative framework going forward. Design schools have a role to play in shaping these frameworks and much of the initial explorations that are needed by society can happen within the classrooms of the future and these in turn will help us build scenarios that will be moderated by the community to actually build a desirable future for all of us.

TATA Nano and the Indian Cities in the Creative Age

Image: TATA Nano that promises to grid-lock Indian cities by 2010…IMHO
Richard Florida in his book “The Flight of the Creative Class” examines and defines the shift of activities to urban centres around the world that provide supports and sustenance for the creative community and as these centres grow they tend to attract more such people. At the end of the Industrial Revolution the availability of material resources and expertise by way of knowledge held sway over the production of wealth in the cities and centres of high production. However now it is sharply veering towards services and these are based on knowledge and expertise and those cities that are able to attract the young performers is able to grow rapidly and far outstrip the growth of the former industrial giants. These centres of power and productivity are moving towards yet another shift which is being driven by the growth of the creative industries and it is only those cities that are able to attract the creative professionals who work in these industries are able to show signs of very high growth and the creation of wealth. Richard Florida is now a professor of management at the Rotmans School of Management, Toronto that is also well known for using design and innovation as a driver for management education and is now rated among the top 10 management schools in the world by leading international business magazines. The school is headed by the visionary Dean, Roger Martin who shifted the focus of management education to design and innovation in 1998 and these shifts are well documented in the Rotmans magazine available as pdf files and is published thrice a year.


Image: The Tata Group chairman, Ratan Tata, with the "Nano" on Thursday at the New Delhi auto show. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)
The creation of the TATA Nano, which is no doubt a great feat of engineering and market prowess raises many questions about the systems level relevance for our cities as they are now and in today’s accepted value system in the business domain it seems that it is not Ratan Tata’s problem at all but that of the government or some other unnamed body to sort out the mess that will surely follow by way of congestion, pollution and road rage that are sure to follow, to name only a few anticipated fallouts of this much heralded innovation. Ratan Tata has shown that it is possible to build a car for less than one lakh of Rupees but he has however failed to show us how this is a desirable option for India. The creative cities are characterized by several features that are attractive for the young creative professional and these include both work related facilities as well as those that support community of creative professionals as well as provide sustenance fro a host of creative activities across a large number of interest areas. These features would include I believe a realm of peace and safety, a place for work and relaxation as well as time away from commuting and the so called rat race, all contributing to the flow of creative juices that will make the whole experience one that is exhilarating and satisfying. The infrastructure for these activities are an essential part of what these cities have to offer and along with these the attractive elements would include high quality accommodation, travel and transport facilities and centres of activities that offer a wide range of creative interests. It is in order to explore and articulate the renewal of our cities by the imaginative use of design that we have included these topics as part of the Design Concepts and Concerns course at NID in the last semester.

The task assigned to them asks the students to examine through brainstorming, categorization and modeling the issues relating to the empowerment of the city populations to make them both interested and capable of contributing directly to the four chosen areas of city life with the intention that we need not wait for governments to act while the city population could take up some of these planning tasks on their own initiative and use the government systems as a key support mechanism. The specific areas assigned to the four groups were to explore and discover design opportunities for the empowerment of local populations to initiate the design and creation of new infrastructure, services, facilities and activities in the four broad areas listed below in the public spaces that could be extracted from our cities by collective action:

1. Healthy Sports
2. Art & Infrastructure
3. Public Education
4. Festivals and Culture

Our cities are already chock-a-block full of cars and bikes and parking space takes up all the free space around houses and offices leaving very little for any imaginative use in play for children and in relaxation for the adults and the elderly, who just refuse to go away. However, we do see that with the application of a little bit of imagination and the creation of new norms and laws we could help transform of cities into robust centres of creativity and then we should be able to expect a very high growth in these cities that are in line with Richard Florida’s assessment. This will not be achieved by the TATA Nano by any stretch of our imagination and on the other hand we believe it is going to add to the chaos and confusion that is the way of life in our Indian cities today since we are aping the American dream of one car, nay two per Indian family, and an infrastructure boom that would build fly-overs in the sky. Such poverty of imagination that would surely make Charles Eames turn in his grave fifty years after the submission of the India Report in 1958. We need to create space for our festivals and parks, for our playgrounds and pavements, for our public facilities and art installations, all in the space now occupied by cars, and this can be achieved with a little bit of imagination and a lot of determination at the political level.

Image: Bus Rapid Transit System in Curitiba, Brazil: A success story that was homemade with local political will.
One city in Brazil has shown us what can be achieved if only we try. Take a look at what the Bus Rapid Transit System has helped Curitiba, Brazil achieve in just three years of determined public action and with an inspired leadership. I quote from the Curitiba story from the Race, Poverty and Equity issue a case study on “Curitiba's Bus System is Model for Rapid Transit” by Joseph Goodman, Melissa Laube, and Judith Schwenk – I quote...
“The BRT—A Success Story:
The popularity of Curitiba’s BRT has effected a modal shift from automobile travel to bus travel. Based on 1991 traveler survey results, it was estimated that the introduction of the BRT had caused a reduction of about 27 million auto trips per year, saving about 27 million liters of fuel annually. In particular, 28 percent of BRT riders previously traveled by car. Compared to eight other Brazilian cities of its size, Curitiba uses about 30 percent less fuel per capita, resulting in one of the lowest rates of ambient air pollution in the country. Today about 1,100 buses make 12,500 trips every day, serving more than 1.3 million passengers—50 times the number from 20 years ago. Eighty percent of travelers use the express or direct bus services. Best of all, Curitibanos spend only about 10 percent of their income on travel—much below the national average.”
Download the full article as pdf file

Amazing statistics, and amazing results are just as possible in India as it was in Brazil, if only we tried. I am not advocating that we now start importing Brazilian ideas by dropping the American dream. Far from it, but I do call for an application of local imagination in each of our cities to tailor new solutions that are appropriate in each case and then use of community processes that were called for in the Eames India Report that use design imagination and articulation to discover what India and Indians believe is a good life going forward. While science and technology and engineering are the “Art of the Possible” we must understand that design and politics can be seen as the “Art of the Desirable” and the debate must begin here with an application of imagination which is the “Design Way” and not just with street level opposition and arguments, which is the “Political Way”, whieh is something that we see exercised daily in our very democratic nation. However the "Design Way" must be given its due soon if we are to find the solutions from here. One positive outcome of all the Shingurs, Nandigrams and the grid-locks in our cities will be the possibility of a rethink when we too will look at design scenarios as a way forward and I do hope it is sooner than later.

Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights

Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights download 36 page pdf file 1.1 mb here.
I was invited this afternoon to lecture to a batch of PhD candidates at the CEPT University and I chose to speak on the topic of “Design as Research: A path to Knowledge Creation and for Critical Insights”. Many design schools and University departments are asking their teachers to acquire PhD qualifications and almost all of the candidates are required to go outside the design discipline to make the transition to a higher qualification if they are to be promoted. However there is little appreciation of the inherent research capacities that are embedded in the design process itself and most designers are required to wander outside their core areas of competence in search of a PhD qualification to further their career as a teacher in design. The question whether the qualification would make them better teachers of design is not in the frame of reckoning and I felt that our understanding of design has in recent years moved far enough to ask for a degree of clarity on this front.

Many design thinkers, have in recent years, made available valuable insights into the role of design research and this occasion gave me the opportunity to revisit some of their writings and to put together my own arguments on the nature of design as it is seen today by some of us and what it could be in the days ahead. In my search for published resources I did not need to go far from my own room since I had been gathering a number of current resources on design thinking and design research and my office has a mini-library that is fairly up-to-date on this particular topic. It gave me the platform to connect the discussions that have been going on the few discussion lists that I am a member of with particular reference to the PhD-Design list which is a platform where over 1200 design professors have been debating these very issues over the past few years and their discourse has been a source of great inspiration and learning for me. The other list that I participate in is the AnthroDesign list, which has many designers, ethnographers and anthropologists; all discussing tools and techniques of design research and this too has been a very stimulating platform of rich learning.

Many of the current thinkers and those who have done considerable research on the topic of design research and its unfolding trajectories are here on these lists and many who may be lurking on these lists too occasionally make significant contributions through their occasional offerings that provides a rich source of intellectual stimulation. I have been encouraging my students to observe these exchanges as best they could and to draw from these current insights about the state of the art in the profession and in academia. In India the DesignIndia list too has been a platform that connects many design professionals who may otherwise be disconnected from the world of design discourse.

For my lecture I was able to cull together insights from a number of published sources and the key arguments came for one key resource, which is the book by Peter Downton, Design Research, RMIT, 2003. I appreciated Downton’s position that, I quote, “Design is a way of inquiring, a way of producing knowing and knowledge, this means it is a way of researching”.


I built my own arguments on these statements and drew additional inputs from a comparison of the positions taken by Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, 1969 and the counterpoint offered by Donald Schon, in The Reflective Practitioner, 1983. The lecture explored the relationship between knowledge production in the sciences and what is produced during the design process. At NID we have developed our own models of the design process as part of the Design Concepts and Concerns course that is offered to all our students at the graduate as well as the post graduate levels. These models gave me the context for exploring the relationship between the various stages in a systems design journey and the corresponding types of knowledge that they generated. While we now have an appreciation of this phenomenon the design profession as well as the academia is still quite uncertain about the validity of their time tested processes and seek to get support and validation from the scientific discourse which is not quite able to fathom that complexities of the design way.

Here the quote by Alain Findelli in his introductory note to the Design plus Research conference at the Politechnico di Milano in 2000 draws our attention to the critical statement by Klaus Krippendorff as he bemoans the lack of faith that designers exhibit in their own knowledge and convictions.

“Probably the most notable pathology of design discourse is its openness to colonisation by other discourses... From within designers are groping for new conceptions and uncritically adopting the perspectives of other discourses invite into their discourse paradigms that may prove disabling in the long run, and incoherences that could break a community apart and systematically erode its identity” Klaus Krippendorff.

This gave me the occasion to discuss the recent books by leading design thinkers around the globe, all of whom have dealt with the changing nature of our design understanding as well as provided some very significant insights about the nature of the design activity as well as its role for humanity in the near and distant future. Research in design and about design are themes that are explored and the findings are helping shape a new identity for design as a field of research.
1. Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, Revolution, Harper & Row, 1972
2. Silvia Pizzocaro et al, Design plus Research, Politechnico di Milano, 2000
3. Peter Downton, Design Research, RMIT Press, 2003
4. Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing, Springer, 2006
5. Bryan Lawson, What Designers Know, Elsevier, 2004
6. Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A new foundation for design, Taylor & Francis, 2006
7. John Thackara, Wouldn’t it be great if…we could live sustainably – by design?, Design Council, 2007

Design and Design Research needs to discover their core offerings that cannot be substituted by any other form of scientific or academic research and then build a framework of confidence and conviction to offer their own discourse that can make the dream of building sustainable futures as a desirable direction for all of us as John Thackara has been demonstrating through his initiatives with the Design Council, UK as well as through his Doors of Perception initiatives in Europe as well as in India. Designers need to embrace design and the design journey with conviction and we will be able to then convince countries and governments to use this discipline to address the complex issues that confront all of us in our daily lives. Many of these cannot be solved or addressed by our known science methods and design must take centre stage if some of these truly wicked problems are to be solved at all. The paper and model of the design journey as well as the styles of thinking in the design process can be downloaded from this link as a pdf file 271 kb size.

My presentation to the CEPT University PhD class can be downloaded as a pdf file 1.1 mb size from this link: “Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights”.

Last year my lecture to the CEPT PhD candidates was about the Ethics of Design Research. The visual presentation of that lecture can be downloaded from this link as a pdf file of 58 kb size.

User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation

Paper and Visual presentation to the first National Conference on GeoVisualisation (GVDRP-2007) at NID in December 2007.
Image: Case Study on village resource mapping assignment by the students of Gandhinagar Campus of NID.

User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation: A presentation to the first Geovisualisation Conference at NID.

Prof. M P Ranjan
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group, DST
Faculty of Design, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

Abstract
The first National Conference on GeoVisualisation (GVDRP-2007) gives us a unique opportunity to reflect on the design opportunities that are emerging in our country for the creation of User Centric Design in the field of GeoVisualisation. Design can bring a new approach to the use of the amazing technologies that have been developed by science and technology and this is an area that we will need to focus on if the current developments are to be put to effective use by ordinary people in their day to day lives.

India lives in many centuries and the rapid strides of development and the forces of globalisation are impacting the lives of all of us, particularly those who live and work in the rural sectors of our economy. It is here that most of our people live and perhaps where we should be making an effort to make a positive impact through a concerted effort to make the tools and processes accessible to the people who need it the most. How do we achieve this when the tools and technology has been held and operated by educated and urban oriented individuals and institutions and when these are not designed to be available to the rural inhabitants? This is perhaps where design imagination can create new avenues for the application of these new tools and techniques in a democratic and ubiquitous manner all over our land. Is this a pipe dream or can or be a reality? Can we demonstrate this possibility in a few significant case studies so that it evokes a sense of commitment across the country to use these now widely available resources particularly in an IT enabled manner.

Image: Case Study of a student project by Sujay Swadi Sanan made by hand drawn buildings to illustrate the Heritage Walk Map for the Old City of Ahmedabad. In this paper we will show that many new applications are indeed possible and these would cover the hitherto ignored areas of application in a participatory manner to make it both usable and relevant to the local condition and the aspirations of the people whom it is to serve. Some suggestions have been made using examples of classroom and research projects conducted by the students and faculty of the National Institute of Design to show how the tools and knowledge domains in the area of geovisualisation can be applied to new and interesting applications that can reach far into our rural hinterland and how these could become a mission that would be achieved through active user participation to address local needs and aspirations in a variety of critical areas of application. These could be called design opportunities since the intention is to add value to the local situation through making the information and knowledge both usable as well as accessible to the users in their own domains.

The areas of application that we see are in mapping out the resources and local knowledge resources in a highly usable geospatial data base that is empowered and enabled by local participation and with the close involvement of local school and professional participants. For this to work we would need a back end that is technology enabled and based on web based tools as well as a field level strategy to keep the database alive and locally relevant. The fields of application could be for stakeholders in primary and secondary education as well as to empower the enormous skill base that promises to become the foundation of the creative economy of the future just as it has been an active ingredient in the sustenance of the rural economy in the past. Blending the past and the future to meet emerging needs could give us immediate benefits as well as long term resources to move our economy forward with wide participation of many sectors of our population. The areas that we envisage are village resource mapping that could be carried out and maintained by the use of simple and usable technologies in conjunction with sophisticated but highly usable backend technology tools and infrastructure. Such maps would keep local data of interest to local stakeholders as an area of priority and the creation and utilization could be carried out in a decentralized manner while remaining usable for a host of administrative and developmental situations.

Image: Case Study of the proposed web enabled and geo-referernced database of handicrafts clusters in India that could be used to empower and enable the creation of creative industries based on a rich local resource of skills and tarditional knowledge. The examples that are shared include a heritage walk at Ahmedabad, a village resource and design opportunity mapping venture, a craft skill and distribution mapping research as well as some speculative applicatioins that are proposed to be taken up with design students at NID in the near future. These design driven applications and explorations will be local in character but some of the insights that are gleaned would help set the agenda for a wider mission based application that would bring huge benefits to the stakeholders across the country. It is proposed that the DST and the NID Centre for Geovisualisation could partner in the research that is needed to make these design journeys that will set the tone for new and effective applications of Geovisualisation in the country.

The visual presentation titled "User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation" can be downloaded from here as a 1.9 MB pdf file.

First National Conference on Geovisualisation: Welcome Address by Prof. M P Ranjan

Image: Screenshot of village study done by NID students as part of the Data Visualisation course to explore applications for geovisualisationWelcome Address delivered to the 1st National Conference on GeoVisualisation held at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad on 28th to 30th November 2007. This was co-sponsored by The NRDMS (DST) Government of India, New Delhi and the NID, Ahmedbad.

Prof. M P Ranjan
Chairman, Geovisualisation Task Group
and
Faculty of Design, National Institute of Design

Welcome to NID and this is a good time to raise some questions as well as to try and provide some answers.

I have four key questions and a host of associated answers. So let me begin with my Welcome address by addressing these one by one.

1. Why GeoVisualisation? What is it anyway?
What are the Issues and opportunities? What are the domains of application? In my personal agenda is another big question, which is, how do we make complex data dealing with geographic spatial implications visible and usable to the ordinary citizen in India.

We stand on a great tradition of cartography in India. A few years ago NID was requested by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India to work with the Office of the Survey of India to develop an exhibition to celebrate the Great Arc project which was the first ever mapping of a part of the globe and this had happened in India some 200 years ago. Since then India has been at the forefront of cartographic traditions and now it is time to take leadership again through excellence in Geovisualisation. In this we would be happy to partner with the NRDMS-DST who have sponsored this event as well as reflect on the work done in Ahmedabad by ISRO and many other organizations that has set a platform for this new field of Geovisualisation to take root in India with a strong partnership between Design and science and technology initiatives.

2. Why Design?
Design is now being defined as a much broader field that takes intentions to the creation of value to society and ecology through a process of thoughts and actions. Design deals with products and applications and it has a user focus while the dominant ideology is having a technology focus especially in the fields of application that we are dealing with in the areas of geovisualisation.
Through design we intend to address the needs of many sectors including education, development, planning, management and most critical of all in the induction of innovation into this sector and all the potential applications so that we can unfold huge value in the process of both creation as well as delivery.

3. Why this Conference?
The geovisualisation agenda can only be addressed by adopting a multi-disciplinary context as a given condition for moving forward since so many disparate skill sets would need to be integrated and this is an attempt to bring all these skill sets to a common platform to address our complex needs and opportunities. This is also an attempt to bring together the multiple knowledge domains of geography, cartography, computation, visualization and design in the service of real challenges that call for the use of geospatial data and representation for the core tasks of local planning as well as in decision support systems in a number of domains of application. We also need to build awareness, commitment and the linkages that are necessary to make the whole operation to be useful to the people at large in many parts of the country as well as in many walks of life and at many levels, local and national.

4. Why at NID?
The Institutional objectives of NID has taken us down a path of discovery and in recent years NID has set up a number of new initiatives that deal with technology design fusion that has culminated in the setting up of new programmes and disciplines and the setting up of two new campuses in Gandhinagar and at Bangalore. Both these initiatives are to supplement the work that has been done over the years at the Paldi campus dealing with promoting design as a core ability in a huge number of sectors of our economy, in my estimate, about 230 sectors that are in critical need of that discipline. NID has proposed the setting up of a Centre for Geovisualisation to provide a platform for research and design explorations in the various sectors of application of geovisualisation which would need a strong interface with the already developed areas of science and technology with particular emphasis in making these applications user friendly by addressing opportunities in usability and accessibility by those who need it the most. We hope to use this conference to help build the agenda for research and education to be conducted by the proposed centre and I would call on the participants to provide directions and suggestions for the NID team to take forward in the days ahead. We are also interested in showing through our interest and actions that the various investments in science, technology and management need to be supplemented by investments and the use of design in this very critical new field and that this would influence other such initiatives for partnership across disciplines in the days ahead.

Welcome to NID and to Ahmedabad. I would, like to take this opportunity to welcome all the speakers and delegates, students and experts to NID as well as to compliment the NID and DST teams that have done the background work to make this happen. I would particularly mention Dr Bibuda Baral and Rupesh Vyas of NID and Dr D Dutta of NRDMS, DST, Government of India and to their teams for their sustained efforts to help realize this event. I would also take this opportunity to thank the Geovisualisation Task Force team as the Chairman of the Committee for their active support in leading the deliberations that have culminated in the launch of the first National Conference on Geovisualisation and for setting in motion a chain of events that will be of huge significance in the years ahead. I will be speaking later on the theme of usability and in my presentation I will share my views on areas of application and on the design opportunities that I see for the read ahead in the field of Geovisualisation in India.

Science and Design: Reality check for India

A wily old “designer”, the first of a breed, lit up a bonfire outside a cave somewhere in South Africa and stayed the night in the cave behind it. We are told by Richard Dawkins that this happened regularly more than 2 million years ago and it certainly changed the course of human destiny. This was his design epiphany moment, and the first for human kind as they became the only species on planet earth to intentionally use fire to generate real value, starting with a feeling of security and a good nights rest. The rest is history. This act of pure insight set us apart from all the other species on earth, all an outcome of perhaps the first discernable human act of design, yes DESIGN!

Intentional action that generated real value!

Design, in its broadest sense, means the management of intentions through thought and action to generate real value. This was a true act of design done in good faith and if someone had tried to regulate his actions and ask for proof of future success, we would perhaps not have been around today to discuss these matters. The human use of fire started as an act of faith and knowledge of fire came much later, after many experiments and truth seeking reflections which is now called the process of science. While science and technology deal with finding truths and building specifications, design deals with reality check in particular context and in the marketplace, which cannot be checked in any laboratory or supported by an abstract proof. Design uses insights AND knowledge with feeling and concern for the context while science is a search for the ultimate truth. While the scientific process is immaculate, we must admit that it is faulted to a point where all truths, however hard earned they may be by repeated experiments and reflection supported by flights of fantasy and imagination, it must give way to the next big truth – the proof of which lies in the fallibility test – upon which the foundation of good science is built and nurtured. Design on the other hand must always fit the context, for the particular moment and the particular location and as Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman would have us believe from their book, the Design Way, in the ultimate particular form of something that works for us, here and now. Science searches for the general, and higher the level of generalization the higher it is in our esteem, closer to the ultimate truth. Design seeks the real and the possible, the politically correct path, closer to the needs and aspirations of the particular user, customized to be a perfect fit. The better its fit the better its perceived benefits and value in that particular context. In the best case scenario, so good is the fit that we even fail to notice its very existence and we fail to see it anymore, it almost disappears from our view and becomes one with our experience and becomes one with us, subsumed into our sub-conscious self, just like a part of our body and mind.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto is taking this intangible quality of design to a new level in management education in Canada with a significant impact across the developed world. He is introducing design understanding into management education with his call for the design of products and services to achieve a total experience, a sensory and intellectual experience, where the manifestations of the material and structure almost but disappear and get blended with the experiential memes of the individual user, the community of consumers and all the stakeholders – which includes the user and the service provider alike – a win-win situation that generates great value for all. He is quoted in a recent issue of Canadian Business, “Design in its broadest sense is figuring out the most elegant, efficient, effective way of doing something – the way that is most matched with the user’s needs. You create a system that efficiently delivers precisely what the customers want.” (pp 45, DB Nov 6-19, 2006). Yes, good business design is good for business and it is not about getting designers into the act, but about transforming business processes and offerings by putting design into each and every one of them, and this is a task for the empowered manager of the future, from the MBD programme that he has helped initiate to replace the thousands of old MBA programmes that dot the globe today. The MBD, Master of Business Design, is now in its third year at the Rotmans School of Management and its message will surely travel to all the other schools, and it is only a matter of time. Yes, it is about putting “Design inside everything”. If may use a modified expression borrowed from the Intel logo, a pun which was also stated by Uday Dandavate in his speech at the “Design with India” session at the Asia Society in New York this February.

We desperately need the message that Roger Martin brings to the Canadian management community if we are to are to combat the mediocrity that abounds in the popular tendering process that is mindlessly adopted by the Indian administration for all infrastructure and public expenditure on the pretext that it solves corruption in our society. Roger Martin’s is a call to bring imagination with some design thinking that would be acceptable to an entrepreneur which could include a dose of calculated risk into our public expenditure that is accompanied by good business sense of a CEO if we are to transform our country with design inside each and every one of these public offerings. Design for India would then mean putting design inside all government investments to bring out the true value of our intentions, surely a task fit for a new Ministry of Design, if we can take a progressive leap into the future of well designed governance in India that would touch the lives of all its citizens in a positive manner. Can we dream big? Can we dream our dreams and act right? Can we try and emulate the act of the first ever designer of two million years ago and set a new course for humanity, and of course for India, towards a better and sustainable future for all of us by using design. However, in India today the collective science and technology budgets of governments and business exceeds Rupees Sixty Thousand crores per year while that for design would be below Rupees One Hundred Crores, surely it is time to examine the proportions and make the required adjustments.

Perhaps we need to bring the spirit of Roger Martin’s debate to the National Design Summit in Bangalore this year if we are to convince the uninitiated and the skeptics in administration, finance and governance to make up for lost time, as a part of our determination to make the National Design Policy work for all of us across all the 230 sectors of our economy where it is needed most. We need design as it is broadly defined and we need it urgently, and we need it now!

References;

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Houghton Miffin Company, New York, 2004.

Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World -
Foundations and Fundamentals of Design Competence, Educational Technology Publications Inc., New Jersey, 2005.

Erin Pooley, “The Dean of Design”, Canadian Business, November 6-19, 2006, pp 45.

Rotman School of Management, website and links to Roger Martin papers.