They Did It!

Saskatchewan Roughriders: 23

Winnipeg Blue Bombers: 19

Herman Miller and Vitra bring back the spirit of the Eamses to Bangalore and India

50 years of the Eames Legacy: The spirit of the Eamses in Bangalore and India

Image: Prof Ranjan and Sridhar Harivanam at the Herman Miller office in Bangalore with the Eames Wire Chair
Charles and Ray Eames are back in Bangalore and their spirit and their design presence is palpable at the Herman Miller office in Indra Nagar, Bangalore as well as the Vitra International showroom on Lavelle Road, Bangalore. I was able to visit these places during this Diwali vacation on my brief stay in Bangalore. I had a mission to fulfill and this took me on an Eames tour of Bangalore, which is possible today since the furniture designs of this legendary Eames couple, Charles (1907 – 1978) and Ray (1912 -1988) are now available in Bangalore through the Herman Miller Inc. and the Vitra International offering. I have been requested by my Institute to explore and develop the concept for a major conference on the Eames legacy in India, which will reach a landmark of 50 years after the writing of the Eames India Report in November 2008. This task will give me the occasion to revisit the Eames story from a number of perspectives and I proposed to share the findings periodically on this blog in the days ahead. Look out for the conference announcement and details on the NID website.

Image: Eames Wire Chair at Herman Miler Bangalore
The Herman Miller office is located a few metres short of the flyover to the Airport Road from the Indra Nagar’s famous 100 feet road, this is one of the many multinational offices that are now dotting the Bangalore landscape and a stark reminder of the massive changes taking place in the Indian business environment. Design is taking centre stage through the arrival of the Eamses through their remarkable furniture, which used to be available only as expensive rip-offs but these are now offered as original licensed products with the legendary Herman Miller warranty for the first time in India. These do not come cheap due to the still high customs duty and exclusive pricing policies but the quality is immaculate and the design memorable to guarantee satisfaction.

Image: Prof Ranjan with the Eames Chaise Lounge at the Vitra Show room in Bangalore. designed and prototyped in 1948 for Museum of Modern Art exhibition it was brought to market by Vitra in 1991.
On the other hand the Vitra business model is unique since all offerings from the Bangalore showroom are made to order at their factory in Germany and shipped direct to the customer in exclusive shipments. Vitra had licensed the Eames products originally from Herman Miller for sale in Europe and the Middle East between 1957 and 1984, but in 1984 the rights were transferred to Vitra who have been offering the products directly to their customers.
Image: A wall at Vitra Bangalore showing the exquisitely made miniature classics offered by Vitra Design Museum
I am sure that the Indian audience will gain insights about the Eames legacy and would appreciate the finer aspects of their design offerings if they have a first hand exposure to the design philosophy and product quality that is represented by the furniture designs on offer by these two licensed producers who have been faithfully following the Eames detailing and keeping the product collections in production over the years. The Eames molded plastic chair for instance has seen an amazing production run of over 5 million pieces in the 25 years after it was designed in the 1950s and it is still as fresh as it was when it was first offered.

There is much more to the Eamses than meets the eye and we will need to devote more space and time to explore the variety of design offerings that they brought to the table. Furniture, products, toys, exhibitions, animation and live action films, photography as well as the now famous “History Wall” for many specific exhibitions which was a fore-runner for the hypermedia structure that has emerged on the web, and I would like to explore all these dimensions in the days ahead.

Image: A snapshot of a quote from the Eames India Report as it appeared in the Design Issues from the MIT Press
I close this post with the opening quote from the Eames India Report, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, that sets the tone and context for the new design Institute that they proposed to the Government of India in 1958, the then proposed National Institute of Design which was eventually set up at Ahmedabad in 1961. More to come.

Grey Cup Bound!

Saskatchewan Roughriders: 26

B.C. Lions: 17

Here we come Winnipeg!

What Next?

I have a list of things I want to do in the shop/garage (build a router table/stand, build a rolling table saw stand, build a lumber cart, build some kid's canoe paddles), but I'm starting to think about what boat is next.

I think a small kid's kayak will be first - the Yost Sea Flea perhaps. (Here is a recently completed example.) Boatbuilder Donald Taylor visited me while in town a few months ago on a trip from his home in New Brunswick. In addition to showing me photos of his guillemot, he also showed me photos of the Sea Flea he built for his 6-year old daughter. We talked a lot about the building process for the Sea Flea and my wife too thinks this would be a good thing to build for our daughters. I mentioned the idea to our older daughter and she is quite excited by the prospect of having her own kayak that she could help me build. In fact, I recently found this drawing taped to the wall: (excuse the b&w scan)

It looks like she's taking on some nice wave's in her kayak!
So I guess that's been decided and it's just a matter of when, how, and what colour.

Then maybe another kayak, for me this time. I think it would be a stitch & glue in order to get something on the water a little quicker. Something like the Point Bennett 18 maybe. A folding skin-on-frame kayak like one of those designed by Tom Yost has a certain amount of appeal too.

Or maybe my next build should be a fast tandem tripping canoe. Like the Green Valley Winisk (I already have the forms for a Kipawa, but I think something larger would fit the family better) or the Bear Mountain Freedom 17-9.

Or, maybe I'll go big with the 18'6" E. M. White Guide canoe from Gilpatrick's book or Green Valley's Quetico. Or maybe I'll go smaller with a solo canoe. The stitch & glue Osprey II from Green Valley appeals to me because of the quicker build of a S&G boat, but I think it's too small for me (plus I can't seem to find it on their web site any more?). The 16-2 Freedom Solo seems pretty much perfect though for me in that category. Or maybe I'll build a small tandem, something I can paddle solo but can have my girls along while they are still small, or which they could tandem paddle when they are older.

However, before I build anything else I want to improve the wiring in the garage/shop & the heating as well. Hmm, maybe I should go clean up the garage first.

World Usability Day at Bangalore: Lecture on Social Equity and Design

Towards an Accessible World: Opportunities for Designers was the title for my lecture. This image is part of the model prepared by my students who as part of the Data Visualisation course at Gandhinagar Campus visited one village called Sahpur in Gandhinagar to look at design opportunities in a typical Indian Village. Looking at the particular as part of usability was my focus in my lecture. rather than talking about the Target Audience we need to look at the needs and aspirations of Meena and Mohan in the Indian context.

The World Usabality Day is a concept driven by volunteers across the world and by industry visionaries who have found value in supporting the event with corporate sponsorship. This year I was invited to speak at the mini conference at the National Institiute of Advanced Science (NIAS) auditorium which is located at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. From 3.00 pm to 7.30 pm on a Monday evening when Bangalore is hard at work dealing with the worlds information technology opportunities about 200 or more IT professionals from some of the leading national and multinational companies managed to get away to look at usability and design in critical areas of our lives. Braving the traffic and driving all the way across Bangalore they stayed till the end of the show only to spend the next hour or two to get back home after an eventful evening. The lectures were stimulating and informative and the crash workshop in envisioning usable new services and product concepts in three areas of need that was on the minds of the organizers, all volunteer IT professionals working in the usability space.

The enthusiasm and commitment that they brought to the workshop session was quite amazing. After some lead lectures by Dr. Girish Prabhu, a case study of a new internet access computer developed by Intel, Prof M P Ranjan speaking on design opportunities that can bring social equity to Indian villages and the lead organizer Sarit Arora of Human Factors, Bangalore sharing a usability test on the new Indian Railways ticket booking site the conference broke up into assigned teams to explore the design challenges. Three broad areas included services for the elderly, a low cost cell phone and a health information system for Indian villages. Each challenge zone had three teams and the format for innovation was intense and got all the creative juices flowing for a few action filled minutes of discussion, ideation and modeling. The half hour extended to another quarter and the five jury members went around reviewing one group at a time, each in a two minute show and tell format, very exciting.

This exciting interlude was followed by two more lectures and case presentations. One by Dr Reynold Washington and his IT colleague H Gururaj on the health care information system that he had helped develop for sex workers in Karnataka and Maharashtra and the insights that were gleaned from this pilot study which is now being rolled out in an improved format. The second was by Sean Olin Blagsvedt from babajobs.com sharing the prototype services that they had developed for converting the informal networks that all of us use to get domestic assistances and their efforts to design and build it as a viable business proposition. The challenges in these two case studies revealed the huge opportunity that existed in India at the non industrial sectors for IT services and value added web services that could address latent needs that have remained outside the ambit of organized business at the bottom of the pyramid.

Dr Prabhu reflected on why the Intel efforts had failed in India although they had used the best of class problem solving techniques in developing the product and the technology for the village based internet kiosk project. I saw that they had focused on the technology. Battery backup, heat tolerance and dust resistant casing and all the other front end and back end systems that should make the system work, but it failed, why? The focus seemed to be on making a robust and low cost solution but I did not hear what the village folks were supposed to do with the whole offering and it seems to me that this may have been the key to the failure of the whole effort, focus on technology and economy and missing the user and their particular condition in the location. The effort to evolve a general solution may have led to the local opportunity being missed and the product failed. There may be other reasons which we will only know if we look deeply It is ironic that the case was presented at a conference on usability when the core reason for the failure was caused by a lack of it.

Sarit Arora presented the Indian Railway ticket booking system and the tests showed a series of gross failures in addressing usability issues in the web based system and the interface. The home page had no picture of a train as one would expect and the user testing protocols showed a whole lot of missed opportunities and missed cues to help users move forward to achieve their objective of booking a ticket. My own assessment was that the case showed a stark failure of design from first principles which cannot be set right by usability testing. However most administrators and corporations would invest in usability testing of a poor solution rather than invest in a good design solution in the first place, a common problem that we see all the time in India. With huge investments being made in product testing and standardization and very poor investment in innovation and design across all fields of application.

The healthcare case by Dr Reynold Washington and Gururaj too was another example of a great challenge of a problem located in a complex context which was dealt with a huge commitment by the use of dedication and use of technology however in spite of all the data that was shared about the stated success of the efforts in containing the spread of HIV and Aids there seemed to be a complete lack of the use of design, once again the promise of technology and administrative diligence are held out as dependable and justifiable and measurable answers while we can envision that by using design at the macro micro level as a system the impact and effectiveness would be different. The use of the integrating force of design is missed here in their presentation which I do believe will make a significant change, if only they tried. Once again a missed opportunity for the use of the multiplier effect of design in a truly wicked problem.

Sean Olin Blagsvedt made an exhilarating presentation on their efforts to build a startup internet service called babajob.com and explained the business model of the social networking site which was also a business with clients, agents, mentors and applicants. The task is complex and it holds promise of delivering some real felt needs at an affordable price. A lot will depend on the quality of decisions that they take at both the strategic levels as well as at the level of detail, both will need to be addressed adequately if the offering is to be sustainable and valuable at the same time.

My own presentation dealt with design opportunities that could usher in social equity particularly in the rapidly changing rural landscape across India as well as in the numerous sectors of need across the thematic sectors such as Nature, Life, Work, Health and Play. These categories were used to get our students in the Design Concepts and Concerns course to explore and inform the range of possibilities and these explorations can be seen on our education blog here. The call for moving our focus from the general to the particular was characterized by the need to shift our attention from talking about a target audience at the general level to thinking and looking at “Meena and Mohan” as they live and work in their own situations and context in an immersive manner if we are to ensure a proper fit and result in bringing empowerment and social equity to all their transactions with business and society in general. The electronic voting machine and a study of a particular village are offered as case studies for the proposed design approach. The presentation 1 MB pdf file can be downloaded here.

The conference organizers here in Bangalore, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and the CHI Bangalore have proposed to place the video recordings of the lectures on YouTube and when they do I will provide a link here. You can see more about the World Usability Day, Bangalore conference at this link here.

PDF file of 1 MB size of my lecture can be downloaded from this link here. Towards an Accessible World: Opportunities for Designers

Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Business School that is steeped in Design Understanding

Image: Six Recent covers of the Rotman Magazine
Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Business School that is steeped in Design Understanding
Besides the KaosPilot, a small school located in Aarhus, Denmark that I wrote about on this very blog (see 22 July 2007 post) there is another cool school that has been seriously using design thinking and action as their primary tool for preparing management students to face the challenges of the emerging creative economy. This is the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in The University of Toronto. Since 1998, when their Dean – Roger Martin – came to the school from industry with his insights that design was something that all successful business leaders used intuitively, he decided to articulate an innovative path forward in management education by applying this insight to the design of business programmes. They have come a long way since then and the efforts are bearing fruit if we look at the acknowledgement that is coming from the business press.

Businessweek and Fortune magazine have both already rated the school among the top ten schools which is a hard fought position of recognition for leadership in a highly competitive space of business education across the globe. In my view they are already ahead of the best since they have seen the value of design and innovation and have managed to integrate the lessons into the programmes offered to their students. The future is already here. I would like to see this interest in design and creativity enter into the fabric of management education in all our Indian schools and only then do I believe will we be able to achieve the universal mission of quality of life that the "Eames India Report" had called for way back in 1958 when the NID was being contemplated in India. (download Eames Report pdf 359kb)

BusinessWeek has once again recognized the contributions of the Rotman Dean, Roger Martin and he has been named a “B-School All Star” – According to BusinessWeek – “Martin's micro-innovation mantra has shot through business circles worldwide: To succeed, he says, corporate managers should become flexible problem-solvers, not sophisticated numbers-crunchers.“ – In 2005, his inventive teachings, which meld business and design thinking, earned him a spot on BusinessWeek's list of "innovation gurus."

Rotman School has adopted a policy of integrating design into management education and to quote an official communiqué of the school which says – “The University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management has set out to become one of the world's top tier business schools. Located in North America's 3rd largest financial centre, the Rotman School is taking an innovative approach to management education, built around Integrative Thinking™ and Business Design™”, which will amply illustrate my point.

The Rotman focus on innovation and creativity has been able to attract great faculty to their school and now Richard Florida, the guru of the Creative Economy fame, has joined forces with the school to build its forward movement, as reported by the school.

Image: More covers – a must see list
Will the numerous Indian schools of management take note of these moves taking place far away, half way across the globe, and will the Government of India listen to these examples and relent to include design at the core of its planning agenda? Only time will tell, since we can only hope and wait to see if these messages sink in and bear fruit eventually, which I do hope is sooner than later. The lessons from the Rotman School of Management are thankfully available for all to see through their remarkable programme of publication that has been sustained over the last ten years with three issues each year, each addressing a specific theme or industry sector and each exploring in depth how design thinking and innovation can make a significant impact across these sectors, very impressive indeed. All the issues of their magazine can be downloaded from their website at this link here. The image above would just give a glimpse of what to expect, go get it.

Great stuff. Very stimulating indeed.

The New Shaneslogic Webpage

Hey Folks
I have moved my blog to a different address and I posted a new article about the Remix 100.
A race boat designed for the Green Race. I hope some of you are going to be at the race this weekend.
Cheers
Shane

This is the new link.
http://shaneslogic.net