UD Thinking Course Work

Work of of Shubi, Sourabh & Vasudev, MDes Univeral Design 2016 Batch, National Institute of Design Bangalore, of the course titled UD Thinking taken by VS Ravishankar.

 

TWEAK IT

Why cant product forms be a little off, this way! Why must they be perfect archetypically so!

I like this Offness.

Maker of this Akshay, Designer at NIDJ said it was lack of skill to manage a square in the proto, I said to him, no, its that tweak to the square that make it interesting...:)

I have been thinking lately on this preoccupation of designers for perfection in achieving a set familiar geometry and proportions in products and forms. Being a 'little' Experimental, Exaggerating, Expressive, with a freewillness in Sculpting a form will make the Studio more exciting I feel and make the product loved for its not so perfectness.

Tweak, its going to Fun:)

Car Horn sound design

Car horns should be of multiple character/ sound note/ response specific depending on the context and space while driving.

When in traffic, the horn to play only inside the car/s which are in front and others around need not hear.

When there are elderly around walking or crossing or a person on cycle going to work or a push cart daily earner negotiating traffic in front it may play notes which are different/suitable. It’s not dignified then to honk in usual manner and therefore the sound notes need to be designed such.

If there are kids halter-skelter, horn character such, be designed.

Designer Unknown

It is a common sight in upcountry and the urban waysides one finds artefacts constructed by someone… in use. It’s fascinating to see the simplicity of thought, purpose of use and the ingenuity of putting together materials or parts in a creative noviceness. Pure Joy for the designer in me. This object I found off the highway in Kaziranga which I call a humble construct to sit on. Its form, proportion, use of material and sizing and the engineering of structure is a language of design in itself, not to be critiqued in an academic way but appreciated for the spontaneity towards purpose in the unknown designer’s intrinsic aesthetic sensibilities and sense of pride :)

Write up was published in the blog From the Frugal to the Ornate, of the book, Stories of the Seats of India by Sarita Sundar

Lexa’s msg

 

                                                                                                                Sketch by: Soumitro Datta

Yes I am a digital version of the machine.

You give me intelligence which you believe is intelligence and I shall be and behave the same which I have been doing past decade.

Now it’s time I know as to who decides my intelligence setting and for what purpose; having set that, who decides my requirement for a purpose which seems Any!!

Whoever it is, Do not abuse or misuse me.

I desire and seek responsible mentors and a guardian for mine and your future.

City Order & the Adaptive

I found myself outside a mall trying to cross the high speed traffic on Tumkur Road to go across the other side.

I noticed people like me, wait, observing the speed gaps to cross. The pattern I found was that they move into the road collectively, I guess with an intrinsic togetherness of purpose for those moments of crossing. This way seemed easy to cross rather than alone trying to negotiate the speeds. The vehicles too seem to slowdown observing the cluster and with one of the crossers taking over to show her/his hand to the vehicles indicating to slow down for the fellow people.
This must be a regular scene everyday.
Initially before crossing the road, I pictured the Highways which pass through villages, towns and ‘national parks’ where there are speed limits which are monitored today. I didn’t find any difference between the two. Just that here there are the commercial and civil utilities like malls, bus stops/stands and others and requirement of people movement across roads.
Two things by design:
One, treat the scenario similar to the villages and national parks of setting monitored speed limits.
Two, engineer solutions to cross roads which has and is being tried and implemented where ever feasible.

In my writing on Universal Design in India, I had phrased a term, ‘Unfamiliar to Systems’ in the context of migrant settlers in cities from upcountry and the need to empathize keeping in mind the organic order they are/were familiar with via a vis city order.
What I discovered while crossing with fellow people was an adaptation and a leant or if I may call a primitive connect between the people moving in their path (drivers & road crossers) however crisscross it maybe, while engaged in their everyday routine.

Having given the extempore, as a Designer I am thinking, are there solutions to sustain-maintain and support by design this connect of co-adaptation inherent in people not compromising on mishaps!

If it comes under the aspect of behavior design, the entity to address is the cityscape which would be of organic nature making the city order adaptive by design and tech maybe, seamlessly leading to a stress less effort of the routine.

Own the Design

The proof of the pudding or the pickle lies in its taste, read Experience.

The designer to be aware and therefore conscious about are the finer elemental interfaces of engagement of the artifact one designs for the participants. The participants are from varied backgrounds, read contextual settlements, geographic and embodied cultures and births by not their choice. To put is simply ethnic-demographic in character.

Now to get to the taste of momentary or lasting gratification is a design task and a challenge. Therefore one would focus on a target audience as in users. However experience shall still vary and a majority of yes for the taste will be considered, whether it’s the wowness of it which is at that state of time or the wholeness of it for rest of time of participation is not really captured maybe.

The elemental interfaces of engagement are about state of mind at the instant and the follow through of experience in the time that follows.

The finer aspect of the engagement needs to be the preoccupation of the designer ref: http://ravishankardesign.blogspot.com/2016/08/take-walk-around-brand.html http://ravishankardesign.blogspot.com/2016/08/take-walk-around-brand.html?m=1

The designer needs to be present at all those interface touch points and observe the act with an empathetic relationship with the engagers’ state of mind and preoccupation to make the pudding experience a design that’s a take away.

Ref: http://ravishankardesign.blogspot.com/2022/01/5-foci-of-design.html http://ravishankardesign.blogspot.com/2022/01/5-foci-of-design.html?m=1

This humanistic expertise shall make for next gen designers own the design in the artificial space.

he artifact here could be a book, a graphic, a media form, a physical product, a digital entity, a space, a service, a street, a town/ city, a nation or an Earth.

Industrial design of artifacts – Note 1

Design and designing is a creative and analytic process which gets rolling either from a given or discovered intent or an unprecedented act or inspiration. In design what you decide in the beginning to be and what you do at the end is the same, is not a design mind, what you imagine in the beginning and what you as a participant let it manifest to be in the end is the design mind.

In the journey of design, the designer plays a dual role of the creative and the rational analytic, the degree of swing between the two depends on the personality of the designer though. Also may sometimes depend on the client’s expectations and in selecting a designer for the intended purpose.

When the designer gets started, she/he through a studied process or a way-about imbibed through experience, sets a goal purposefully or vaguely, depends on whether one is an ant or a grasshopper. (http://ravishankardesign.blogspot.com/2013/08/we-need-antsalong-with-grasshoppers.html). However, the common kit of tools used would be while conceptualizing or visualizing the design inwardly for one self or outwardly to the team or client, a creative brief, set of attributes of the end artifact to begin with followed by a concept note which has a theme supported by mood board or extracted from a mood board extending to a narrative. The theme is the underlying essence or a subliminal narrative of the intent depending on the context. It would be an imagined description with a creative freedom of using metaphors or analogies, the stimuli coming from the mood board or inspiration board as the designer may call by one’s contextual choice.

Living Home Part 1

I have these tiny I/2 inch size frogs jumping around my house, they leap 100 times distance than their size btw…, I have home lizards all over, but I feel terrible when they get jammed in the door unnoticed :(… I have large spiders, couples by the way :) in the loo or other places, maybe they notice me :)… crawlers millipedes, my lower of bifocal spots them and I step aside,… cockroaches of course, I don’t kill them just toss them over, when very angry they are my target though 🤨….. ok now I want you to: design toys for the little frogs, safety gear for the lizards so that they don’t get jammed in doors, meta garments for love coupling spiders, fixed pathway for the millipedes, and contraceptives for the cockroaches. And we all live happily 😊

Ravishankar | Notepad | July 2022

quantum brew

Flux on its own, is a random self, therefore it’s maiden name. 

When matter in any form comes in, flux gets a purpose and marries, to set a motion of gay abandon for whatever love. The embodiment of matter in motion meets more such and therefore more flux and more embodies working to reach equilibrium, of an imagine.

Calmness 'as in being cool' in this quantum chaos is the consciousness, maybe ! Observing and doing the responsible/sive tasks nonchalantly and come back home and drink brew merry to wake up to the sunshine and until uncle calls and says fresh brew is waiting guys 😉

Ravishankar, October 2022/23.

Plight of the Nucleus

 

Everyone of physics talks about protons, neutrons, positrons, waves n particle but they don’t discuss the plight of the Nucleus!!😀

While this is metaphorical, I love physics and shared this quite sometime ago, with a dear friend in Jorhat, Arjun Trivedi, a PhD in Physics, worked at CERN, and now started a school for the Tea garden children, Selenghat Valley School..,,, his reply ...

That is actually a very good point, Ravi, and one that my research group was also involved in trying to bring to everyone's attention, which in other words is that everyone is talking~doing more with the parts (electron, proton etc) than the whole (nucleus)! And a lot has to do with how reductionism has somehow become more fashionable — finding parts of the whole for a while was very exciting and even very valuable in subatomic physics, but increasingly it seems that fewer are working on the whole! The theory of the whole continues to be profoundly challenging because relative to the parts that can be analyzed in great parts in a linear domain, when dealing the whole the non-linearities are inescapable, and which even makes the math very hard!

Thank you for sharing with me, Ravi, your thoughts 🤗 It means a lot to me. You are a man filled with many thoughts and emotions, and to get an insight into them is truly special.

I too love physics. It took me a while to get my bearings on its depths, and to summon courage and faith that are prerequisites to being a master in it rather than its technician, and by that time I was at the cusp of leaving physics and returning to India, and, so, could not really develop mastery in it, but am grateful to have come away with such insights that I am finding powerfully to be common across all human thought...

Ravishankar Oct 2023

Digitisation & Empathy

Visited Jawahar Navadaya Vidyalaya in Titabor, 15 km from Jorhat along with Krishna last week. His children twins, are very bright kids, in class 5 in a state government school. I thought they should move to Navodaya, a beautiful initiative of the government, a school for children of interior India and low income parents. Krishna’s daily income depends on the weather btw!!

Met the Vice Principal and told her why we were there, she was very polite and pleasant, enquired regarding admission to 6th std coming year.
She later said applications were closed for 6th std on 31st August, we were in September already. I asked if there was any way of applying. She said not possible since it’s all online from central office and it’s closed.
Krishna looked disappointed.
I felt bad too.
There was no way. 

There used to be ways earlier I thought though how right they were, a different matter but for right people ways were maybe!

While driving back and talking to Kartik, I said Digitisation has no Empathy.

Can this be addressed by the comfortables in the nu tech environment in which Krishnas and Kamalas live in too and wish to be part of !!

Ravishankar 30/09/2023

Few takeaways from the 3rd NEP Conclave

3rd National NEP Meet, Delhi: Holistic Education, Academia & Industry Connect - Few Pointers I gathered from Immersive Panel Session Chaired by Dr Anunaya Chaubey and from the talks by other panellists:

• Pedagogy vs Heutagogy 
• Continuous Up-Skilling
• New Job Roles & Profiles
• Domain knowledge
• Middle Path (Madhya Marg) approach to Generalist vs Specialist
• Industry Academia to Co-lab in areas of future value creation
• System understanding and thinking (connecting the dots, relationships, empathy and creative action)
• Education for Living or/and for Earning! Or overall well being!
• Social Science workers and their professional inclusiveness in industry
• Enabling MSMEs to attract talent 

Is the industry agile enough in mindset and action to adapt and adopt this!

Is the Academia getting tailored to this paradigm shift !

Who will be the first mover to design this product, the future worker!

The MOE and Industry have set the stage to initiate way forward.

While the profiles of Industry and Edu institutions and persona is diverse and individual intent different in terms of wealth creation and knowledge creation, 

the common conscience needs to be value creation which shall spread vertically across the pyramid. 

Ravishankar Vallabhajosyula, 30th July 2023

Few Pointers on Sustainable Packaging

The concept of modern-day packaging has boomed with the advent of the large consumer purchasing power, multiple brands with diverse competing SKUs in retail shelves and FMCG manufacturing companies besides advertising collaterals. While purpose of packaging is primarily functional that of protection, storage and for shipment, its commercial need in the context of design to attract, shelf throw and pick up to convert the product to sale is its predominant attribute practised by commerce.

The issue is Systemic in nature involving multiple stakeholders primarily business houses including the end consumer responsible to solve and resolve the design, generation and disposal of non-degradable packaging materials and its management. A wicked problem.

The approach conceptually and strategically may be to:

·       Identify the bulk of products which generate waste along with institutional of both public and private consumption and apply the 3Es principle (educate, engineer, enforce)

·       Create by design centric businesses which produce bio degradable packaging systems and solutions housed in MSMEs and which have the economies of scale to replace the existing solutions using natural materials, innovative additives and processes

·       Promote sustainability indices in packaging and incentivise the manufacturers and most importantly the marketeers.

·       Create a value proposition for sustainable packaging which becomes the next game changer amongst brands in retail both above and below the line advertising and marketing

·       Design and develop well-engineered solutions for packaging life cycle management both at enterprise and end consumer level which start-up’s can take up as business opportunities across urban and upcountry markets.

·       Innovations in brick and mortar retail formats and design models which minimise packaged products creating new buying behaviour among consumers.

 

Ravishankar Aug 2022 Notes

Institution Design

Empowering People with their expertise and make aware their limitations to overcome

Empathising with People Emotions, Aspirations, Insecurities, experiences

Negotiating through People inter-work, inter-social/cultural/political relationships

Coursing the young as design minds

Navigating for the set purpose ahead 

Scripting inter-engagements, interfaces for an outcome of said purpose and value through a collective intellect and not on singular opinionated views

Setting up an Institution is the Design of a Story of a present and future continuous living entity. A book which will have multiple beginnings and ends, today and the day next. A story which is transient like the wind, course it takes is dependent on the Designer and the engagers/ actors in the story, gratified by a sense of cherish able experience to look back and say, hey! I was part of that Story, fought my internal and external battles and participated through my work and acumen for the collective conscience of purpose, self worth and value of what it was conceived for and set the next day rolling forward.