Design for a System

‘Object Subjectified’

DITO [Data-Intelligence-Tangible Object]

Products of utility by daily universal users, products of operators’ use, products of enterprise users are becoming more embedded with digital intelligent technologies like AI with sensor driven systems data inputs or human behavior and pattern inputs as data, inputs from web resources.

Products have evolved from objects to subjects with personality, behavior, etc, where one would look at a product and instead of ‘what is it, would ask ‘Who is it’ …or get introduced to it as so and so…   

In this paradigm shift, away from the conventional ways of present and past, the Product Design Process for designers while conceptualizing and designing this subject would look and flow like this while the broad attributes of Meaningfulness, Compatibility, Universal, User agency remain primary:

The DITO Design Process

Map Context

(the purpose, environment of use, research, creative brief setting, user agency)

Capture Mental Models

(Users familiarity and unfamiliarity of use from past experience, user knowledge, use cognitive abilities and inabilities, user preoccupations & state of mind)

Identify Metaphor

(Give it an Identity)

Conceptualise Scenarios

(visualize the product in use by the universal users or target users as the case maybe)

Set Behaviors

(personality, characteristics)

Give Form

(Look, Touch & Feel)

Set Materials

(ecocomposite sustainables, perishable)

Make Actualise

(Collaborate, Build, Prototype, Test)

Fine tune

(Iterate, final design, Specifications)

Ship

The infographic developed in collab with notebookLM

Masters in design: Trajectory Qualification Curriculum

 This curriculum outlines key pointers for a progressive Masters in Design program, fostering deep expertise, adaptability, and leadership in design practice. It builds from foundational appreciation to strategic leadership, integrating systems thinking, innovation, and ethics.

Core Curriculum Key Pointers

• Design Appreciation & Adoption
  Cultivating empathy and integration of design principles into diverse contexts.
• Design Thought & Adaptation
  Evolving design methodologies to respond to dynamic challenges.
• Research for Design
  Rigorous inquiry methods tailored to design innovation and problem-solving.
• Contextual Mindfulness
  Awareness of cultural, environmental, and societal influences on design.
• Conceptual Liberty
  Encouraging bold, unconstrained ideation and boundary-pushing creativity.
• Visualisation & Demonstration Skills
  Mastering tools for communicating complex ideas through visuals and prototypes.
• Intent Clarity
  Defining purpose-driven design outcomes with precision and focus.
• Artefact/Product Service System Design
  Holistic development of tangible products, services, and integrated systems.
• Action Inclusive Thought & Design
  Participatory processes that embed stakeholder agency from ideation to implementation.
• Negotiate Design Requirements over Business Goals
  Balancing creative integrity with commercial viability and strategic alignment.
• Innovation/Technology & Social
  Bridging tech with socially responsible outcomes.
• Strategy & Presentation
  Formulating design strategies and pitching them effectively to stakeholders.
• Creatives Management
  Leading teams of creatives through collaborative workflows and resource optimization.
• Design Leadership
  Guiding organizations and projects toward design-centered transformation.
• Design Ethics & Policy Framing
  Embedding moral frameworks and influencing policy for sustainable design practices.

 

 

Design is about being passionate.

With a dispassionate approach in execution for a compassionate cause, visioning and negotiating with the provider, for a quality comfort of the recipient user.

DESIGN

 

Every nation or ethnic demography has its own pre-occupations that direct thought and action which 'determines' design.

It is a contextual adaptation directed by a need with a democratic, useful, emotional, nonviolent and cultural sensibility.

-    - V S Ravishankar 2009

Valueholders

 I just figured, Stakeholders as commonly used term vs holders of stake when used, can sound very different !

For a designer, when you are designing in or a system, you are looking at and conscious of the interfaces of the system enabling by design for every participant in adding value to the performance of the system, therefore Valueholders, the rewards are though stakes by default or incidental, that’s not the preoccupation of a designer, like Rao says, designers are Value creators.

Ravi | from Notepad | Nov 2024

A Message to the Design Schools

Your task and responsibility is creating and training young design minds who are,

sensitive, passionate, subjective & objective, free thinking, lateral in thought, yet middle path in approach of meaningfulness, contextual awareness in time space & surroundings, concern towards needs and action, make easy the things, comfortable in complexity and ambiguity, see the whole and parts, examine & capture, highly skilled, draw & sketch, make & demonstrate, conceive ideas, conceptualisers & visualisers in any media of expression, who take creative leaps & challenge, romance with beauty & form,….

By Design.

This is your challenge and work towards realising such Products of Design Professionals for more informed and sustainable futures and not chase the default futures!

 

 

Ravishankar VS | Notepad | 14 Nov 2024

 

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.