Communication

India Design Forum : Some thoughts on the new design forum in New Delhi

by Shagun Singh

My day job is to work as an interaction designer at a world renowned innovation company called frog. While catching up on the latest design events and happenings on designmind, the reputed frog blog on design, technology and business, I came across a post about a design event in India called the India Design Forum [...]

Braille phone for the visually impaired

by Kirti Goel

Technology is about facilitating tasks. Design is about enabling users to accomplish those tasks and hence making them feel empowered. Sumit Dagar, an interaction designer and recently announced as a TED 2011 Fellow, has been working to present technology so as to enable the blind. About 314 million people are visually impaired worldwide, 45 million [...]

Movirtu’s phone sharing product for BOP users

by Shagun Singh

The past decade has seen a lot of work being done in the arena of development of mobile applications in the developing nations. A lot of them include mobile banking, inventories for agricultural products, education, healthcare etc. There has been extensive mobile phone penetration in places like India, parts of Africa, China, and a lot [...]

Gov 2.0 and India

by Shagun Singh

I heard Kiran Bedi talk recently at a fundraiser event for SEVA, a non profit organization, based in Richmond Hill, Queens, that facilitates immigration of South Asians to the US. Kiran Bedi is an Indian social activist and a retired Indian Police Service officer. During her riveting talk that included her work in Tihar jail [...]

Indigenous Modernities – Jyoti Hosagrahar Part 2

by Shagun Singh

The second part of the video is titled ‘Indigenous Modernities’ based on the title of Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book with the same title. In this video, she talks about modernity in the context of the developing world. She brings up the perception of ‘Modern’ where it is equaled to western living vs it being understood as [...]

The Technologists : Anab Jain

by Shagun Singh

Anab Jain is a designer and a TED Fellow, interested in creating stories that lead us towards new, alternate futures. Educated in India, Vienna and London, she is the Founder of Superflux, a design practice working at the intersection of people and technology. She created ‘The Power of 8’ a collaborative project to imagine alternate, [...]

Notes on funding for social change

by Shagun Singh

On May 26th, I attended a workshop on ‘Funding for Social Change‘ organized by WorldStudio at SVA. Andrea Pellegrino is a business partner at WorldStudio with Mark Randall. She orchestrated the workshop and it was very useful for people who are taking baby steps towards building projects that are socially responsible and don’t necessarily have [...]

The city and the internet

by Shagun Singh

For some of us who grew up back home in India, we understand the perils of living in an unplanned city. Dodgy transportation system, consistent power cuts, inefficient waste disposal and sewage systems, gridlocked roads and a broken, corrupt bureaucratic government. People develop ways around problems. They adjust. The idea is to work the system [...]

Babajob.com – Connecting employers with informal sector workers

by Ria Rajan

Babajob.com is a Bangalore-based start-up that uses the web and mobile technology to connect employers and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) informal sector workers (i.e. maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) with the goal of creating a scalable, replicable and profitable solution to combat poverty. Babajob aims to do this by creating greater market efficiency in the informal sector through [...]

The Indovators – Part 1 | Lina Srivastava

by Shagun Singh

Lina Srivastava is the Principal of Lina Srivastava Consulting, LLC, which focuses on employing strategy, innovation, engagement and the use of cultural assets to create and demonstrate social change. For our new feature ‘The Indovators’, Lina talks about opportunities for indian designers in the fields of service design, information design, systems design, climate change and [...]

Designers as ChangeMakers – Part 4 | Ritwik Dey

by Shagun Singh

Ritwik Dey is an Interaction Designer. For “Designers as ChangeMakers”, he talks about the sad state of the Indian education system and his struggle with it. He comes from an engineering background and talks about his growth as a designer and his love for information design and data visualization. Amongst other things he talks about [...]

Empowering the deaf child – Vaani

by Ria Rajan

VAANI is an organisation that works to empower the deaf child. Its role is to act as a catalyst. Rather than delivering services, VAANI supports the development of accessible sustainable services for deaf children and their families whilst working closely with the overall development strategies of the country. VAANI works with local organisations to build [...]

Designers as Change Makers – Part 3 | Simrit Brar

by Shagun Singh

Simrit Brar is a Graphic Designer who lived and worked in NYC for 6.5 years before moving to LA to work on the publicity for Meryl Streep’s latest film. She was also a part of the team that created the graphic ‘NYC taxi’ logo. She is the creator of some of the most popular posters [...]

Mera Nokia

by Shagun Singh

MeraNokia is an information phone service from Nokia providing localised information in Agriculture, Education. The Enertainment section caters to Astrology and Ringtones. Depending on the service, you either subscribe to it, or download content when needed. If you subscribe to a service, the service sends you content messages to your MeraNokia inbox. At present, customers [...]

MobiGlyph: Phone concept for rural India

by Shagun Singh

MobilGlyph: Making Data Tangible from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. Adaptive Path, a product experience and strategy design company recently went to rural India to investigate the impact of mobile technology and developed concepts for new mobile devices for this market. Mobiglyph is one such concept that allows illiterate users to save contacts by using QR [...]