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 2012. Apparently some of the top design talent from frog will be in New Delhi to speak at this conference. I usually pride myself for keeping in touch with the design network in India where I grew up and went to undergrad school for Interior Architecture and Design, but India Design Forum rang no bells. Was this a recent government initiative, was NID involved, or another reputable design school?

There has been a recent upsurge of design groups and conferences in India. I know about the designyatra conference and the upcoming Unbox festival both of which I can safely say are amazing participatory events that have aimed to strengthen the interdisciplinary design community in India. India Design Forum seems like a new venture in the the design foray. For one, the founders are unheard of. On close research (googling I mean)  it turned out that Rajshree Pathy is the chairperson and managing director of the Rajshree Group of Companies and her partner Mitra Khoubrou runs a boutique firm called Pink Tank in UAE.

The website for the conference doesn’t reveal much other than the fact that some top design talent from all over the world has been invited with a sprinkling of local designers. You think of a designer and they are there on the roster of speakers listed on the website – from Christian Louboutin to Paola Antonelli, from Rem Koolhaas to Rohit Bal. They are all there. I hope the organizers have definite reasons to have these very specific designers at the conference. We all know that William Bissel can talk about India and small business in India but how Karim Rashid would lend to that conversation is up to our imagination. That said, varied designers from all over the world could lead to a TED like event where talks from people established in their fields could to lend to an inspiring monologue on design thinking and methodology.

The IDF blog has some dated design entries but will hopefully become more lively and event related. The facebook page in turn is doing a great job creating a buzz about the event. As we wait for more details to unravel on this event, I hope against hope that the registration fee is not sky rocketing assuming that flying, accommodating and feeding all these hot shot designers has been no easy or cheap task. However since the organizers are a far cry from being grass root designers, this is not an altogether impossible or impractical mission for them.

Inspite my cynicism surrounding this event, I am hoping this will be a great time for young, upcoming Indian designers. A time to be inspired, enlightened and entertained. Speakers like Kevin Slavin and Sam Pitroda will not disappoint in any kind of event. Smart people will inspire other smart people irrespective of the event, sponsors or the organizers. One can only hope that design becomes more relevant and participatory in developing nations like India and such conferences attract the right kind of people. The IDF conference takes place from March 2nd to 10th in New Delhi.

Video about the India Design Forum

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 of them are blind (Source: WHO). As part of assistive technologies to interact with the computers, there are screen readers and braille displays. These are good solutions for the output mode, however, there ought to be better solutions than the mouse and keyboard for the visually impaired and blind to be able to input.

The technology is moving towards pocket-size mobile-computers. These smart mobile devices are highly powerful communication, information and entertainment devices. They are moving towards the interaction-heavy, multi-touch screen devices, and follow the interaction paradigm of “content is king”. However, the accessible technologies are way behind these technological advances. There is immense possibility of using mobile devices by the visually impaired and blind as it is not dependent on the point-and-click interaction model of the personal computers. Dagar identified this and worked on defining an interaction model for the targeted user group on mobile devices.

His design concept, named as the braille phone, uses a haptic interaction model. There are two parts to it, the content and the controls. The content is represented using heightmap technology. (Heightmap is a raster image used to store values, such as surface elevation data, for display in 3D computer graphics. (Source Wikipedia)). In this design concept, content, otherwise represented by color values of different pixels, is mapped to the height or the surface elevation. The surface of the device is a special kind of plastic which is flexible, height-varying and pixel actuated. (Yanko’s braille phone concept uses Electric Active Plastic.) This surface raises by an electric signal. Hence the colors of the content are now “felt” by touching the elevated surface.

The second part is the interface elements of the device, including controls to act upon the content. Most interfaces, today, present controls contextually. The context is known by visual cues, e.g. upon highlighting text in MS Office 2010, the toolbar with controls for text appear. However, for the blind, all the necessary controls should be presented at all times. Dagar’s concept, envisioned with dimensions to be close to that of an iPhone, has two categories of controls, the global and the contextual. The global controls are physical buttons and are placed towards the right of the device. The contextual control elements appear as and when required, towards the right side of the “display”. The editable and the non editable content appear towards the left side of the “display” in a given context. This is the basic layout of the device.

Dagar’s interaction model is a new model for the blind. It will require a learning curve. However, with mobile phones becoming so prevalent there are high chances that this could be the next device type for the visually impaired and blind.

As any good design process begins with identifying user needs and envisioning possible scenarios of how the design would enable the user. Dagar envisions, “a fully loaded device would be capable of incorporating never-thought-before features.

Some of these are:

• capturing images and saving them as height maps. Images can be of a place one has been to, a person one has met, or almost anything that a user wants to remember. A height translated version of vision enables user to perceive and hence connect more closely to the real world.
• using GPS along with maps for blind. The use of this feature would be immense. A user will be able to reach his destination of choice with minimal help for directions
• convert to image text to Braille. A user would be able to view newspapers, magazines, posters, notices and other text based media by pointing the device camera on the same and reading the content converted to Braille on the screen.”

We wish Dagar luck in converting his concept into a reality.

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 of South American nations.  A lot of developers and stakeholders in the mobile industry are creating applications for the base of the pyramid users, taking for granted the affordability of mobile handsets and SIM’s by the BOP users. Statistics show that very few BOP users can afford mobile technology. Since mobile and wireless communication makes it so easy for people to communicate and bank even in places that are secluded and far flung, It doesn’t come as a surprise that an innovative startup has thought of a solution to make mobile communication available to BOP users. The initiative is called Movirtu.

As described on the Movirtu website – Movirtu provides innovative mobile technology and business models to wireless telecommunication service providers servicing rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia to help them realize shared access to basic mobile phone services at a much lower cost than has been achieved before. Although we are a for-profit enterprise, the company has an underlying social mission: To expand the use of mobile communication by the rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia living on less than $2 a day to improve their sustainable livelihoods and help alleviate poverty.

User flow for movirtu

Movirtu is developing a series of patent pending products that would enable shared access to basic mobile services for people earning less that $2 a day. For one such application called MXShare, Movirtu partnered with frog design to create a virtual mobile phone system to enable people who can’t afford to buy handsets to call, receive calls and text message using other peoples phones or pay phones. This mode of communication was being followed in the past using SIM cards. The call maker would borrow the phone and simply replace the SIM in order to see his/her contact list and make the call. This involved taking the phone apart and caused both the lender and borrower some amount of discomfort. The SIM’s were also easy to lose and only the person who was carrying it was able to use it, not the whole family.

MXShare is based on similar behavior type of borrowing other peoples phones to make calls. In the case of MXShare, all the information is stored virtually in a telecom cloud and can be accessed by the user by logging into his/her account using a code or a password. This doesn’t require any SIM cards. Frog design was responsible for doing user research and experience design for the product. Extensive research was conducted in Kibera in Kenya where people were interviewed to gather observations to know how people lived and used technology. The technology was well received and everyone was very excited about it. The challenge was coming up with the right nomenclature where the designers decided to go with the established universal language.

‘Cloud Phone’  as it is being called now is being compared to cloud based webmail or google voice. Accessing the cloud costs the subscribers 10 to 20 cents a call. Compared to a $25 dollar handset and a $12 SIM card, the Movirtu solution is affordable for users earning $2 a day or less.

Recently Movirtu raised $5.5 million dollars for expansion in a Series A round of financing. The funding will allow Movirtu to expand to newer markets and help its goal of reaching 4 million users by 2013.

Nigel Waller, the Founder and CEO of Movirtu who is also the POPTECH Social Innovation Fellow explains the step by step functioning of MXShare  -

Movirtu Fact Sheet

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 in New Delhi and other inspiring stories, she talked about one of her newer initiatives – the Safer India initiative. The Safer India initiative is a project that has been undertaken under the umbrella of Dr Bedi’s non profit organization called ‘India Vision Foundation’ that was formed in 1994. The India Vision Foundation works in the area of Police and Prison reforms as well as women’s empowerment.

A Safer India Initiative is a web platform that allows the users to send their complaints to the respective State Police Department over the web. All the user needs to do is to sign up and then write their complaint and submit it. The complaint is sent to the concerned police department. India is well known for its bureaucratic and corrupt police and administrative departments. This initiative is a fast track solution to getting your complaint sent to the right person without going through the trappings of bribery and long lines that plague the Indian police and administrative services. That said, the system doesn’t assure that any kind of action will be taken on the complaint. There is no tracking system built into the website yet and it is upto the complainant to follow up on their complaint with visits to the police station. What it does provide is the hope that technology is a universal leveler and that your complaint will be received by the concerned department irrespective of what your social status is within the system.

Web 2.0 platforms that allow community interaction and facilitate civic and social services are picking up rapidly around the world. Gov 2.0 is Web 2.0 for the government. Gov 2.0 has picked up in the US considerably in the past 5 years. The Code for America initiative that was founded by Jennifer Pahlka and SeeClickFix by Ben Berkowitz are two popular examples of using the web 2.0 technologies to work for city governments.  The website for the Orielly Gov 2.0 summit hosted in Washington DC in Sept 2010 gives a good overview of the term -  Gov 2.0 Summit brings together innovators from government and the private sector to highlight technology and ideas that can be applied to the nation’s great challenges. In areas as diverse as education, health care, energy, jobs, and financial reform, there are unique opportunities to rethink how government agencies perform their mission and serve our citizens. Social media, cloud computing, web, and mobile technologies—all provide new capabilities that government agencies are beginning to harness to achieve demonstrably better results at lower cost.

Open government and datasets would be a great asset to a democracy like India to promote good governance. Emerging technologies are already being embraced in the country which handles a majority of the technological work outsourced from the west. The trick is to use these skills to bring about social and civic change within the country. The government needs to make data sets available to its citizens like the data.gov initiative by the Obama administration in the US. There are more than enough grand challenges that the technologists in India need to battle through so that basic services are easily accessible to the local people and we can hold the government responsible for shoddy infrastructure and systems. A good example of such action is  ipaidabribe.com, a website where Indians upload videos of their experiences in paying a bribe, in refusing to pay a bribe, and in not having to pay a bribe. President Obama met with Janagraha, the creator of this web platform during his visit to India in Nov 2010.

President Obama attended what is likely the first ever  Expo on Democracy and Open Government in Nov 2010 at St Xaviers College in Mumbai. Samantha Power, special assistant to the President for multilateral affairs and human rights blogs about the event stating in the whitehouse.gov blog – India’s dynamism in the technology sector is well known, as is Gandhi’s legacy in India of civic action and bottom-up change, but today’s expo highlighted something very fresh: Indian civil society’s harnessing of innovation and technology to strengthen India’s democracy — by fighting corruption, holding government officials accountable, and empowering citizens to be the change they seek.

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 sustainable and practical response to day to day problems. To emphasize on that aspect of ‘Modern’, she talks about Old Delhi, Hinglish and FM Radio as examples of practical solutions, interactivity and modern living in the context of the old world. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s recent book Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (Routledge 2005) won a 2006-2007 award from the International Planning History Society.

For Jyoti’s video on sustainability, click here.

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, optimistic futures. Most recently she was working on a project called 5th Dimensional Camera that explores the wider implications of living in a world with quantum physics. Her recent talk called ‘My Elastic City – Designing for India’s immaterial urbanism’ at the World Congress for Information technology revolved around soft urbanism in India.

The recipient of Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, Anab has also presented her work at MoMA, NY, Apple Computers Inc, LIFT and SIGGRAPH.

This video footage was recorded on skype so please bear with the quality. Thanks!

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 client funding. Andrea ran us through a few basics. Worldstudio Inc is one such rare design shop that works on socially responsible communication design and branding projects.

Traditionally such social design work has always be done under the umbrella of -
Non Profit Organizations
Civic Authorities
Probono Work
Corporate Responsibility Programs

So the question raised was how does one fund socially responsible non client based initiatives when it does not fall under any of the above categories. The questions thus explored were funding, developing ideas, creating communication plans, developing a budget and gauging the return on investment.

Funding models for such projects could be sourced to –
Grants (Eg Sappi Grants)
Donations (Eg Project M-425)
Integrated solutions (Toms Shoes)
Sponsorship (Tribeca Film Festival)

Getting started on a project and keeping it going -
What is your passion and what drives you?
Start small – Small acts inspire big ideas.
Be realistic – Assess your situation.
Float the idea – Confirm viability and interest.
Find partners, build a collaboration – Dont try & do it alone.
Leverage your relationships – Start with who you know.
Develop a communications plan – Build support for your idea.
Create a project document – Tools to engage your sponsors and partners.
Funding sources – Research, Research, Research
Be Flexible – Allow for changes in your concept.

Methodology -
Indirect – Raise money for local charity you like.
Concrete – Open your home to a homeless person.
Visionary – Look towards the future and create something long term.
Commentary – Create an installation that deals with a social subject.

Communication plan -
Who are you trying to reach?
Will you engage subcontractors?
Website.
Traditional Advertising – Print, TV, Radio, Mailers.
Editorial Outreach.
Social Media.
Collaboration.
Multimedia.
Collateral.
Involving partners in media plan.

Project budget -
Hard costs
Development time
Execution time
Risk as a percentage – 10 to15 %
Potential for in-kind donations

Return on Investment -
Reflects value
Creates social impact
Potential for PR activation
Interacts with key markets

The second half of the workshop was more hands-on The group was split into a bunch of smaller groups. Each group was given an idea and was asked to apply the above stated list onto the idea to make it real. The sequence of the process entailed coming up a concrete idea or concept, and then creating a communications plan and budget for it. Personally for me, things suddenly felt doable. There seemed to be definite plan of action in place. One thing Andrea stressed about a lot was putting the time spent on the project in the budget or accounting for your time. Amongst other nuggets of amazing information was a great group of people. It was truly inspiring to be in that room. There was a sense of community and love for social design. Things that will only grow with time as more of such projects get funded. For more details on this workshop, don’t hesitate to contact me on shagunster@gmail.com.

Other projects by WorldStudio inc -
Design Ignites Change
The Urban Forest Project

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 in order to get maximum returns from it. It is tough to think of rebuilding or fixing this broken system since living in that system, if one is not rich or if one doesn’t work for the government, is such an ordeal.

This is an excerpt from a recently published article in the NY times. The writer is Akash Kapur – “Between now and 2030, the report (a Mckinsey report ) estimates, 250 million Indians will migrate to the cities, a figure that exceeds the current total population of all but three countries (China, India and the United States). As a result, India will have 68 cities with populations of more than one million (compared with 35 in all of Europe today)…….”Like much of the country, cities suffer from the legal ambiguity, rampant corruption, political infighting and institutional inertia that block even the most enlightened policies and policy makers.”

Are we equipped to deal with this influx when the cities cannot even handle the numbers that live in them right now? What if the policy makers have a way of getting round the government and mobilize the people instead? What if they can develop a community and network of people genuinely committed to changing the system or atleast identifying the problems within it, in an analytical fashion. I came across ijanaagraha today – an online platform to initiate community building to create change.

A cut and paste from their about section says – “The iJanaagraha portal envisions a huge online networking community that is committed to urban issues – electoral and civic. It aims to initiate change, build networks of communities & local civic bodies, provide data on urban issues, civic awareness & training – all of this at a local neighbourhood level. With the relevant information presented intelligently through use of simple interactive MAPS and a powerful platform to ACT, we aim to inspire everyone to get out and grab opportunities, participate in campaigns, events and community projects and become an Active Citizen in our society.”

The number of people using this portal to connect to others and identifying problems is unknown. However the fact that a step has been taken in the direction of using the internet or the online community to mobilize change is a powerful one. Another great example is FixmyCity.com. FixMyStreet is a site to help people report, view, or discuss local problems they’ve found to their local council by simply locating them on a map. This is UK based application. It launched in early February 2007. The various projects under DIYCity initiative are a step towards using the internet to improve civic services and urban problems in NYC. The government initiated ‘Dial 311′ is a great way for the public to get in touch with the New York City services and information also.

The democratization of the internet has allowed a number of grassroot level initiatives to take off and create substantial change in the way governments are run and cities evolve. India, with its abundance of people and knowledge needs to use this medium effectively and to its advantage.

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 voice and web features such as SMS, USSD, automated voice systems, and operator manned call centers, enabling employers and job seekers to find each other. The simple premises, upon which it built itself and continues to grow on, are –

• Everyone deserves to get a better job, no matter what their income or skill level, and
• Technology can enhance our ability to both hire more efficiently, and better communicate with those we care about.

While at Microsoft Research India in 2005, CEO Sean Blagsvedt co-ran the Advanced Development and Prototyping Team and worked very closely with the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, whose aim was to study and invent new ways that technology could be used to positively impact the social and economic development of the world’s poorest 4 billion people. Sean’s first thought was “Great – all they need is the village version of LinkedIn.com!” In reality however, in order to make such a system work, one has to overcome the problem that most low-income workers of the world may not be literate, nor own a mobile phone and rarely own or have ready access to an Internet-connected PC. Most people in India find jobs through people they know – namely their extended social network – and most employers – particularly when hiring employees that work in the home – would like to hire a person who someone they trust can vouch for. Another important factor with the increase of travel time (owing to the increase in the number of vehicles on the roads) and often-unreliable public transport has resulted in people looking for jobs closer to home, in their neighborhoods. More often than not, it’s the simply not-knowing that causes people to miss out on better-suited opportunities. Babajob.com is an attempt to digitize this process and information to efficiently “get the word out” and importantly provide an incentive for the folks in between an employer and employee to connect people together.

By leveraging web and mobile technology, Babajob scales and engages a wider audience creating greater efficiency for employers and further deepens the social impact on job seekers. Employers can conveniently browse job seeker profiles based on salary, location, languages, employment background, skills and references. Babajob offers several fee-based services to help in the matching and hiring of seekers.

With services available for all major cities in the country, Babajob is currently testing out a new voice application that will help communicate the necessary information into various regional languages. With a likely tie up with a mobile handset maker – the goal is to transcend, once again, the language and literacy barrier, to broaden the scope of Babajob’s services.

Babajob serves as a fine example of complex system design for a country that is socially and linguistically diverse; and where literacy is a major point of consideration, while attempting to make information accessible.  With a constantly evolving set of parameters and a strong belief in the transformative power of software on society, Babajob is social entrepreneurship at its best. By tapping into informal social interactions and streams of information, and using a blended value business model that combines a revenue generating business with a social-value-generating component, it provides us with a glimpse of the paradigm shift that is brewing with regards to businesses in emerging economies.

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 more.  She elaborates on how designers can use their inherent skills to create cross sector relationships and communication channels.  She also emphasizes the importance of fostering a climate of creation and risk taking in a conservative risk averse culture.  Overall, the first feature of our new series tells us why designing for the developing nations is a challenging yet gratifying and why innovation matters.