Service

Disrupting women’s hygiene in rural India through design thinking.

by Shagun Singh

Having grown up in a middle class family in India, this came as a shock to me – 88% of women in India do not have access to sanitary napkins. They resort to using rags, ashes, newspaper, dried leaves and husk according to a study by AC Nielsen. According to an article in Fastcoexist, girls [...]

Fair trade comes to India

by Shagun Singh

As the buying power of the Indian consumer grows in the coming years, it is time that they start making educated choices about what they are consuming. The market is flooded with products from all kinds of producers that clumps mass produced industry made products with the ones produced by the fast dwindling race of [...]

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 Sustainable Urbanist – Jyoti Hosagrahar Part 1

by Shagun Singh

Jyoti Hosagrahar is faculty at Columbia University, New York and Director of Sustainable Urbanism International at Columbia University, and Bangalore, India. Architect, planner, and historian, she advises on urban development, historic conservation, and sustainability issues in Asia. Her research interests include urban heritage, cultural and environmental sustainability of cities focusing on the intersections of nature, [...]

A Grand Idea | Inhabit – winners announced

by Shagun Singh

The Mobile Activation Station by Holobiont The Mobile Activation Station designed by Holobiont (Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert) has been selected as the winner by our three esteemed judges – Raul Smith Correa of ‘Faiscas‘, Soo-in Yang of ‘The Living’ and Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai. They win a grand or $1000 to make their [...]

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, [...]

Low-cost self-diagnosis tool for rural India

by Ria Rajan

Primary health centers are the cornerstone of the rural health care system. In 1991, India had about 22,400 primary health centers, 11,200 hospitals, and 27,400 clinics. These facilities are part of a tiered health care system that funnels more difficult cases into urban hospitals while attempting to provide routine medical care to the vast majority [...]

The Indovators – Part 3 | Dr Simone Ahuja

by Shagun Singh

Dr Simone Ahuja is the founder and principal of Blood Orange Media, a multimedia production and design company that creates content in emerging markets, focusing specifically on examples of innovation with global relevance. Most recently she developed, produced and directed the Best Buy Corp supported television series, Indique – Big Ideas from Emerging India, for [...]

NyayaBhoomi – A Service Design Venture for Auto-Rickshaws

by Shagun Singh

Ever had to catch one of those New Delhi auto-rickshaws? You know that you are being taken for a ride then. The rickshaw drivers are rude, they refuse to go by the meter, they always seem to be going the opposite direction to where you want to be going. I have questioned the local transportation [...]

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 [...]

Kopernik : Connecting technology with people who need it the most

by Shagun Singh

Incase you haven’t discovered the difference in the writing style – from well put together prose to someone writing a personal diary, here is the revelation. I am the person who does the videos and not the writing. That said, Ria is on vacation and will be back soon. This morning I woke up and [...]

FreMo: A BikeShare Initiative in India

by Shagun Singh

I visited Paris in the summer of 2007. After spending a couple of weeks of learning french and reading the lonely planet, I was prepared for a week or two of intense historical, cultural and architectural overdose. Everything was pretty much as imagined except the law that allows one to open a bottle of wine, [...]

“A Grand Idea – Inhabit” Competition Brief

by Shagun Singh

What is this competition about? This competition is focused on design solutions that can change our immediate urban environment into places that we can truly inhabit. The first series of ‘The Grand Idea Initiative’ is called ‘INHABIT‘. The ultimate challenge of which is to create solutions that introduce fun, sustainable, and innovative ways people use [...]

The Indovators – Part 2 | Jinal Shah

by Shagun Singh

Jinal Shah is a digital strategist and works for Electric Artists in NYC. She describes herself as a thinker, writer and storyteller and jots down her thoughts in her blog – Constant Beta. She also started a blog called Dsplaced that aggregates stories from people and talks about their sense of displacement from home and [...]

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 [...]

Jaaga – Creative Common Ground

by Ria Rajan

Having spent a long weekend with Archana Prasad –Co Founder Jaaga, National Institute of Design alumnus and Bangalore based artist, in Pondicherry, where she was performing with her group The Manjunauts, (she is also a VJ) at the Freedom Jam; I had the chance to engage in a dialogue with her about Jaaga. Jaaga’s name [...]

Chotukool – nano refrigerator for rural india

by Shagun Singh

The ChotuKool is like no other fridge. It does not have a compressor. It runs on a battery. Utensils and bottles need to be loaded into this 43-litre cool box from the top. It weighs only 7.8 kg and costs only Rs 3,200. A product of Godrej & Boyce, the fridge was co-created with the [...]

The Rise of the informal economies

by Shagun Singh

Wall Street Journal published an article on informal economies. Stating the first paragraph from the article -”Economists have long thought the underground economy — the vast, unregulated market encompassing everything from street vendors to unlicensed cab drivers — was bad news for the world economy. Now it’s taking on a new role as one of [...]

Social Lending in India

by Shagun Singh

dhanaX is an online-offline person-to-person lending platform that allows Indians to lend and borrow money from each other. For a lender looking for a social investment, or a borrower seeking an affordable loan, dhanaX  provides and option by facilitating lending or borrowing of small capital using scientific, credible methods. dhanaX works in partnership with a [...]

Stopping open defecation in India by 2012

by Shagun Singh

“This is the first toilet in the world — in the world — where you use the toilet and you get paid,” Nair says. Now India is trying a different kind of cash reward to encourage toilet use. The Nirmal Gram Puraskar, or “clean village prize,” gives 50,000-5 million rupees to local governments that end [...]

The SammaaN Foundation – The Rickshaws of today

by Shagun Singh

IRFAN ALAM, a 27-year-old from the Indian state of Bihar, remembers clearly when he first felt the thirst for entrepreneurship. Sitting in the back of a cycle-rickshaw on a parched summer’s day in his hometown of Begusarai, he asked his rickshaw-puller for a drink of water. He points out that India’s rickshaw-pullers earn only a [...]

The next billion mobile users

by Shagun Singh

VNL | Meet the next billion mobile users from VNL on Vimeo. Vihaan Networks Ltd., an Indian telecommunications company known as VNL, won the Bronze award for a solar-powered base station to bring cellphone access to remote rural villages. The inexpensive base station can be quickly assembled and set up by unskilled villagers, and can [...]

Justice on wheels

by Shagun Singh

“We must take justice – fast justice – to people,” vowed Mr Singh. “When a verdict takes 10 or 20 years, it destroys their faith in the legal system.” According to the government, Indian courts are bedeviled with a staggering backlog of 15.6 million cases. It is not uncommon for minor cases to drag on [...]