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!

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.

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 was thinking of the next groundbreaking idea that changes the world (I do that occasionally). I thought of the shortest way of getting design for the emerging world really on its feet. Here is a list of things from my diary this morning -

1. Go places
2. Meet with NGO’s
3. Offer them your awesome design help
4. Come back wherever home is for you
5. Raise money for the project from the great crowd-sourcing tools out there
6. Employ people
7. Get the project on its feet
8. See lots of smiling faces and then turn the whole thing into an award winning documentary.
9. Win an award

If you are thinking of stealing this idea, you are late in the game. Kopernik partially does those things and does them even better (other than the film part). Instead of going all over the world looking for projects and spending your wives hard earned money, they have a grassroots approach to the problem. The NGO’s are encouraged to submit proposals for the technological and design help they need. These proposals are assessed by the donors. Kopernik raises funds for the chosen organizations through crowd-funding. Once the funds have been raised, the proposal is handed over to the technology providers, who manufacture the product and ship it to the users. On implementation, the recipients have to report back on the use of the technology/product/ design in use.

The whole service seems flawless but when I look at the fund-raising page, it seems that they have a long way to go. That said, Kopernik seems to be in good hands. It was started by World Bank and UN Development Fund alums Ewa Wojkowska and Toshihiro Nakamura. This model eliminates the top down approach of the traditional aid agencies and promotes more grassroots level, bottoms up approach of getting design and technology to the right people.

For designers wanting to step into the social realm, it does make one elephant size problem really simple – that of distribution. By giving the reins of decision making into the hands of the organizations that work within the community, the process becomes more streamlined and evolved and gives all of us some hope.

Here is one of their success stories

For more information on them – http://www.thekopernik.org/

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 country. She spoke to Designwala about innovation in India through incremental change. She also talks about examples where storytelling has been used in education, women’s empowerment and social change.

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 his two projects – Mumbai Voices and EMCounter. Both the projects are based on data collection and cater to the needs to the emerging nations. Ritwik works at the digital ad agency R/GA and spends his spare time being a photographer.