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 idea come to life. The Mobile Activation Station is a portable reconfigurable table with built-in power distribution, lighting and storage. It turns empty stores into communal spaces. Once built, the Station will be available for short-term use in vacant storefronts along Rogers Avenue in Crown heights, Brooklyn.

The Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio Castro Cosio

The second favorite project for the judges especially Soo-in is the Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio. Bus Roots is a living garden on the roots of city buses. It brings life to a forgotten space and provides humans with a reminder to pause and let naturte help lead a healthier life.

Traffic Cones into Flower Receptacles by Daniel Ebuehi

The third favorite project for the judges, especially for Raul Smith Correa is the project by Daniel Ebuehi from Philadelphia. In an attempt to bring vitality as well as sustainability directly into the streets of Philadelphia – literally in the middle of the street – this scheme transforms the ubiquitous traffic cone into a flower receptacle that can be assembled to form a garden retreat.

Our special thanks to the third and final judge who helped us make the final decision – Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai.

This competition would not have been possible without the generous contributions from these amazing people and friends :
Ravisharon Kaur
Ramakrishnan Subramanian
Rahul Pande
Kiran Kannacheri
Saravanakumar Velayudham
Sameer Kumar
Keerthik Sasidharan
Saad Tabani
Ritwik Dey
Giana Gonzalez
Sonali Sridhar
Jairam Ranganathan
Amit Desai
Priyanka Gupta
Shweta Mudgal

In simple words, Synthetic Biology is about making living organisms do things which nature had not intended on them doing. Its about taking tiny bits of DNA, splicing them together and inserting them into bacteria. In effect, a bacterium could be made to change colour or made to be bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. In Yashas Shetty’s words, Artist and faculty member at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology as well as Artist-in-Residence at NCBS – National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) – “this mixing and matching of elements to create new things was a bit like what artists did. But instead of using paints and canvas, synthetic biologists used life itself.”

This thoughtful insight by Yashas Shetty led him to mentor a bunch of art& design students – who knew very little, if anything about science to participate in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year. One of the aims of the competition is to attempt to build simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts and operate them in living cells.

The iGEM competition facilitates this by providing a library of standardized parts (called BioBrick standard biological parts) to students, and asking them to design and build genetic machines with them. Student teams can also submit their own BioBricks. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.

Information about BioBrick standard biological parts, and a toolkit to make and manipulate them, is provided by the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, or simply, the Registry. This is a core resource for the iGEM program, and one that has been evolving rapidly to meet the needs of the program. Beyond just building biological systems, broader goals of iGEM include:

• To enable the systematic engineering of biology.
• To promote the open and transparent development of tools for engineering biology.
• To help construct a society that can productively apply biological technology.

As per the rules of the competition, MIT sends all participants 400 bits of DNA. They are all numbered. One cant go to a database of parts on the web and find out which DNA makes what and then make your organism in the laboratory using the DNA bits.

NCBS had been sending students for MIT’s iGem competition for the last couple of years. Last year they decided to send art students – who knew nothing about science – to participate instead. They were called the ArtScience Team from Bangalore. And, unlike scientists, the artists came up with a project which only artists could have thought of: they were going to replicate the smell of first rain in a laboratory— that odour when pure water from the skies mixes with soil.” The English word for the smell is Petrichor, a non-lyrical name for a phenomenon that is so emotive. The primary cause behind the smell, however, has a slightly more lyrical name: Geosmin, an organic chemical.

The students did the scientific parts in the laboratory of NCBS. At the end of it, Shetty says, the experiment didn’t turn out the smell of first rain. Instead there was this smell of dampness.

But it was enough.

They won the third prize for science. The presentation, in which they explained how a group of art students became scientists for a season, got them a special prize for best presentation. “They said that they started off as artists and are now talking to scientists. I think that impressed the judges,” says Mukund Thattai of NCBS, whose laboratory the art students had used for this experiment. The ArtScience Team took synthetic biology to new groups, running workshops to teach designers to build working DIY microscopes using webcams and ran creative workshops at a school for the urban poor. This idea of “human practices” – that is, exploring the ethical and social implications of the technology – was a new focus of last year. What made this team stand out from the rest was the fact that they looked at the field from a beginners perspective and climbed their way up to the knowledge filed and shared it with anyone who was interested. While the other teams were focusing on a problem-solution approach they were more interested in making the knowledge that iGEM was distributing as accessible and open source as possible. Their process- start to finish, complete with drawings was documented in a handbook that was printed at distributed at the competition. It’s no surprise that they ran out of copies. The handbook is available for free download at – http://hackteria.org/wiki/images/a/a1/Handbook.pdf

When I asked Neha Bhatt, member of the ArtScience team – about her first hand experience with synthetic biology and its processes, she said “ it was a real eye –opener. For me, the competition’s process opened up a whole new area I’d never known existed. The field of artists doing science and the boundaries b/w art and science being traversed.”

Apart from being instrumental in changing people’s perspective towards synthetic biology, the participation of students of art+design in an otherwise science competition, threw open many discussions; primarily that was access. Should Science as a field and practice remain inclusive or should it open its doors to creative practioners as well; to explore and create? There were those purists, of course, who simply did not take them seriously, for they believed that artist’s are those who draw the bio diagrams; and the main question that they were faced with was – ” So if  you guys being beginners can be given the authority to play around with real life, can anyone looking to harm society also not to do the same?”

They’re answer was simply that their project was an experiment to these questions.

Team ArtScience 2010 is all set to make another appearance at this year’s IGEM. Here’s wishing them all the best and one hopes that more such lines between seemingly disparate disciplines get blurred, norms get challenged, more knowledge gets shared and that perceptions are constantly altered.

The iGEM 2010 site –

http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page

The wiki of Team ArtScience Bangalore -

http://2009.igem.org/Team:ArtScienceBangalore

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!

A Grand Idea -Inhabit Section competition culminated on June 17th. A lot of  interesting entries came pouring in from all round the world. The ones published are a few that stood out. Our judges Raul Smith Correa from FAISCAS and Soo-in Yang from The Living are going over the entries and plan to pick a winner soon. The winner gets to develop a prototype of their design using $1000.

Vid de Gleria & Ziga Kresevic – Urban Rebagers

Robin Liu – Popup Bookstore

Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert – Mobile Activation Station

Jirawit Yamkleeb – Double Take

Marco Antonio Castro – Bus Roots

Hiroyuki Ichihara – The benches of Tsuchibokasi

Robyne Kassen – Monkey Bar Bike Racks

Jurriaan de Brujin – Metro

Yusuke Sakuma & Akihito Matsushita – Forest Bath

Dominik Chung – Park Hill, Sheffield

Daniel Ebuehi – Construction Cones

If you would like to see more than one design to come to life, please make a donation. The donations are tax deductible.

If you would like to see more than one design to come to life, please make a donation. The donations are tax deductible.

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 in the countryside. Primary health centers and sub centers rely on trained paramedics to meet most of their needs. The main problems affecting the success of primary health centers are the predominance of clinical and curative concerns over the intended emphasis on preventive work and the reluctance of staff to work in rural areas. -(Source – Wikipedia)

This is where the Low cost self-diagnosis tool comes in.

Winner of the International Design Excellence Awards 08 (http://www.idsa.org/IDEA_Awards/gallery/2008/award_details.asp?ID=35918307), this is a mechanical self-diagnosis tool was created to help patients in rural India capture symptoms and provide them basic information about their disease. Made with recycled materials to maintain low costs, it aims to empower patients and aid doctors with accurate diagnosis and efficient recovery throughout the rural parts of the country.

Designed at Honeywell Technology Solutions in Bangalore by Ankur Sardana (NID) and Parag Trivedi (IDC), this tool displays relevant information. With simple rotation of rings & mapping on the chart, the tool provides -

1. Criticality of disease, basic suggestions (like – ‘how soon to meet the doctor’)

2. Kind of diagnostic tests would be done on them (this is based on the research finding that the villagers are quite suspicious of blood being used for testing & also unprepared for the expense which tests might require)

3. Cases in which they should meet a specialist directly instead of going to a general practitioner

4. Information & contact numbers of healthcare providers

The tool consists of a set of Rings (symptoms), a disease chart & other information. These rings could be made of cheap but durable cardboard. Each ring has set of symptoms. The patient rotates the rings (starting from smallest) & chooses his symptoms by bringing them in one line, below the marker. Each symptom has a number printed on it. The user maps the disease code (set of numbers, 1 from each ring) on the chart. The chart provides tentative result –disease name, severity, next steps, diagnostic tests required to confirm disease, doctor they should meet (i.e. which specialty) & contact information of doctors &hospitals. Made out recycled plastic/cardboard, it is easy to be produced locally in the villages.

The low-cost self-diagnosis tool was born out of the need to provide rural Indian patients with a method to help themselves. Healthcare has not been a priority of rural dwellers in India & they have been used to taking ‘over the counter drugs’ or getting quick relief in the form of a steroid injection from the unregistered medical practitioners- URMP’s (in villages there are usually no qualified doctors). Though an immediate solution, it is not a proper one, disease symptoms resurface & the patient is rushed to a proper registered doctor in the city, who now administers an emergency case where it could have been a case of normal diagnosis. With the tool, the rural dwellers can be empowered with basic knowledge about their disease & can avoid the mistreatment by URMP’s. This tool can also be used by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and self-help groups (in cases of illiteracy) to increase awareness & help make disease symptoms more understandable to the patients. There is also a mutual benefit for healthcare providers and patients. The patients save the money and side effects of self-medication and time, while the doctors have increased inflow of patients and thus more usage of their services.

Currently, in its present form it has not been tested on a large-scale. Most of the feedback has been gathered from the villagers. The educated villagers usually becomes excited, as they understand that they can get empowered if they have some idea of what disease they have. What has been tested in the field (in UP) is a variant in which there are no results, just collection of symptoms. The results have been mixed. Literacy is by far the biggest problem.

While this tool doesn’t aim to act as the messiah of the rural health care problems in the country, it certainly is a step in the right direction. One hopes that it inspires other creative practitioners and problem solvers to delve deeper into this space. It certainly needs more such social innovations.

For more information about more the tool, contact: Ankur Sardana: ankur.sardana@honeywell.com

More on Honeywell at – https://www.honeywell.com/sites/htsl/

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

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 which she journeyed across India to explore how innovation within India drives socio-economic development on the sub-continent and beyond. Meetings with CEO’s of multinational corporations as well as grassroots entrepreneurs heralding bottom up, small scale innovation gave her a holistic, on-the-ground look at the methods of innovation employed in India and the mindset behind it. The Center for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, served as a knowledge partner for the series. Indique – Big Ideas from Emerging India is currently airing in PBS markets across the US.

Dr Ahuja currently serves as an advisor to the Center for India and Global Business and has served as an Associate Fellow at the Asia Society, NYC. She provides consulting services to trade delegations, academic institutions and Fortune 100 companies and regularly contributes to a Harvard Business Review Blog on HBR.org, including a recent post about innovation mindset entitled Jugaad: A New Growth Formula for Corporate America. Her pending book, Leading in a World of Scarcity:New Strategies for Doing More for Less for More, will be available in 2011.

Blood Orange Media is based out of Minneapolis, USA with affiliates in Mumbai, India and across the globe.

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 system in the capital a bunch of times. The new metro system is a part of the solution but will not really replace the rickshaws as far as short distances are concerned. The government intervened in 1998 only to implement CNG or LPG for all auto-rickshaws and the bus fleet in the city. However, there were no service changes in order to improve any of these transportation systems. Recently, I came across a non governmental organization called NyayaBhoomi. The two main centers of focus for this organization are public transportation system and government accountability.

NyayaBhoomi has been developing a venture called the ‘Auto Star Club’ for sometime. The venture is focused on developing an auto rickshaw service that creates an ecosytem of profit generation, client services, long term growth options for the drivers, and technological innovation. NyayaBhoomi published a handbook for the auto drivers that tells them about their rights and duties. The book is aptly titled “Samaadhan” and was published in June 2007. They have also facilitated advertising on auto rickshaws by creating an organized framework for such advertising and got the Municipal Corporation of India to approve this initiative. Around 10,000 rickshaws are registered as volunteers under this system and around 5000 of them are expected to be included in the Autotisement initiative.

A new initiative called Auto Star Club is an initiative that aims improving the auto rickshaw service in India. They intend to have a call-in rickshaw service, very much like a taxi service. The auto’s would be equipped with GPS system to calculate distance and estimate the fare. The drivers would undergo and intensive etiquette and manner training sessions to deal with customers. They also want to create an organized sector for employment by giving the drivers uniforms, health-care and other retirement benefits. This would be made possible by money from the advertisements as well as higher fares.

The ‘Mission Mafia se Mukti‘ initiative is aimed at freeing up rickshaws from the clutches of the Mafia. NyayaBhoomi is still trying to raise money in order to put the some of these systems in place. Their main goal is to understand the underlying problems that causes the rickshaw service in India to be flawed, inefficient and corrupt and then work on solving the problem. It is almost a bit scary to think how we live through broken systems everyday and do very little to rectify them. NyayaBhoomi has taken that step and I hope they succeed. They made this very entertaining but very educational film about future possibilities in this sector that can be put into place as soon as Oct 2010. A hopeful film and perhaps a future possibility.

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.

When I look back at my time in undergrad school, amongst the endless hours of work and play, I think of the time spent at the canteen. Canteen was the place where we drank tonnes of highly caffeinated chai, sketched design solutions with twigs on the loose soil and chatted about things that interested us. I remember getting into an argument with a senior of mine about human accomplishment. Who was smarter – the guy who discovered penicillin or the guy who designed the Barcelona Chair. I said Alexander Flemming was the winner and my senior was the opinion that the medal of accomplishment should be given to Meis Van Der Rohe for designing this awesome chair. Not sure who won the argument. Avinash (my senior) did mention something regarding design change and how a simple chair challenged the way people perceived design and what it represented. It is almost like Coco Chanel’s corset-less shirts. They were expensive and elite but represented a shift in how women dressed. I would guess that Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum did that for Architecture, so did Corbusiers Villa Savoye in France.

This article is more in reaction to Maria Popova’s article called Design : Sit or Stand? which was in reaction to Alissa Walker’s article in Good Magazine called ‘Why I write about design now’. Design is meant to solve problems but it also has a bigger agenda than that. It changes how people perceive society. Design is the representation of the spirit of the age. I don’t condone $6000 sofa sectionals but I don’t think that designers need to stop experimenting with things we use in our daily lives – chairs for example. The Cabbage Chair, which is also a part of the ‘Why Design Now’? exhibition in Cooper Hewitt is a good example of what I am trying to get at. It is a conceptual piece, an idea, an artifact, a thought. If designers loose that quality, then they loose their core. Designing for social good is the need of the hour and designers need to step up and do their bit. They need to be social activists, engineers, prototypers, policy makers but they also need to be artists. They need to push the envelope, think of alternatives that an engineer, a social scientist, or an end user just cannot. That is what makes us what we are. That’s how we do what we do. Social design is not a style, its a call to action. Respond to the it but have a vision. By the end of the day, the idea is to emerge as a designer, a damn good one too and not an aid worker.