Public toilets have always been a big problem in India. New and innovative solutions are created everyday to solve this problem. The latest in the row of toilet innovation is the E-Toilet by a company called  Eram Scientific Solutions which is a part of the Eram Group, a technology research and development company.

The company created the toilet called ‘Delight’. Delight is an automatic public toilet with automated payment collection, door opening, flushing, floor cleaning and sterilization. The GPRS enabled system allows controlling the toilet remotely by administering collection monitoring and unit health status through web application and mobile phones. Delight is equipped with a Bio Membrane Reactor that helps recycle the water and reuse it for flushing and cleaning. Solar panels are available for alternate energy needs. In the areas where drainage tank facility is not available Delight can provide a Green Eco Friendly solution to manage the waste and its disposal like the Bio Membrane tank system and the Water recycling unit.

The toilet needs around 45sqft of built space and comes with a coin validator where the insertion of coins opens the door. Delight is first in the line of world class sanitation facility in India. Around 150 toilets have already been installed and another 300 are due to be installed.

The cost of e-toilet varies from Rs.350,000 to Rs.850,000 (inclusive of bio-membrane reactor’s price). Bio-membrane reactor is a nano-technology-aided device that instantly recycles the used water and makes it ready for future use, according to an article in IBN Live. The income generating model for these toilets is the advertisement panels attached outside and the collections everyday by the users. The present installations have been made possible by funding sources like the Local Area Development Funds, local self governments, corporate social responsibility funds, Lions Clubs and NGOs and trade organizations according to an article in Business Standard.

Sustainable Comprehensive Hygiene Initiative (SUCHI) @school project

Kerala is the first state in India to offer the connected toilet facility and other states will follow soon. Eram Technologies has also joined hands with Toonz Academy and created cartoon characters on the front panels of the units to be installed in schools in Ernakulam to make students aware of cleanliness and hygiene. More information about this project is here.

A Luncheon Panel Discussion on Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship : Change Drivers for India’s Inclusive Growth was held in Davos, Switzerland by ‘India Future of Change‘ on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2011. The panel that featured experts from the field of innovation and design discussed how the synergy between design and innovation can be a catalyst for India’s inclusive growth.

Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO LLC,  kicked off the ‘India Future of Change Davos Panel on Design, Innovation & Entrepreneurship by quoting his futurist friend Paul Saffo, “Figure out how far you want to look into the future and then look twice as far back”.

Paula Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture & Design Museum of Modern Art – New York, who was one of the panelists talked about innovation and necessity. She said that countries that had a material culture and a condition of necessity were in a position to jump ahead or leap frog and could teach the world how to do the same. The technology and design world had its eye on the developing world, since sustainability often meant common sense and necessity meant utilizing everything optimally and not wasting anything.

Wilfried Aulbur, Managing Partner for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants said India started out as a country known for its services with Infosys coming up with the mobile delivery model and making a statement at a global scale. In the engineering department, products like Tata’s Nano car have done well both in India and other emerging markets. He talked about smaller scale industries in India that are not in the performance value chain as the bigger suppliers and competitors. There is a big inconsistency between the giants and the small scale industries in terms of innovation as compared to the developed countries where the small scale enterprises fom a big part of innovation and productivity.

MP Ranjan,  faculty at National Institute of Design and Member of the governing council for the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design thought that for the past couple of centuries india has been moving towards industrialization and homogenization. Informational access would mean local access to news and local utilization of resources. Instead of exporting goods, local infrastructures that support local markets could create a sustainable ecosystem thus promoting diversity and the local crafts industry. Financial and information access was required to make this thinking come to life.

Tim Brown who m as a question regarding the difference between the Silicon Valley and India to be an entrepreneur.

K R Sridhar, principal, co-founder & CEO of Bloom Energy answered this question by talking about the ecosystem that surrounds the entrepreneur. Silicon Valley with its 30 year old history of backing innovative yet risky ventures has earned its place as the top destination for technology entrepreneurs. “Will that happen in India? The answer is yes”, he stated. India has always had the soft skills necessary for entrepreneurship. That comes from necessity. The talk in the design and technology fields these days is sustainability. In India, that is not an option, its a necessity, to support the population. It is a value conscious culture and the culture says that I need the most for my money and the false notion of sustainability being costly makes no sense. Indians are creative in their own way and find local systems and infrastructures to make things work. Making good masala means a lot of different spices and then connecting the dots and creating that ecosystem. Right now venture capital firms do not exist in the true sense of word in India but the country has a very bright future in that realm.

Tim expanded on having an impact, developing some of that ecosystem and bring new talent in by asking a question regarding the impacts of global companies like Adobe systems moving into developing countries like India.

Bill Rusitzky Director, Strategic and Technology Partner Alliances at Adobe Systems answered by listing the names of other developing countries housing Adobe R&D labs other than India. However their biggest facility is still in India. 20 % of Adobe employees are actually in India. The aim is to design and manage the products for both the local and global markets. In response to the kind of infrastructural support this company had in India, Bill responded by talking a bit about the level of piracy that existed for technology products both in India and China. which was a problem in the ecosystem and intellectual property area. However with respect to getting the right skill sets, the Indian market had been really great.

Tim asked S D Shibulal, COO, Infosys Technologies, about the future of innovation in India. He responded by talking about the ecosystem which is still in the process of being built. The various components of this ecosystem being education – some great R&D is coming out of educational institutions in India, global companies that are creating their own R&D centers and Indian companies like infosys and Tata. He thinks whatever India had achieved was through execution and the phase for innovation was just arriving. It is primarily about creating services and products and India has an advantage in that sector since India is looking to make services and products that are a necessity like the  ECG machine by GE and Tata’s Nano car. Both these innovations fall under the category of frugal innovation and are affordable, durable and leaner versus faster, smarter and expensive. It is a completely different direction. India has the necessity which will lead to innovation which in turn will be taken out of the country. Like Nano being launched in Europe as Nano Plus since these products are relevant to India as well as the developed world.

Tim asked about the notion of reverse innovation at a design level. Will the world see a Indian design tradition innovation as was seen in Italy and Germany in the 20th century ?

M P Ranjan’s responded to this by talking about a company called Daily Dump based in Bangalore. Every organic material used at home can be composted at home so one doesn’t need the municipal corporation to handle the dump outside one’s house. They have broken the supply chain down to small components and figured out where expertise is needed and where it is not needed. The whole thing is an example of systems design and not just product design. This requires a different kind of design thinking.

K R Sridhar elaborated on certain points about infrastructure and 80% of Indian population living in villages. He questioned whether a person would really like to move out of their town and live in a slum in a big city if they had an option of having a better life and opportunities in their own town. Today there is IT access that can be provided anywhere and a little town can be very profitable doing what they want to do. This would deter villagers from flocking to the cities that do not have the infrastructure to provide services to the incoming population from the villages.

All in all the discussion brought together enlightened minds pondering over the state of Indian design and innovation while keeping in mind the limitations of its infrastructure.

India seems to be on the brink of exciting new things especially in the realm of art and design. As a young creative practitioner, its inspiring and encouraging for me to see examples of the new work that is emerging from the country.The UnBox festival was once such platform that brought together 200 practitioners, academics, and thinkers from the fields of art, design, technology, research and entrepreneurship. The festival acted as  a space to share cross-disciplinary reflections on bringing about cultural change.

Held last month in New Delhi, the festival is the brainchild of four successful Indian creative practices that have successfully crafted an inter-disciplinary approach towards driving impact and change. They go by the name of The Box Collective; made up of Quicksand ,Codesign, BlindBoys and Basic Love of Things (B.L.O.T.). Wanting to share and exchange the experiences of their combined creative endeavors, they decided to organise  and use the format of a festival; as it would help express and celebrate the diversity, that is the core idea behind it.

The festival that ran for the duration of four days, had as part of its iternary – a conference, fellowships, workshops and public events that drew in people from various fields like sociology, business and development, entrepreneurs and of course, art and design. The fellowships were offered in the fields of new media, sanitation, organic food and rural livelihoods. Unbox aimed to build momentum around design thinking and interdisciplinary collaborations to drive sustainable innovation for businesses, society & culture in India.

Some of the speakers included John Thackara ( Doors of Perception ),MP Ranjan, and Ashish Rajpal (CEO, iDiscoveri). The conference had a bunch of workshops that dealt with a variety of subjects such as design thinking, brain storming and developing future scenarios, conceptual principles & techniques of telling stories, typography, the basics of film making and theater, making sure there was a little bit of something for everyone.

The festival also had an open day, where the participants visited a host of studio spaces, kitchens, offices, and common spaces, where new idea are constantly brewing. Another interesting and fun activity that found its way to the Unbox schedule, was an all day – all night platform for hacking, tinkering, learning, creating, and playing. The three parallel festivals that were organised to coincide with Unbox were TechnoDrome – a festival of emerging electronic music, visual arts and performances, BeatRepeat – a  festival bringing interdisciplinary perspectives to the spoken and written word using electronic music, cinema & new media, and EyeMyth – a festival of visual music and experimental film.

Having garnered the support of the Goethe-Institut, and the British Council, it definitely got the attention it deserved. Plus it had a great turn out. All in all, the first ever Unbox festival went down a success. When I spoke to the some of the Unbox peeps last week, they were gearing up for a meeting to discuss the future plans of the festival. Here’s hoping that next year, it only gets bigger, better and more awesome.

Images compiled by The Unbox team. Shot by various participants.

To know more, visit – http://unboxfestival.com/home/

The Union Cabinet in India approved a “National Design Policy‘ on 8th Feb 2007. The step was taken realizing the strategic importance of design for national and industrial competitiveness. The vision behind initiating the ‘National Design Policy’ is to have a design enabled Indian industry. The government initiated a consulting process with designers and industry stakeholders to outline what the policy would entail. After a design policy was put in place, an Indian design council was formulated by the government  in March 2009. The council is made up of designers, heads of design institutes and members from departments of commerce, information technology, ministry of textiles etc. Amongst other activities the design council is meant to undertake design awareness and effectiveness programs both in India and abroad. In other recent news, the council recently unveiled the I-Mark – quality tag at the inauguration of the Japanese Good Design Exhibition at the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The idea behind the I-Mark is to raise the profile of Indian design. The products that bear the mark will be a combination of great quality, aesthetics , functionality and technology. Other developments included, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laying the foundation stone for an upcoming National Institute of Design (NID) at Jorhat in Assam, the first of the four new NID’s planned through the 11th five year plan. There are concerns that the funds allocated to the National Design Policy are not wasted without a discussion with the stakeholders in the design community.

Which brings us to the point of design thinking within the government. With the setting up of the National Design Policy, Indian Design Council, I-Mark and the four more National Institutes of Design nationwide, all in the last five years the government is slowly trying to make a transition towards a design literate nation. Inspite of all this, not a lot has been done to involve the public in general in the government’s design awakening. The UK and many Scandinavian countries have Design Councils that are created so that the government can understand the design needs of the public. This is done by hosting workshops for the public so as to better governmental services by community feedback and collaboration. The list of to-do’s for the Indian Design Council doesn’t really include an internal assessment of a broken service system that includes health, education, urban infrastructure and more that plagues India.

There is a huge disparity between how the government, designers and the community thinks about design. A shared understanding of design thinking and innovation will benefit all, especially the government and the community. In the past a lot of attempts have been made to reform government, make services more efficient and reduce corruption and bureaucratic delay in decision making. A lot of these initiatives have not involved public participation and have not been sustainable. Design thinking via the Indian Design Council could bring about some of those changes.

RBI's data warehouse

One other way is to adopt open data standards. The open data movement allows the digital data freely available to the public. With the Right to Information Act 2005, an Act of the Parliament of India “to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens.”, (source Wikipedia)  the time for open data movement is ripe in India. For the data to be useful to others, it should be machine readable and should offer an API for the programmers to be able to design products and services using it. In India the RBI database of Indian Economy and Election Commission of India, have data available and open but most of this data is not in a machine readable format.  Opencivic is a service based in India that opens data in a machine friendly format. They provide a set of API’s that let the developers interact with this critical data and design engaging application and services.

Most of the design innovation in service sectors has happened in the private sector in the past 25 years. Can services become better in the public and governmental sphere? Yes, but not if all entities work in isolation and try to fulfill their personal agendas. Creating design councils for bettering Indian design is one thing but fixing broken infrastructure is design related as well. Buying ‘Made in India’ should make Indians as proud as taking a bus safely in the capital. Reforming public system is one of the biggest design challenge India faces today and it cannot be dealt with, without public participation. There is a need for a platform that can bring together high level thinkers and doers who are design practitioners, technologists, general public, policy makers and government representatives to initiate a process of design thinking and to share information to accelerate the improvement of public services in India.

References :

Open data movement : triumphs and tribulations

The Center for Internet & Society

Supertable (previously called the Mobile Activation Station) is a project  by Holobiont (Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert) . It was  selected as the winner of the ‘Grand Idea Competition‘ organized by Designwala this summer. Haruka and Frank won a grand or $1000 to make their idea come to life. Supertable 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.  Supertable will be built off of an easy set of instructions with easily available kit of parts. It follows the idea of hackable and DIY culture of building structures that are flexible, adaptable, reusable and community driven. Stay tuned for the Holobiont’s other community and urban planning projects in the upcoming second part of this series.

A new publication on Parsi housing in India, was recently released by the SID Research Cell, Center for Environmental, Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad. The book that has been titled – ‘Gaining ground – Making a new homeland’ is a set of explorations based on history, migration, growth, architecture and lives of the Parsis in India. The SID Research Cell has published close to ten publications with funding from TATA foundation. The following article is a set of excerpts from Shuchi Vyas’s conversation with Snehal Nagarsheth.

Shuchi is the Associate Development Director at The Akanksha Fund and a friend who has also written ‘Bringing vernacular architecture to a wider audience’ based on another publication from the SID Research Cell. Snehal Nagarsheth is a well known architect and Assistant Professor at the School of Interior Design CEPT and also heads the SID Research Cell along with Krishna Shastri who is the Head of Department at SID. Shuchi had an opportunity to speak with Snehal during her visit to Ahmedabad earlier this year.

In these excerpts Snehal talks about understanding Indian architectural history. She explains why architecture cannot be defined by styles and structures alone but needs to be understood in a more holistic way. According to her, compiling ‘Gaining Ground…’ was about winning the trust of the people involved and understanding their lives and history because understanding architectural history is not about standalone buildings and styles but about social connections formed by people.

(I have taken the liberty to categorize the excerpts from the conversation under various headings for a more comprehensive read)

ARCHITECTURE AS NARRATIVE

“At the department (SID CEPT), the faculty had been wondering how to discuss the history for interior design. Should it be the same as history for architecture ? When one looks at architectural history, it is actually to understand how people lived in those spaces and not just to see the styles and structures of the spaces. Then we figured out that this will be the way we would do it. We’ve been interested in narratives, and wanted to actually understand what people had to say”.

ARCHITECTURE AS SEEN BY PEOPLE

“This book is a small little project that builds indian history and you need many such projects to have a correct perspective of Indian history. Otherwise we are looking at our history, which is generated for us by the British or by the people who are studying India. Our intent is not to understand architectural history holistically, but to understand all the different threads that make up the history. It needs to be seen not only from an architectural perspective but we discuss the homes through its narrative by the people who live there, so they give us an experiential understanding of the space through time. We are then given an abstract understanding by the plans and elevations and then we’ve got this understanding which you develop by photographs. That is how we put the pieces together to understand a historical space.”

INDIAN HISTORY

“If one takes a smaller window to look at Indian history, our history might get a little clearer to us and it might even shift this larger overview the foreigners have built for us. Without having a deep understanding of India, a general overview of history was formulated by outsiders who ruled us for 300 years. If one looks at Indian history through a lot of small windows, all windows will connect revealing a panorama. We don’t really have a microscopic view of what India is all about. So we started looking at history in our department by saying that if you had to teach Indian history, would you just have this larger overview to fall back upon which talks about typologies, dynasty rules or is there something else that we can develop.”

SID RESEARCH CELL

“We got the project going by funding from the Tata fund. We have put together ten books since then. There are three monographs. The school has been doing a lot of documentation, so all of our documentation is converted into books. And then we had another research, which was the history of interior design. So we were lucky to have students because we have been talking about publishing work but we had not really produced books because it involved a lot of work. The whole Parsi housing publication started off as a school project. A thesis was going to be put forth for printing by the SID research cell. A similar project was being undertaken by the School of Architecture and their book covered more ground than what we were thinking about. So we expanded on the same topic of Parsi housing and then another student came by with photographs of Parsi Aramgah. Aramgah is a place where they bury their dead if they don’t have a tower of silence. We saw the photographs of these spaces, it was decided to convert this thesis into something bigger. The idea was to open and expand the topic of Parsi architectural history.”

STARTING OFF

“We have a photographer without whom this book would not have been possible. That is Cyrus Mobedji. He’s a Parsi, so we got access to a lot of places because of him. He has been a friend and since we were doing a book on Parsis, he helped us out. It is tough to get permission sometimes to document a house. Here we are actually invading their privacy so for them to feel that it’s alright is a difficult thing. It is a community, which has been leading a sheltered life for a long time, so to get access to really nice, beautiful old homes is tough.”

PARSI MIGRATION & IDENTITY

“If you are a minority just moving to another place, you don’t get benefits or you don’t come out so strongly as a community. When it’s a new nation, then moving in is slightly easier but in India you had a formed country and to come out as a really strong force in a country like that is commendable. They are a small community, today they are about 68,000 and I don’t think they exceeded ever over 1.5 lakhs. They were extremely well positioned and they really did very well for themselves. That made us think about what this milieu was like, which allowed them to survive. Then we realized that before coming to India they spent a short while, about twenty years at another location, which is like an island off shore, so they did not get to the mainland and they settled there for a while and then they moved. At that time, it is conjecture, but they figured out that to go further south of the main state, would be sensible.

They landed at the extreme point, which was Sanjan- that is like the last bastion of the Gujarat. which became their gateway. And the king there gave them the permission to stay and removed a lot of appearances, they couldn’t have their language, they couldn’t have their dressing, they had to marry according to the indian rites. They had to give up a lot but they maintained their religion and said they can’t convert. They removed distance in terms of appearances. They just melted into the background. They were absorbed because they spoke the same language, their mother tongue was Gujarati and they had their own religion but in India you have so many religions, so you had one more. They had a special status because they were given special permission by the king but they would be by themselves. They always strategically politically aligned themselves with the ruling class, because they were a minority, and aligned with the ruling body to get the benefits. The community benefited, all along. That gave them a kind of leap over a lot of the other communities. This community built off of various places but strategically they didn’t have an outward desire to build an identity.”

PEOPLE

“They are very passive people. They consider themselves Gujarati, they speak the same language so they were allowed to retain their identity. When you actually see their dwellings, they are not very different from other Gujarati houses. They live in almost the same style. At one point, though, when the British came, they aligned with the British. They had an exponential jump in prosperity. They emulated the British tremendously as a result you had this amalgamation of quasi-colonial, quasi-Gujarati individual that was developing in this milieu.”

CLASSES

“They also have classes. In Persia they had eight classes. Finally when they came over here, they only had two . One class preaches the religion and they are the ones who will probably do all the rituals at the place of worship, and they are the ones who are the traditional keepers of the religion. While you have the other class who are the followers of that religion. It’s not as though that the divide is as strong as in the Hindu’s but I think the divide does play a certain role in holding onto traditions. Also, they take Parsi first names so they go back to their roots when they pick their names. But that is the only thing they take from Persia, they do not have surnames that are Persian.”

LAST NAMES

“Last names in India came about largely because of the British because they had the tax structure, which is very formalized. So even for us, we had distinctions in our last names which was to do with what you do and where you work. Those were the initial ways of finding some kind of identity; they actually had to make a new homeland so they started taking on last names, which were Indian. It was a real fusion of things that happened within the Parsi community.”

TRADE

“I have a feeling that they were trading even before they decided to come to India. India was a part of the spice trade and there was the Chinese silk route which existed. Ultimately the spice route went up to the silk route so the trading went on for a long time. I have a feeling that they were pretty much aware of the fact that we worshiped fire and they worshiped the fire as well. The similarities were there in a manner of speaking. The Parsis probably traded along the western coast of Gujarat. They could have had smaller settlements. It is interesting how only their religious building is where they reflect back on culture, nowhere else.

After migration, a lot of investment for the Parsis was in cotton. The cotton boom that happened in India in the early 19th century was initiated by them.

It is interesting how we found that all the stone that was used to build Bombay came from the Parsis of Porbandar. Most of the yellow stone that is seen in Bombay comes from Porbandar. The Parsis of Porbandar had a very good relationship with the king who had the mining rights of the stone, while the Paris used to have an off loading facility in Bombay. That is how we realized that looking at this small little community of one lakh people, actually tells you a lot about the development in India, because they were aligned politically, they always managed to be in the forefront. Almost all the railroads that were made were all worked on by the Parsis because they were all engineers and were all educated, during the times of the British. It was not unknown that they built a separate identity, but the fact that they remained in the background allowed them to be accepted by both, the locals as well as the ruling class.

The liquor licensing came about by the British because almost everybody in India brewed their own liquor so you couldn’t tax it. The British banned the liquor practice so you couldn’t brew it and then you could only brew it through licensing. Almost all the licenses belonged to Parsis. To get the license it surely mattered that you knew somebody high up. You realize that there is a tremendous strong strategic move to align with the ruling class.”

LAND

“Some of the Parsi houses which are in the villages of Gujarat have huge tracts of land, because they were given a lot of advantages during the British times. They were used as people who were the in between for communication, for ruling, for everything. They formed this whole group of people who negotiated between the British and the local groups. And in that whole process, they had tremendous advantage, because if there was any declaration by the British they were the first to know. British were always looking for avenues of income, so lands which were forest land, which didn’t yield income for the British were given away. Tracts as big as 25,000 hectares of land or a jungle was given out to the Parsi community. That jungle then, was partly converted to agriculture. The British could then can tax the income from the produce.”

ARCHITECTURE

“They didn’t build with a specific style. We realized that consistency is what they were really addressing, and there was an intention to make this their new homeland so they didn’t do something specific architecturally . They did not go ahead and build, like you have the Portuguese, who came and built a style. However they transformed the English bungalow to Indianize it. That allows you to see how the bungalow becomes a simple village home. They asked for their basic architectural needs to be met. When they needed a well, they built wells. The women during menstruation live in a separate little chamber with an iron door which is present in many houses. So they built things, as per need, but an outward appearance to state a presence is never seen. Just 200 years after them, the Muslims followed. They couldn’t, state their difference at all then since they had fled from the Muslim persecution in Iran. There are about 50-60 houses all belonging to Parsis in Parsi villages in Gujarat, they are all landlords, and largely into agriculture. That’s where you see these bungalows, which became quasi-Indian homes. They’ve taken up this idea of the bungalow, the British bungalow, and it kind of gets overlaid with what they considered important.”

THE BOOK

“The book we have put together is not a very large book. It is difficult for us not to have a lot pictures because the Parsi homes are so beautiful. What is really amazing is the manner in which the spatial arrangements are done. The interiors are exquisite, it’s kept very beautifully, so we divided this book in four parts. The first part is before they moved to India. We looked at their background and their architecture which is only present in their religious buildings. They are called Agiari. Their homes are pretty much like ours. It’s not necessary that they would only have had Parsi craftsman build it.

For the book, we wanted to come up with a holistic understanding of history of Parsi housing rather than saying that this is the architectural style. We wanted to understand architecture as a cumulative process. A building up of what this architecture was about comes from understanding of architecture not as stand alone buildings but as connections to its people and their history otherwise we were going to end up probably just having an overview versus the details. We didn’t have styles of building, we actually didn’t even have extensive styles in clothing but we had people who had lived this history and contributed to the growth of India, mingled with the British, acquired styles from everywhere while preserving their religion and customs. Its a truely amalgamated religion.”

The book – ‘Gaining ground – Making a new homeland’ pays a homage not only to the spaces the Parsis created and called home but their undefeated spirit of survival as well.

Click here for the list of other publications and order form for publications by the SID Research Cell

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.

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/

In India, power cuts during exam time is every child’s biggest anxiety. One breaks into a sweat, starts pacing up and down and even goes to the extreme of praying to the Almighty; promising reforms, pledging away a life of sin and the long dreadful countdown to when the lights will turn back on.

This very real, and seemingly life-threatening fear is what served as a starting point for Studio ABD when they began designing StudyLite – a LED lamp, in collaboration with BPL. Studio ABD firmly believes in story telling as integral part of designing products and services; and so it seems fitting that the lamp was inspired by the ring of halo that hovers above the head of the wise and saintly. Light is the quintessential metaphor of enlightenment.  Designer Abhijit Bansod visualised a ring of light glowing over the head when a child is studying. In the StudyLite he has tried to keep things simple yet unique.

This iconic and animated study lamp embodies a smooth and seamless form to allow maximum user interaction as it’s designed especially for children. It is extremely eco-friendly with its solar charging capability and low power consumption; and has a 6-hour battery back up to provide uninterrupted source of light while studying. Ergonomically simple, portable and lightweight StudyLite has recently won the prestigious Red Dot award. Red Dot stands for belonging to the best in design and business. The red dot is an internationally recognized quality label for excellent design that is aimed at all those who would like to qualify their business activities with the help of design. This is a proud moment and a big leap forward for Indian Design, being perhaps the first Indian company to receive such critical acclaim.

Another refreshing feature of this rechargeable lamp is that every lamp is marked ‘Designed and Made in India’.  Studio ABD wanted to highlight the fact that the components of the lamp, the assembly and the design were all done here, within the country – promoting the use of locally available resources, materials, people and technology.

StudyLite came into existence by the sheer genius of the design team who worked directly with the end users without much interference from the manufacturers –BPL. The biggest challenged faced by them was to tackle the mindset of resistance from the manufacturers. While they were extremely supportive of original design and idea, the concept of having a halo head for the lamp seemed a tad unnecessary. Fortunately, it was nothing a little patience and persistence couldn’t contend with.

Another problem they had to deal with was the pricing of StudyLite. At the moment, being marketed at a little more than Rs, 1500, there seems to be a slight apprehension to spend that much, despite its pleasing aesthetics, functionality and sheer practicality. Again, it’s a matter of tackling mindsets. Studio ABD hopes that the right marketing and publicity will go a long way in helping them do so.  Winning the Red Dot has done wonders for StudyLite in making its presence felt in the Indian market. Currently available throughout the country, it is now gearing up to be hopefully exported and retailed internationally.

To know more about Studio ABD, please visit – http://www.studioabd.in/

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.