One can find ample instances of mobile phones enhancing the lives of those on low and unpredictable incomes at the base of the pyramid across the world. Today I came across a small yet active example of the advantage of mobile connectivity in the context of my current research endeavors at Dharavi in Mumbai.
Jan Mohammed runs a knife-selling and knife-sharpening enterprise, which he operates from his bicycle, to service the Dharavi-Mahim-Sion area. He conducts business by going door to door in these neighbourhoods and often parks up in one of the busy marketplaces during evenings. Since buying a second-hand mobile phone he has been able to attract the business of local restaurants and caterers who provide bulk sharpening work and have become regular clients via the accessibility his phone assures.
The aspect he likes best about his phone is the prepaid payment method. Having a wife and five children back at his village in Uttar Pradesh means that he makes frequent calls home – but when he is low on money and hasn’t topped up his phonecard he can still receive calls ensuring business. In fact he had just last week paid to replace his knife-sharpening grinder so had no money left for phone credit, yet was still able to receive a lucrative call from a wedding caterer to sharpen 75 knives.
Knife-wallas elsewhere in Dharavi who conduct business without mobile phones.
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Tuned-In
My week has been peppered with conversations on the use of scenario building as a
method of design thinking. This took me back to fond memories of working alongside my inspirational colleague MP Ranjan at the National Institute of Design (NID) in India who has been pushing the barrow of design thinking and its extensive applications from way before it became a hot topic.
Energetic in mind and manner, Ranjan has been evolving his invigorating, provocative and immensely popular Design Concepts & Concerns course for close to two decades now. A cornerstone of the programme is his learning from the field model which is kicked off by investigating local micro-enterprises.
By closely examining sidewalk entrepreneurs, students are encouraged to engage in a rich exploration of current scenarios to spark dimensional discussion towards enhanced scenarios. This process lays the foundation for future envisioning that can be scaled to embrace complex challenges to which design thinking can be applied: from systems to services and beyond.
Ranjan elaborates on the course blog:
… it is far easier to start with small and micro enterprises such as street food vendors who are easily accessible and can therefore be a very useful source of business learning and about a number of finer aspects of entrepreneurial behavior. Each of these micro businesses is indeed homologous to a huge multi-national business conglomerate in a similar line of business such as the ones involved in the preparation and delivery of food to their customers across several continents.
As design extends its focus from product innovation to social innovation (including significant expansion into service design) one hopes that design schools are exposing students to relevant skills and contexts. And as Ranjan has clearly demonstrated – those contexts can be as close as the nearest street corner.
Images from students of the DCC Foundation Class of 2006
I was particularly heartened to come across the recently launched mash-up of fashion and fundraising: The Uniform Project in which a pledge has been made to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.
Actually there are seven identical dresses – one for each day of the week. Every day the dress is artfully reinvented via layers and accessories and images posted online in the effort to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation – a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India.
The project’s brainchild Sheena Matheiken recollects “I was raised and schooled in
India where uniforms were a mandate in most public schools. Despite the imposed conformity, kids always found a way to bend the rules and flaunt a little personality… Girls obsessed over bangles, bindis and bad hairdos. Peaking through the sea of uniforms were the idiosyncrasies of teen style and individual flare. I now want to put the same rules to test again, only this time I’m trading in the Catholic school fervor
for an eBay addiction and relocating the school walls to this wonderful place called
the internet.”
It all made me reflect on my past delvings into fashion and connectivity which I covered in my paper Fashion, Humanism and the Online Environment (1.8MB). Written in 2005 I’m the first to admit that the dialogue has definately moved on. However at the time Web 2.0 was still a fresh enough topic to win me a junior faculty travel award to present at the International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes conference in the US. (disclosure: my main driver for submitting the proposal was the thought of a two week escape from the excrutiating heat of high Indian summer – to which, as a New Zealander, I was entirely unaccustomed.)
The Uniform Project goes a long way in exemplifing my suggestion:
“through the internet, fashion holds the power to create space for social, cultural and altruistic discourse… the multi-layering of internet based communication affords the opportunity to participate in the arena of commerce while remaining culturally relevant, responsible and active.”
While I was more speaking about fashion brands leveraging cultural connectivity The Uniform Project is instead an online fundraising initiative masterfully leveraging fashion itself. Great to see the Manolo on the other foot!
No longer patronisingly for ‘dummies’ – it’s a welcome relief to note the emerging host of savvy communications for clarifying complex information. These de-mystifying initiatives are not only potentially transformative but have implications of being powerfully inclusive as well.
First up: a timely animation explaining the Credit Crisis which is the result of “exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world” by Jonathan Jarvis over at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasedena. In fact it also shows up the failing of mainstream media to shine a clear light on this subject and raises the notion that they have then traded on the resulting confusion.
Xplane, the Visual Thinking Company who employ the method of visual collaboration and acknowledge that “effective communications… move people to action” have co-created a plethora of visual initiatives aiding understanding of complex information – rendering concepts like How Obama Reinvented Campaign Finance both palatable and digestable.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWgJlwTDIRQ
And on a topic dear to my heart: co-design. I’m over trying to bumble my way through explaining this concept to people and this beauty from thinkpublic does a great job. If this is combined with case studies from public & corporate arenas then one can easily begin grasp the concept. But hey – that’s another post!
Finally – if you’re still confused about Twitter: here it is in plain English and perhaps check out more humorous clarifications over at More New Math.
We increasingly need better filters for information (in both commercial and public spheres) and I’m a big fan of these being executed in a compelling way. If more people understand stuff surely we can expect better dialogue. And lets face it – life isn’t getting any easier – and attention spans certainly aren’t getting any longer.
[A nod to TBWA Media Arts Mondays over at PFSK]
Earlier this year I spoke at the TypeShed 11 symposium here in Wellington, New Zealand which was a great opportunity to catch up with global type-obsessives I already knew and to meet some new ones. Though I always feel a bit out on a limb in such company as I’m no craftsperson when it comes to typography (having a short attention span for form) – but rather like to poke around the socio-cultural manifestations, functions and implications of type and type-making.
I spoke on Indian street graphics, touching on issues such as multiple language, globalised brands and competing technologies alongside the pervasive flamboyance of idiomatic typography in India.
You can download a summary of the presentation entitled Sign-wallahs: Indian Streetscape (2MB) that was published last year by the good folk at Lab Magazine or check some of my Indian street graphics collection on Flickr.
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We Tell Stories: Hard Times may seem like a depressing title but this collaboration between Nicholas Felton and Matt Mason explores the current scenario as fertile ground for disruptive innovation, amongst other things. It actually imparts a powerfully positive message to those who are ready to embrace disruptive initiatives and acknowledge them as creative catalysts for change.
Although it takes some effort to read – part of its appeal is actually with the challenging yet dynamic form of engagement.
Created for Penguin’s We Tell Stories digital fiction site.
A couple of years back, while teaching design at the National Institute of Design (NID) in India, I carried out a study on the visual marketing of Coca Cola for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Viewing Coke’s journey through the lens of glocalisation, I explored notions of branding as a site of negotiation between global business interests and local cultures.
You can download the Glocal Cola PDF (2MB) containing a significant part of the research or if you prefer just looking at pictures you can check out my Cola Collection on Flickr.
