A quick spot of cross-posting from my recent interview with Anil Gupta which featured on Design Observer this week.
Anil Gupta serves as senior faculty at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) from where he champions the recognition, respect and reward of those who are knowledge-rich yet economically poor.
Alongside consulting global development agencies he formed the Honey Bee Network in the late eighties which nurtures and cross-pollinates grassroots knowledge, creativity and innovation. Via various platforms stemming from the network – scouting, documentation, validation and dissemination of innovations are pursued while seeking to catalyse knowledge into feasible products and sustainable enterprises.
Meena Kadri
How would you describe your mission across your many initiatives?
Anil Gupta
To enhance the inherent creativity of grassroots innovators, inventors and eco-preneurs while exploring a new paradigm for poverty alleviation that celebrates inclusive development. We focus on devising a knowledge network from village to government level while overcoming the constraints posed by language, literacy and locality. We also facilitate the documentation and cross-pollination of traditional knowledge across India.
Meena Kadri
How do you see these endeavors playing a role in reducing poverty?
Anil Gupta
Most models of development are centered on what the poor don’t have rather than what they have. Some position the poor at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but this does not equate to a lack of knowledge, values and social networks. I prefer to see the poor as a provider than a market — with their limited material resources driving knowledge-intensive, informal innovation. Through providing incubation and development support, patent and intellectual-property-rights assistance, marketing advice and microventure funding, we seek to support the creativity that already exists at the grassroots.
Read the complete interview at Design Observer.
Mitti Cool cookware by Mansukhbhai Prajapati, from Gujarat
Gas-powered iron by K Linga Brahman, from Andra Pradesh
Pressure-cooker coffee maker by Mohammed Rozadeen, from Bihar
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Mumbai Markings Enhance Service Design
Mumbai’s Pavement Purveyors (CNN)
“Attack complacency. Lay siege to boundaries. Load your catapult with options”
– fundamental Moxism
Recently I participated in a NextPlays lab by Moxie Design Group along with ten others from diverse involvements spanning government, non-profit and corporate realms. NextPlays is a transformative platform encompassing a culture of participation to explore sustainable future scenarios – then to imagine, plan and build strategies around them.
The session was exceptionally well devised as a fast-paced yet flexible programme which harnessed group energy and maintained momentum throughout the day. Activities alternated between presentations and discussion on context and challenges, exposure to inspiring case studies, rigorous team brainstorming around specific scenarios – and the personas that would be interacting with them. The seamless framework focused participants’ energy on a wide range of variables toward cultivating sustainable and transformative solutions.
NextPlays Labs have been conducted by Moxie with a wide range of organisations both global and local – from Air New Zealand to the World Bank and upcoming sessions with big boys Procter & Gamble. Each lab is specifically tailored to relevant issues facing the organisations, with the Moxie team skillfully migrating approaches on the fly to accommodate the unique needs of participating enterprises. Strategist Bert Aldridge notes “NextPlays is not about delivering answers but rather it’s an engagement tool to enable and build capacity around the seeking of solutions” while director Peter Salmon succinctly refers to its power to “catalyse conversations towards sustainable outcomes.”
The labs have been used in both Bangkok and Hanoi to explore urban development in conjunction with the World Bank Institute. Participants in these workshops have included community educators, climatologists, architects, environmental youth groups, waste management specialists and urban planners. In such company NextPlays has played a role in the aligning of agendas towards future-focused outcomes on a civic scale. Through encouraging an appreciation of inter-connectedness, divergent players discover potential efficiencies and opportunities.
And back here on home turf I found the expert guidance from scenarios to solutions, context to collaboration, macro to micro – all made for a highly rewarding and productive experience of the Moxie mix.
Related articles:
Creating Waves Through Collaboration
Change Agents Surmount Style
Last week I became a contributing blogger over at Osocio – a website that aggregates
non-profit campaigns and social advertising from around the globe. Here’s a relevant bit
of cross-posting on a surprisingly simple yet highly effecive design strategy that playfully encourages behaviour change:
Scooping up a D&AD Yellow Pencil in this months awards is the brilliant Newspaper
to New Paper project from Dentsu, Tokyo. I feel D&AD are also to be applauded in acknowledging the great worth of this humble project. It signals that they are gauging quality not so much by the effort that is put into a design but more by the effect it has
on its audience.
Entry Rationale
BRIEF:
Design a package for a street vendor that sells farm-grown vegetables and fruits. The brief required somethig original, easy to use and low cost.
SOLUTION:
We focused on old newspaper used to wrap vegetables with. Newpaper was used for good reasons – for its moisture retention quality which helps keep vegetables fresh longer and for its reuse value. Under the “Newspaper for New Paper” project we utilised what was already there – the newspapers – and added an element of design that would be playful and make people smile… both those selling the vegetables and those buying them. By re-using old papers that would be thrown away, the project was friendly to the environment as well as to the budget. By simply adding colourful dots or stripes to the old paper we came up with a totally new package design.
RESULT:
Sales grew by 20%, as did the number of customers. There was more interaction with customers. Because they liked the design, people didn’t just throw away our New Paper but re-used it for something else. News of the low-cost, original design wrapping paper spread virally to other stores that used newspaper for wrapping. The New Paper project was not just a new design for wrapping paper but a pointer to a better lifestyle for us all.
