We had a little show and tell at IFTF on Friday where we all brought in examples of good things to read.

I wanted to bring Indian blogs that I like a lot. But I also thought I needed more than my own finds – ones that focused on design, technology, art and/or culture. Because it was late in San Francisco, I was overlapping significantly with the daylight part of India’s diurnal cycle. Who better to ask where the good content was than some trusted colleagues from the subcontinent?

It turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected. I got a handful of good responses when I posted it on my twitter feed – maybe 35% of all those I asked. Some replies were more relevant for what I was looking for: well organized, thoughtful commentary, minimal ads, a clear editorial focus, and, above all, unabashedly Indian.

However, a few replies also cited how difficult it was to think of blogs or magazines – from a specifically Indian context. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult. Perhaps much of Indian culture is derivative in one way or another and that we often run into conflicts when we cite what is “purely” Indian (I’m gonna get in trouble for this last sentence . Or maybe the blogs are just difficult to find, in a different language, or just not cool enough.

It also seems a lot of blogs don’t maintain momentum – as if they aren’t “serious” enough to be sanctioned. I was super bummed not to see much from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) or even from Srishti for that matter. I guess new media isn’t supposed to be linkable from home institutions (but please correct me if I’m wrong).

Then again, maybe it’s not allowed. You’d be surprised how many social disincentives as leveraged at people just trying to share good ideas, insights, and sensemaking (#justmyexperience). But that’s changing – I hope.

In any case, here’s a first go, and this list is fantastic.

What are your favorites? I’d be especially down for some Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, or other links too. Post ‘em in the comments if you like – and better yet – tell me why I’m wrong. Enjoy!

http://issuu.com/wkdelhi/docs
Portland Ad Agency Weiden and Kennedy opened an office in Delhi. This is their culture mag. Really well-done, visually-compelling, and curiously out of the mainstream – but then I guess that where the advertising peeps always play.

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/
I’ve been really impressed with the quality of articles coming from caravan. Timely topics (the first I ever read was about UIDwallas) and good layout.

http://www.randomspecific.com/
A killer visual culture and design research-based collection. Smart commentary and vibrant, reality-based images permeate the senses.

http://praja.in
Want to know what’s happening in the mobility and public transport scene in Bangalore? This is transport politics writ large. Great levels of participation.

http://designpublic.in/
A series of conversations about design and innovation in the public interest – by the good peeps at CKS.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/
It seems a bunch of massive media outlets are learning to pay attention to India.

http://masalachaionline.blogspot.com/
Desi graphic design.

http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/
Respected NID Prof. M P Ranjan on design thinking, design research, and some massive issues in sustainability and inclusion.

http://www.hobnook.com/
TBD

http://www.sarai.net/
Old school, super school, the source for critical thinking about cities, new media, art, and culture

http://poolmagazine.wordpress.com/
Looks like Tiger Beat – for the Indian design caste.

http://helterskelter.in/
chaos and control. like it.

http://www.openthemagazine.com/
Bordering on info overload, but the writing looks promising.

http://www.designwala.org/
Arch + design for developing world.

http://www.medianama.com/
Tech and business details.

GOOD is one of those publishing groups that’s sort of like a cross between WorldChanging and ISO50. They pull together interesting, relevant research and ideas from the web, but they bring it all together with a stunning array of infographics designed to present information meaningfully. It helps that they bring education, design, and health directly into the fold.  And the have a good twitter feed (whoops, no pun intended).

A couple weeks back I was spending some time on pyramids, and GOOD’s link to a double pyramid showing the relationship between diet and agricultural intensity (read: let’s get away from the amorphous “environmental impact”) got me interested in their Redesigning the Food Pyramid contest.

FoodNet

An early iteration of the food pyramid – turned – network paradigm.

Since I also happen to be doing some work on agricultural supply -and- what I would call attachment ecologies (these are links that create what we call health, wealth, concepts, diet, and technology), I started to wonder how the food pyramid might be implemented using the Indian version of a food pyramid and dietary requirements.

My first stop was to take a look at some of the nutritional guidelines designed by the U.S. (since this would be my main focus – for the contest at least).  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture issue new guidelines every 5 years.  I checked out guide for 2005 and the upcoming revisions for 2010 for inspiration.

At the same time I was attempting to find out what guidelines India uses.  This turned out to be trickier that I had anticipated.  The National Institute for Nutrition (NIN) issues the guidelines.  The last time they did this was in 1998.  NIN performed an array of information, education, and communication efforts.  However, despite these efforts, the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey found no significant improvement in the nutritional status of the Indian population in the seven years (1998-2005) since the guidelines were issued.

FoodBar

A second iteration - trying to make the network "list accessible".

As it happened, I lucked out with a news article describing how the NIN was looking for suggestions for revising the guidelines and their dissemination – specifically around how to create awareness of the guidelines.  This helped me uncover a few different documents and sources of information.  I tried calling of course, but that was unfortunately not productive as I kept getting passed to someone else.  The basic guidelines can be found at the India Development Portal, but they must be mail ordered from NIN here.  I was able to find specific daily nutritional requirements tables here, but the providence of the document is unclear (I’m guessing NIN).

In the meantime, I started formulating suggestions for how to improve the dissemination of the guidelines.  I sent these to NIN, and a follow-up call revealed that they had seen them, but hadn’t yet responded.  I’m actually optimistic that they might find them useful.

What initially interested me about the pyramid was the opportunity to represent the notion of a networked diet – one that ties into a variety of cultural and ecological options & constraints.  Etching through the design and layout process, I started arriving at some ‘solutions’.

weekly-food-choices

A decision support tool for making food choices.

The U.S.-based diet guide arrived first, and as I started wondering what to do with the leftover empty space (while trying to figure out how to make it less flat), I realized that food icons would do both.  Then as I started thinking about how the graphic “assembles” into everyday life, the concept of the food refrigerator magnets started to materialize.

fridgeMagnet

Using magnets to provide interactivity, daily, and weekly reminders of food goals and choices.

Turing out the Indian version is going to be a bit trickier.  For one thing, “My Weekly Food Choices” and “My Food Web” looses relevance in places where someone else makes decisions for you.  Plus, the collective aspects of eating means the choices are often negotiated within families or groups.  Thus, it will probably become something like “Our Food Web”.

In representing amounts, it’s interesting that Indian guidelines are purely in grams (except milk which is mL).  The U.S. system uses two types of volume (cups and ounces equivalent) and one weight (grams, for oils).  However, I think the next big challenge will be to get some food icons for Indian foods (north and south).  Any takers?

weekly-food-choices-INDIA

Dietary guidelines and decision aid for India

OpenIDEO recently launched with a few beta projects aimed to promote social entrepreneurship – first for helping kids make healthy food choices and then for affordable teaching and learning services (in India).  The OpenIDEO web platform is a good use of social media to gather up precedents, promote participation, and organize preferences.  People are free to contribute as much or as little as they can, but as with any project, there are clearly different levels of participation.  Somewhere I read [from the EVOKE people I think] that there are usually five or so levels of participation in crowdsourcing or social media projects: 1) look around, 2) create an account, 3) some participation, 4) active involvement, and 5) hardcore.

Because I have an interest in teaching and learning, I decided to commit and follow through to the end – contributing as earnestly as possible with my available time.  I probably ended up somewhere around “active contributor”, but by no means was I “hardcore”.

I came in a little after the start of the project and didn’t have much time to contribute to the precedents phase.  Precedents is where people share examples of things that are relevant to the project brief. Here the brief was to increase the availability and affordability of teaching and learning tools and services in the developing world.

The brief is often where the closest attention should be paid. It’s usually where conflicts and misunderstanding originate. As with any project, the real challenge is to first define the problem – and then to demonstrate how the solutions posed solve that problem.  It sounds easier than it is.  I think crowdsourcing succeeds and fails in the ways people perceive and interpret the problem, and how they subsequently map their solutions to the problems as posed.  The challenge for any crowdsourcing project to embrace is how to support the interpreting and mapping more effectively.

This post is meant for me to reflect and assess what I thought was fun and what I thought was less fun about OpenIDEO’s process – as a user and participant.  Perhaps because the focus of the challenge was teaching + learning, I viewed it a little like being a student-participant.

What was fun.
The challenge was relevant and broad enough that I was able to easily focus my efforts into developing a few concepts. In most cases, I had the education settings and use-cases in front of me while I was doing my other work on rural agriculture and livelihoods. In all I added three concepts.  It was mainly a way for me think through problems, and I did it as much for myself as I did for the challenge.

In Share the Seed, Not the Tree, I collected data about the costs of materials and services in use at a typical school in a large town in Andra Pradesh, India. I wanted to use collected data and observations of kids at school because I thought this seemed to be missing from the brief, and because unsubstantiated assumptions about people and contexts are too common.  Among the many context submissions, there were a wide range of assumptions about context, affordability, meaning, and culture, and I didn’t really understand where they were coming from. But that’s okay. 

On the formal side, I think the developers should have made the formatting a little easier for the user.  As it was I couldn’t present anything in tabular or list format.

Untitled was a information tool for library services we’ve been working in at CSTEP which provides a simple to implement way of tracking library books and other assets.  Common resources like libraries and parks are REALLY difficult to maintain in India – unless you have a guard and locks.

Fig1

One take-away lesson from the concept I sent in (and for OpenIDEO) was that I think teaching and learning will benefit more when the resources that are present are made visible with the rules and users clearly shown to all.  We need information technologies that simultaneously support different modes of interaction – from centralized to decentralized and everything in-between.

Fig2

News Ecologies Remix Design (Figs 1 & 2) was as much an experiment with graphic design as it was thinking through the hovel industrial ecology of newspaper recycling and aggregation AND journalistic content creation.

What I really like in hindsight was the eventual use of the concepts – something that wasn’t made quite clear up front.  The ‘winners’ were all compiled into a resource guide that provided a series of steps and questions to help move subsequent innovators through the design process themselves.  The winning concepts were not projected as projects to be implemented – they were positioned more as catalysts for teaching and imagining.

So in the end, the brief ended up more like a rapidly prototyped workbook – filled out with design ideas.  The OpenIDEO platform was a quick way to generate relevant content that could be used to support people’s thinking as well as a process for local actors working on a similar design brief.

What was less Fun.
I have way more to say about what was fun and less fun, but because of time, I only want to focus on a few things that seemed consistent or inconsistent with the aims of the challenge.

On the less fun side, the social aspects of the platform were not as enriching as I expected.  There were ‘winners’ in a collaborative process, and this raises multiple issues as part of a larger discussion about framing, education and collaboration.

I also didn’t get a stable sense of interaction with other participants.  Keep in mind the platform is still in beta, and they are (I assume) working on additional “features”.  Inter-participant interactions consisted of comments on posts and “applaud” recognition.  I really wished I could have been notified by email of updates to comments and other interactions between participants.

I also got the sense it was a popularity contest.  This was reinforced in the evaluation phase where, after an intense round of concepting, forty concepts were shortlisted.  If I were a student in a classroom, this would have been really discouraging.  It was a like working to satisfy a set of criteria and then finding out afterwards that you were actually being evaluated against a different set of rules.

We’ve now got 40 concepts based on popularity and those which have the most potential, as chosen by GMC. In order to get down to 30, and help these ideas move forwards, please evaluate them against the criteria.

I think this is where OpenIDEO really failed with this challenge.  Most students at a certain age are not disappointed by not winning.  It’s not knowing how to improve that kills your motivation.  This is exactly the challenge for India.  Many teachers – especially at the college level – are themselves unable or unwilling to distinguish relevant knowledge and its applications from less effective ones.  What they do know, they stick with – leaving innovating educational models in the dust (quite literally sometimes). 

Experienced teachers also know that if students are uninformed about why they got a certain grade, they get upset and frustrated and will loose motivation quickly.  This is probably why standardized curricula and testing are used so much in schools – and why ‘progressive educationists’ react so strongly to any mention of evaluation or standards.  When no one has to be responsible for facilitating that map between problems and solutions, there are simple, correct and incorrect answers.

It would have been better to do the detailed evaluation first – giving feedback to all the concepts – and the “applause” round second – with the detailed evaluations available as evidence of the mapping between solution and problem. Yes, it would have been more tedious perhaps, but so what.

If I had know it was all about popularity, I probably wouldn’t have invested the effort. There was no way to ‘see’ the mapping between the problem statement and ‘winning’, making it appear as though arbitrary because it wasn’t made visible.  What I wanted was the opportunity to see if my perspectives matched the challenge problem and where it needed improvement.  So in the end, I didn’t learn much. 

But hey, it’s a beta test and failing is good.  Hopefully it becomes an opportunity for better implementation.

The second round of evaluation was more detailed and asked respondents to rate the solution on a few different criteria – along with detailed comments to further their effectiveness.  I don’t want to get too much into the feasibility of many of the ideas for India, but I will say that there could have been better alignment between the concepting phase and what schools and education are like in India.  I don’t want to be a downer on brainstorming, but I did feel like some of the social interactions were too encouraging, without providing any real interpretation of the costs, benefits, or obstacles that the solutions presented.  But then maybe that is ENTIRELY appropriate give the India-based context.  Perhaps providing a more detailed design brief along with supporting materials would be one way to provide such a diverse array of participants with more meaningful context.

In summary, it was fun, challenging, enriching, and I’d do it again.  However, because the social and evaluative aspects value certain actions over others, I am less inclined to contribute as fully as I might otherwise.  Nonetheless in it’s successes and failures, it’s a powerful example with lessons for the design of teaching and learning tools, values, and services.

This post from frog design reminded me of a short presentation I attended a couple of year’s back on Maslow’s Hierarchy. I have to admit that I forgot what the main point was that was being made, but I think it had something to do with design and how attention to this classification could help designers with the “important” things. There is something about Maslow’s pyramid that fits quite nicely with Indian social philosophy. Perhaps it is the hierarchy part – or maybe the path to enlightenment.

This is short presentation I gave to the Melton Foundation’s Symposium on Innovation which was held in Bangalore in August, 2009. I spoke on Innovation in Education, coming from the perspective of someone with the aim of bridging disciplines and interpretations.

A Model of Mitochondria in the Cell

What is a mitochondrion? It’s an organelle (kind of like an organ in your body) for a cell.  They generate much of the chemical energy used by a cell to carry out its different processes.

I have been working on a project for the last few months that extends work on what I call Silking Systems. By calling it Silking Systems, I’m trying to emphasize the patterning of silk and textile production as a set of relationships, things and interactions to accomplish varieties of silk/non-silk relationships, rather than as modes of behavior or production which are static – or should I say pre-threaded?

In 2008, some of my students researched How Silk is Made (after How Stuff is Made) for my class on Design for Sustainability. Their work documents the collection and processing of the silk fiber from cocoons to the thread you find in finished textiles.

Steps to a square cocoon.

In attempting to learn about sericulture from scratch, I visited some local producers in Karnataka, India and pulled in some textual research and advice – including Joseph Needham’s classic series on Science and Technology in China (1998 ed).

The most recent concept that I want to document here is pretty simple. Human mitochondrial genome sequences are woven in sequence using silk to produce a pattern that matches the mitochondrial nucleotide patterns.

Ashwathnarayann

Checking the loom's warp.

I have a few implicit goals and a few explicit ones as well. An implicit one is that I am attempting to push the relationship between craft, production, economic agency, and hybridity. I am drawing to some extent from the idea that economic value is generated through recombination – that goods and/or services emerge and create value when they are mixtures of other (especially unrelated) things.

Transferring the silk thread for the weft from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Eric Beinhocker details this concept of value through hybrids along with an evolutionary algorithmic perspective on economics in his book The Origin of Wealth (2006). The book was recommended to me by Cesar Hildago, a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Development. Cesar’s work on complex networks has also influenced this project, starting with his article on the Product Space of Nations (2007) and continuing with images like figures 1 and 2 which came out of his research. The network graphs make it easy to see how different economies differ in the products they export.

Fig 1. This image maps the products produced by the United States in 2000. The squares are things they are good at – in the US's case vehicles, chemicals, forest products, for example.

Fig 2. This image maps the products produced by India in 2000. The squares are things they are good at – in India's case textiles, chemicals, and diamonds, for example.

My thinking is that by challenging some aspects of the status quo in silk and textile production, new value propositions might be found. This comes, perhaps, by demonstrating that square cocoons are possible or by remixing molecular genetics and weaving to create a series of silk stoles based on a mitochondrial haplotype found frequently in southern India.

Preparing the shuttles from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Another goal is to simply visualize the mitochondrial genome – and to make it as accessible for teaching and learning as possible. Making it tactile and making it in silk allows people to touch, feel, and to see individual sequence variation. Silk thread is a good scale for this sort of thing – not too small and not too big either. So in viewing these stoles (which measure about 5 meters each in length) one is challenged to look for patterns and they are rewarded with the same.

The mitochondrial sequence used to produce the pattern next to shuttles that carry the silk thread through the warp.

Weaving silk using a mitochondrial sequence from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Checking and threading the warp. You can see the silk fibers and how thin a single one is. It takes years to master silk weaving because it is a very delicate and dexterity-rich process.

Finished pattern stretched on the loom.

I’ll expand this article as the project develops further, but I’ll end now with one nagging curiosity. The pattern that is being produced is engaging and pleasing. It makes me wonder if it in some ways exploits a bias we humans may have towards certain arrangements. Specifically I’m thinking about pink noise patterns…but I need to search more.

References

Needham, J., & Kuhn, D. (1988). Science and civilisation in China: spinning and reeling. Vol. 5. Chemistry and chemical technology. Pt. 9. Textile technology. Cambridge University Press.

Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The origin of wealth: evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics. Harvard Business Press.

Hidalgo, C. A., Klinger, B., Barabasi, A., & Hausmann, R. (2007). The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations. Science, 317(5837), 482-487. doi:10.1126/science.1144581

A group of researchers made up of advanced students from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT) set out to learn about ethnographic practice and to experience the places and people that may have something to add to our understanding of how the technology fits (or doesn’t fit) with their everyday life. Their goal was to identify how user context could affect the landscape of educational technology…or at least that’s how they started out.

Playpower is a initiative to support affordable, effective, and fun learning games. The project is starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.

The video below introduces the Playpower Foundation’s mission.

Playpower: An introduction from Playpower Foundation on Vimeo.

Working on a set of social research practices means getting to know or getting NOT to know (depending on how you look at it) the places and practices of the people who can potentially create something valuable from changes to the exiting technology and it uses.

We held a summary and feedback session at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy after their first week of training and observation. They shared their process of ethnographic research gathered feedback to develop it further and begin to implement more observations on a wider scale.

The research team gave a great introduction of their process with some initial results. What followed was a fantastic discussion among approximately 15-20 staff and researchers at CSTEP as well as visitors and the Playpower team.

Many themes began to emerge, and it became clear that the exciting thing about the Playpower project was more than its concept of low cost computing. Instead, I think it raises as many questions as it answers and engages its audience with problems about the role of technology in education and everyday life.

We explored multiple themes in more or less detail, but overall the session was a fantastic success and good model for how to bring about discussions that relate social science, technology, economics, and education in exciting ways.

Questions and themes for further follow-up:

1. What is the role of ethnographic researchers in relationship to the design process and the Playpower project more generally? That is, how do perspectives gained “on-the-ground” compete with held assumptions about the project and its implementation?

2. How do we move from perspectives of technology as a solution questions about peoples’ goals and aspirations? That is, are we working on the Playpower technology as a panacea for educational constraints rather than understanding how family and individual wants and needs articulate their own technology (or otherwise) solutions?

3. Understanding context means that we may need to do some questionnaire redesign – to understand more than just the landscape afforded by people’s lifestyles and incomes towards an understanding of how practice and purpose shape socio-technical interactions.

4. How can the conclusions and assumptions held by programmers and designers be refined? Put another way, do designers or researchers feel free, comfortable, or motivated to redress cultural biases and modes? Also, how is the distinction between game design and development articulated?

5. Does ethnographic research inform through techniques beyond the interview-questionaire-film? What are additional techniques for research?

6. What are the values that Playpower is proposing, advocating, or nominating? For example, are fantasizing, empathy, or transitions in behavior and practice something the project aims to make durable in its presentation and game design? What about the game or software content? How do these values translate into design – e.g. process or pattern knowledge as bird’s eye views and 2nd order perspectives.

7. Can film and cinema provide media and narrative precedents for games and instruction?

8. Did they buy (the original keyboard/game sets) because they are educational? Or for other purposes?

9. Are there game paradigms to move beyond the screen and into interaction and engagement with the real world.

Here’s a recipe. I learned to make this with a family at the Pushkar fair and a small group Srishti students and faculty. It’s a traditional Rajasthani dish of dal and baati which is like a heavy bread or roll. You could probably make small baati (ours were the size of tennis balls) and bake them (no bondfire as in the recipe). However for authenticity, you could do what we did which was cook the baati in a heap of hot, glowing camel dung. The trick is finding a herd of camels to get the fuel from. Although at Pushkar it wasn’t a problem. Very tasty!

Daal:
1/2 kg moong daal (green gram)
onions, 1/2 kg spinach (shredded), coriander, garlic (crushed),
2 tomatoes, chillies
dhaniya (coriander seeds) powder, turmeric

soak the daal for 5 mins
boil 7 glasses of water with 2 teaspoons of salt
add the daal to it

chop onions and green chillies
heat them in 4 tablespoons of oil
add 1 tbspn dhaniya powder
1 tbspn red chilli powder
a little turmeric
1/2 kg shredded spinach, 2 tomatoes
when the daal has boiled enough, add chopped coriander leaves and mix

daal seasoning: heat 2 tbspn oil, add jeera (cumin seeds) when oil is hot enough and add the chopped garlic. add it all to the daal when ready.

Baati:
1 and 1/2 kg atta (wheat flour)
add some salt and water and knead the dough (thick consistency)
make balls of the dough.
cook them on a bonfire (or bake).
optional: then lightly fry the baati in ghee (clarified butter) or regular butter

you can also make a nice sweet dish to eat with the dal by then tearing bits of the baati and mixing well with jaggery (unprocessed sugar).

Ulat bansi from CEMA on Vimeo.