Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Publishing Meeting

praskrishna — 2014-09-09T08:25:32Z

As an initiative towards building a community, a meeting on digital publishing was conducted by C-DAC GIST Pune on August 22, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja attended the meeting.

See the Facebook page of the event here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/c-dac-august-22-2014-digital-publishing-meeting

Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University

nitika — 2013-03-05T01:03:05Z

A digital literacy workshop was organised at the Department of Arts, Delhi University for students pursuing their masters in Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies on February 5, 2013. Nitika Tandon shares the developments.

About 30 students and 4 faculty members attended the three hour long workshop. Surprisingly most participants had a clear understanding of how Wikipedia works, who writes the content, who are the Wikipedia editors, where do these editors come from, availability of Wikipedia in different Indian languages and many other aspects that participants are usually not aware of before most wikipedia outreach sessions. I was stunned and pleasantly surprised at the same time. I was then told that many of their fellow colleagues from Hindi department had already attended a session sometime last year and had briefed them about workings with Wikipedia. The main reason to organise this particular session was the curiosity to understand how does one actually 'edit' Wikipedia.

Mid way into the session we moved to the computer lab where all participants had access to computers, laptops and internet. A computer was shared by 2-3 participants because there were'nt enough machines. To begin with students were taught how to do basic and minor editing such as correcting spelling, grammar, punctuations, the importance of show preview button and writing an edit summary. Participants were then taught wiki mark up, adding references, adding inter-wiki links.

Towards the end of the session students filled in feedback forms with their contact information so that we could keep them updated on upcoming events and meetups that are being organised in the city. Many participants had questions about how to add table of contents, pictures and info box but there wasn't enough time to cover it all.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/digital-literacy-workshop

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education

praskrishna — 2013-06-07T11:30:29Z

The Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS (IISc) is hosting a one day Digital Humanities consultation on July 13, 2013 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Note: Following is a draft text which will be updated soon.

The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade, transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. Consequently the very foundations of the systems of knowledge production and dissemination are being re-examined. This is due to the impact that the digital turn has had on already established systems, and to the exciting possibilities that it offers for radically transforming these systems. In tertiary education for instance, one of the ways in which the digital impact has made itself felt is to move the classroom online or to make resources freely available online, thereby providing access for new constituencies.

For researchers, digital archiving and digital publishing has made possible the same widening of access, while also enabling innovative ways of reading traditional objects of inquiry through the use of computational methods. While these developments are not confined to a specific domain of knowledge, the term most often used to reference them has been ‘Digital Humanities’. The term has gained currency worldwide perhaps because of the seeming incongruity of the relationship between the conventional humanities disciplines and what is deemed a technological development. This is a relationship that has not only produced new approaches to old material, but perhaps — even more significantly — reconfigured the objects and domains of inquiry themselves, and re-tooled the modes by which we conduct our research.

The five host institutions have engaged with each other in different collaborative initiatives over the years. Most significant among them have been (a) the exploration of integration, inter-disciplinarity and dialogue between the natural sciences and the social sciences/humanities; and (b) the production and deployment of critical resources in Indian languages in the higher education sector. We seek to bring these interests together in the proposed consultation aimed at setting agendas for digital humanities in India.

Exploring the possible connections between the human sciences and the digital domain could throw up many productive directions for the higher education system. One of the biggest challenges facing the system in India today is the issue of access and the quality of that access. In the coming decade, Indian higher education is estimated to achieve a Gross Enrolment Ratio of at least 20% (from the existing 12%). This immense new inflow into the education system poses significant institutional and pedagogic challenges. With English emerging as the global language for knowledge production, there is pressure on the Indian higher education system to move towards English-based teaching and learning. Simultaneously, here is a cognitive issue: of effective comprehension. Students who are first-generation learners are finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate with the English-only curriculum that presents itself to many as an insurmountable hurdle.

A new set of possibilities could open up if one were to examine this issue from the perspective of the Indian languages. For over 150 years these languages have been used in all modern institutions and practices (from banking to statecraft) and have developed their own concept ecologies and rich traditions of public intellectual discourse. Currently these languages and practices are being thrust into the background by the globalization of higher education. Re-inserting them into our classrooms and institutional arrangements would be crucial from two perspectives: a) providing newer avenues for students to re-negotiate curricular content which is predominantly in English and b) infusing new source materials into social, political, economic and cultural research on India, thereby increasing the relevance and dynamism of Indian social sciences and humanities. Needless to say, technology will play a major role in this context. Not only will technology figure prominently in addressing the question of access, equity and outreach, it will also help in bringing hitherto inaccessible intellectual resources into easily available and distributable forms. Also crucial to the question of access is the scalability that digital technology offers.

Through this interdisciplinary consultation, we hope to chart out the possible directions for digital humanities in India, which would include, among others, a strong engagement with Indian languages as well as a rethinking of how the sciences and the humanities could intersect. All of this is likely to hold paradigm-changing consequences for higher education: involving for example online learning, technologically enhanced learning, archival practices, new research methodologies, and the production of new and locally relevant knowledges.

We invite participants to make short presentations of 15 minutes each reflecting on the questions raised in this note, and bringing to the table issues raised by the initiatives in which they have taken part so far.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education

DevFest'19

Admin — 2019-10-14T14:50:33Z

Bhuvana Meenakshi was a speaker at the event organised by Google Developers Groups at Coimbatore on September 14, 2019.

She spoke on WebXR: The journey to the centre of Reality. The audience were all beginners and they were amused to see her works on Mixed Reality. They also learnt to kickstart with the easiest ways of developing the most cool applications using Firefox's framework.

Website: https://devfest19.gdgcbe.com/

Blog: https://kbmtechie.wordpress.com/2019/09/22/speaker-experience-at-devfest19/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/devfest19

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

praskrishna — 2014-08-22T00:51:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in partnership with the School of Cultural Texts and Records, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai is organizing a two-day workshop for students at Jadavpur University on August 25 and 26, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan — 2014-10-12T03:52:20Z

A two-day workshop for students was organized by Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune (KSPWSC), Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (CIS-A2K) on September 11 and 12, 2014 in Pune. Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan summarize the developments from the workshop in this report.

Day 1

The workshop began with Tejaswini Niranjana speaking about the monolingual nature of the present day higher education system. She explained why monolingual students were disadvantaged in their pursuit of knowledge, since they could not grasp the concepts coming from the societies they lived in. The mandate of CILHE was briefly explained, and the commitment of the centre to generate accurate and relevant multi-lingual terminology for the social sciences and humanities stressed upon. She lauded the role of the KSPWSC, Pune University, in using bilingual pedagogic material and promoting an engagement with Indian language materials in their courses. The importance of using digital resources was also discussed. The collaborative nature of creating entries on the Wikipedia platform was stressed. The organizers added that students from various other institutions across the country would be participating in the larger exercise.

Next, T. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K spoke about the changing nature of knowledge repositories and the pattern of access to those repositories. He described at length the genesis of Wikipedia and the influence it has today on the way we access and understand knowledge. Different types of digital resources available to us and the nature in which they generate the knowledge and make it available was explained. Participants were also introduced to the difference between born digital material and digitized material along with the many sister projects of the Wikimedia foundation. Vishnu explained how anyone registering as an editor on Wikipedia could begin contributing to the development of this knowledge base. This was followed by a session in which the basics of Wikipedia editing were explained.

Following lunch, there was a group exercise that required the participants to pick any three concepts that were provided to them in a handout and try to explain the same without using the concept itself. This exercise was important as the participants would try to understand the concept more closely without assuming its meaning. This was self-evident. Better understanding of the concept would in turn help them to write about it or use it meaningfully in an Indian language entry on Wikipedia. Many participants found this exercise difficult in the initial stages as they fell back upon their classroom understanding of the term. They were asked to focus on explaining the concept without using the word itself but by understanding its effects and its multiple meanings.

In the second exercise, the participants made use of the material generated through the first exercise and tried to explain the denotative and connotative meanings of their chosen concept. The third exercise involved coming up with a cluster of concepts in which their chosen concept was embedded. The idea was to show how concepts derived meaning from a larger context, and could not be understood outside of their conceptual universe. The first day of the workshop ended with all the participants successfully registering themselves as Wikipedia editors, learning the basics of editing, and having taken part in an exercise that made them think about the concepts they used with greater clarity.


						Above: A participant explains the denotative and connotative meaning of her chosen concept.

Day 2

Participants were asked to search for an article in the English Wikipedia for a person, a book and a concept connected to women’s studies. They were asked to identify the challenges involved if they had to translate the article into an Indian language they were familiar with. The exercise was intended to alert the participants to the kind of problems they were likely to face during the act of translation. They were also asked to come up with solutions as to how these problems could be overcome. A key problem voiced by many participants was that of the non-availability of the right phrase/term/word in Indian languages. Tejaswini Niranjana advised the participants not to reinvent the wheel but use the terms that had been coined earlier but were now out of circulation in Indian languages. She also pointed out that translation from English to Indian languages is a different process than from Indian languages to English. In the former, one has to break sentence structure to make the meaning more clear, and in the latter one has to combine the sentences. She also said that the process of translation must happen at the level of sentences and ideas and not simply at the level of terms and words.

Answering another question about the lack of social context while translating a concept, Prof. Niranjana asked the participants to use the existing historical and social writings already available in their languages to overcome this problem. These writings could be updated and edited, and current references added.

Vishnu continued the discussion of using digital platforms to create and disseminate knowledge by explaining various tools available. He stressed the importance of sharing our efforts in creating knowledge and making it widely available, and pointed out various features of Wikipedia and Google translator. Participants were shown ways by which the existing knowledge base on Google and such other digital knowledge platforms could be improved.

Everyone then started working on his/her individual entries that would be the quantitative output of this workshop. They were asked to select one topic (a book, a person, a concept) from their previous exercise and develop an article based on that in any Indian language that they preferred. Most of the entries were in Marathi, with a few participants opting for Hindi. There was an entry in Bangla as well.

At the end of the workshop, more than half of our 26 participants had fully developed entries in Indian languages. These entries contained a table of contents and references, inter-wiki references, and external links, and in some cases included images too. Many participants wrote about personalities such as the writer Mukta Salve, the feminist theorist Mary John, and the contemporary Marathi writer Narayan Bhosle. Some wrote about concepts such as feminism, nationalism and domestic violence.

This two-day workshop proved to be immensely successful as the participants were motivated to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms regularly, and began to appreciate the importance of Indian language initiatives such as these.

We are very thankful to the entire faculty at KSPWSC, Pune University, Dr. Anagha Tambe, Dr. Swati Dyahadroy, Sneha Gole, Sanjay Kumar Kamble, and Deepa Tak who facilitated the discussions and were of immense help in conducting the workshop.


					Above: Tejaswini Niranjana with participants at the Pune workshop.

Click to download all the photographs from the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/report-on-developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

Design!PubliC — Third Conclave in New Delhi

praskrishna — 2012-05-30T07:03:33Z

On the 20th of April 2012, the third Design Public Conclave, organized by the Center for Knowledge Societies in collaboration with IBM, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and the Centre for Internet and Society, was held at the National Museum, New Delhi. The Conclave brought together thought-leaders and decision makers from the government, the media, multinational organizations and academic institutions for a conversation about transforming India into an Innovation Society.

Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Aditya Dev Sood, Arun Maira, Aditya Mishra, Sukumar Ranganathan, Bhairavi Jani, Ashwin Mahesh, Yamini Aiyar, Scott Burnham, Samanth Subramanian, Shanker Annaswamy, Ashok Alexander, Jeby Cherian, Pankaj Jhunja, Chakshu Roy, Ekta Ohri, James Crabtree, Theo JJ Groothuizen, Sam Pitroda, Darshana Gothi Chauhan, and spoke in the session on Participation, Collaboration and Innovation. The varied audience included representatives from the Planning Commission, the Embassies of Netherlands and Sweden, the American Center, the Ford Foundation, Premsela, DFID, PRS, Lirneasia, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Financial Times, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, NID, Asian Paints, Yes Bank, MTS, and many others.

The conclave began with three panel discussions exploring the relationship between trust, participation and innovation.

Participation, Collaboration, Innovation

The discussions touched upon different means to generate citizen participation in key decision making, including using social media, mobile phones and other technological platforms. These new networking technologies help create spaces for discourse, debate, and an opportunity for collective organization and activity. They also have the capacity to transform the agency and voices of previously remote societies. However, despite their potential to garner massive public participation, they have not really been utilized by most private, public or social institutions.

Mere participation is not enough. It is necessary to moderate the conversation and make respondents accountable for their comments, so that it does not lapse into a meaningless cacophony of anonymous voices. The challenge that remains, then, is to design a platform where both citizens and the government can engage in a meaningful way, without the barriers of language and literacy, and collaboratively arrive at meaningful, actionable solutions.

Imagining India as an Innovation Society

This conversation dove deeper into ways in which the necessary elements of trust and participation could be better incorporated in all the sectors of society in order to enable an innovation culture in India. Existing conceptions of innovation in India, including price-pointing innovation, and the need to move beyond this and create a culture that values systematic, routinizable innovation processes were discussed. When innovating in the public sector and designing systems and processes that affect the larger public, it is especially important to respond to the specific needs of the people. This is where avenues for civil society participation and the design of public spaces become especially crucial, as they function as interfaces between decision-makers and the public. Each panelist spoke about different aspects of this large challenge, touching upon user needs, education systems, intellectual property laws and methods of innovation.

It was clear, as the conversation ended, that a lot more work and planning is needed to even begin to articulate and come to a consensus on what an innovation society looks like.

Click to download the full report (published by Center for Knowledge Societies) [PDF, 2.18 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-delhi-event-report

Design!PubliC — Innovation and the Public Interest

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T08:48:25Z

On the 14th of October, 2011, the Center for Knowledge Societies organized the second edition of the Design Public Conclave, a conversation on how innovation can serve the Public Interest. The conclave was held at the lovely premises of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore.

The conclave was highly interactive and brought together representatives from technology houses like Intel, GE, TCS, Infosys, and Seimens, with social sector organizations like Arghyam and funding agencies like the Gates Foundation and HIVOS. Officials from the National Planning Commission and Karnataka State Innovation Council were also involved. Speakers included the philanthropist Rohini Nilekani, interaction design expert Reto Wettach, policy advisor Ashwin Mahesh, design thinker M.P. Ranjan, among other experts from India, Sri Lanka, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the UK and the US.

The Conclave began with three panel discussions, each of which focused on the relationship between innovation and a specific sector of society: the private/corporate sector, the social sector, and the public/government sector. Each panel consisted of a moderator and four to six domain experts, but the audience was asked an encouraged to participate freely along with the discussants.

"When designing public and social initiatives, both structure and intuition are invaluable, and neither should be ignored in favor of the other." Sunil Abraham Centre for Internet and Society		"Where there is no trust, there will be no creativity, and therefore no innovation." Aditya Dev Sood Center for Knowledge Societies
"In startups, people are free to experiment without always being bogged down by commercialism, like in large corporations." Aditya Mishra Headstart Foundation			"When discussing the public interest, it is important to think about which public we’re talking about, and to specify whose interest we are working towards." Harsh Srivastava National Planning Commission
	"There is a general perception that the government doesn’t listen to us, but my perception is that not enough of us are trying to be heard." Ashwin Mahesh Mapunity
"There are many interest groups and each one believes that only their interests matter. We have to be able to compromise and collaborate." Rohini Nilekani Arghyam		"Design is like dancing while wearing handcuffs; you have to work with constraints and try and create the best possible solutions." Reto Wettach Interaction Design Studios
"Innovation is about designing something radically new, which transforms our experience of the world." M.P. Ranjan Design for India		"Public-private partnerships are often the best way to ensure that innovation happens in the public interest." Sneha Raman Center for Knowledge Societies

PANEL 1 Innovation and the Indian Corporation

This discussion focused on whether Indian corporations and how they can help bring about a culture of innovation. Panelists agreed that while Indian society is highly innovative, large Indian corporations are usually not.

The successes of large corporations often render them less willing to take risks. Also, the hierarchical decision-making structure of corporations can inhibit innovation, leaving little incentive or opportunity for subordinates to be creative.

Large corporations can play a substantial role, though, by collaborating with small entrepreneurs and working on social issues. This way, the technological expertise and infrastructural capabilities of large companies can be married with the empathetic, lived knowledge of grassroots innovators.

PANEL 2 Is Innovation in the Public and Social Sectors Possible?

This discussion focused on whether the public and social sectors can innovate. Panelists agreed that collaboration and participation are the key ingredients when innovating for the public interest. This also makes the entire process more transparent and hence keep power imbalances and misuse in check.

Private-public partnerships are the best means for innovation to happen, where governments can provide the policies and structures that support innovation, and private firms provide their expertise in developing solutions.

Another major concern that was brought up is the challenge of trust, the lack of willingness to take risks, and the fear of failure. These are all institutional challenges that need to be overcome before the social and public sectors can become capable of innovation.

PANEL 3 The Challenge of Startup Innovation

The panelists talked about startups in India and how people’s conception of them is often limited to technological products and services, largely because people are unaware that there can be startups for governance, for the social sector, for public services, and more.

They spoke about the need for a more robust and supportive startup ecology, for which the biggest problem now is no longer a lack of funding, but rather a lack of consumer belief and trust in startups. Additionally, cultural factors can contribute to the success or failure of this startup ecology: Indian society, for example, is too risk-averse and unforgiving of failure. There is, therefore, the need for an ‘innovation incubator,’ with the right architecture, guidance, mentorship, financial support and other necessary resources, to help make socially valuable startups happen.

PANEL 4 The Theory and Practice of Innovation

After lunch, panelists grappled with the question of whether innovation can be routinized, and if design is the means to do so. They talked about how good innovation necessarily stems from good design, which means adding meaningful value to a product or service.

Design can be seen as any expression of intentionality, rather than being relegated to the realm of the purely visual. All human beings, not only trained designers, are capable of designing, and erroneously think of ourselves as non-designers. This is especially true in social redesign, where citizens from any walk of life can contribute meaningful information and ideas. Hence the need for active community participation in service and policy design, as participation during the solutioneering process will mean fewer problems with implementation and realization.

In the afternoon, participants broke out into groups to brainstorm how innovation can help solve three grand challenges of Indian society. CKS researchers first presented information collected from field visits prior to the conclave in order to focus the session.

INCLUSIVE HIGHER EDUCATION	QUALITY MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTHCARE	INDIA’S TOILET PROBLEM

Despite many government efforts, the number of students pursuing higher education in India is still dismally low. Reasons for this lie in a lack of access to institutes of higher education, insufficient finances and restrictive cultural practices and attitudes. In order to understand the challenge, CKS researchers and domain experts visited an alternative education center that utilizes omputers and online platforms to teach. Possible Solutions The success of online higher education lies in locally relevant solutions Human interaction is necessary to complement the technological interface. Create shared learning platforms to encourage collaborative learning. Insights Financial and cultural factors are the greatest barriers to education, especially for girls. Lack of awareness about opportunities, and an absence of local mentors. Language is the key barrier to using computers and the internet for education.	Maternal and child health in India is amongst the poorest in the world. This grim situation is preventable, however, with good health services, better dissemination of information, and by ensuring proper nutrition and care through pregnancy. CKS researchers conducted research on ante-natal healthcare in rural areas, in order to understand the the gaps in the delivery of these services. Possible Solutions More campaigns to make beneficiaries aware about the services they can avail. Offer incentives to healthworkers for providing better care to patients. Local government should be made stronger and more accountable. Insights Healthcare providers are three-fold: field healthworkers, public (government) clinics,and private clinics. Public clinics are cheaper but lower quality, while private clinics are expensive but are better equipped and offer better services. Field healthworkers are usually more trusted though they may be less knowledgeable.	74 percent of rural India still does not use toilets, which has wide-ranging implications on health, hygiene, safety, convenience, and privacy. The government introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign to bring toilets to all of rural India, but huge gaps in implementation still remain. CKS researchers and domain experts from Arghyam spent a day in the village of Dandi Kanahalli to understand toilet usage patterns from different respondents. Possible Solutions Support more NGOs working in this area. Create communal toilets that target women Build stronger local government Insights Most respondents did not construct toilets until it became compulsory to do so. The main challenge to toilet construction is the lack of financial resources. Despite financial constraints, communal toilets are nonexistent.

INCLUSIVE HIGHER EDUCATION

QUALITY MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTHCARE

INDIA’S TOILET PROBLEM

Despite many government efforts, the number of students pursuing higher education in India is still dismally low. Reasons for this lie in a lack of access to institutes of higher education, insufficient finances and restrictive cultural practices and attitudes.

In order to understand the challenge, CKS researchers and domain experts visited an alternative education center that utilizes omputers and online platforms to teach.

Possible Solutions

The success of online higher education lies in locally relevant solutions
Human interaction is necessary to complement the technological interface.
Create shared learning platforms to encourage collaborative learning.

Insights
Financial and cultural factors are the greatest barriers to education, especially for girls.
Lack of awareness about opportunities, and an absence of local mentors.
Language is the key barrier to using computers and the internet for education.

Maternal and child health in India is amongst the poorest in the world. This grim situation is preventable, however, with good health services, better dissemination of information, and by ensuring proper nutrition and care through pregnancy.

CKS researchers conducted research on ante-natal healthcare in rural areas, in order to understand the the gaps in the delivery of these services.

Possible Solutions

More campaigns to make beneficiaries aware about the services they can avail.
Offer incentives to healthworkers for providing better care to patients.
Local government should be made stronger and more accountable.

Insights
Healthcare providers are three-fold: field healthworkers, public (government) clinics,and private clinics.
Public clinics are cheaper but lower quality, while private clinics are expensive but are better equipped and offer better services.
Field healthworkers are usually more trusted though they may be less knowledgeable.

74 percent of rural India still does not use toilets, which has wide-ranging implications on health, hygiene, safety, convenience, and privacy. The government introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign to bring toilets to all of rural India, but huge gaps in implementation still remain.

CKS researchers and domain experts from Arghyam spent a day in the village of Dandi Kanahalli to understand toilet usage patterns from different respondents.

Possible Solutions

Support more NGOs working in this area.
Create communal toilets that target women
Build stronger local government

Insights
Most respondents did not construct toilets until it became compulsory to do so.
The main challenge to toilet construction is the lack of financial resources.
Despite financial constraints, communal toilets are nonexistent.

Quo Vadis

This edition of Design Public made it clear that innovation was a high priority for different stakeholders in society, but also that many players lack a clear understanding of how to actually go about the process of creating a new product or service. This would suggest that what is really required in India today is training around the fundamentals of innovation, including the process of understanding needs, developing concepts, protyping a solution and then further enhancing the new and innovative solution. In addition, we realized that many of the large scale challenges being faced by Indian society have to do with deficiencies of trust, inadequate avenues and channels for people to participate in decision making processes and that these are the more fundamental barriers to broadbasing a culture and associated practices of innovation in this society. These are the themes that we have resolved to work on further in future editions of Design Public.

A participant questions the panelists during a discussion on startup innovations

Opportunities for Sponsorship and Partnership

The Design Public consortium is now soliciting support and sponsorship from organizations, agencies and corporations that are particularly interested in these topics. Sponsorships follow the following tiered structure:

Institutional Sponsor US $10,000/-
Dinner Sponsor US $5,000/-
Event Partner US $3,000/-

We also welcome contributions of content and other kinds of support in kind that might allow the event to proceed to greater effect. These may include travel support for speakers, accommodation bursaries for worthy cases, student scholarships, sponsored dinners, paid breakfast tables and special expert and media access by arrangement.

To find out how to become part of the Design Public Consortium, please contact CKS team members in New Delhi and Bangalore as below:
New Delhi: Khushboo Hasija | khushboo.hasija@cks.in | +91 97115 18587
Bangalore: Anand Vijayan | anand.vijayan@cks.in | +91 93437 87505

December 2011 | Published by Center for Knowledge Societies

Jamuna Ramakrishna (HIVOS) in conversation with Dilini Wijeweera (Lirneasia)

Participants from the audience contribute to the discussion on policies and programs for innovation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-2014-innovation-and-the-public-interest

Design!PubliC — Event in Delhi

praskrishna — 2012-04-11T11:45:04Z

Centre for Knowledge Societies in partnership with IBM, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, HeadStart, India@75, LiveMint, and the Centre for Internet & Society is organizing the third edition of Design!PubliC event in Delhi on April 19 and 20, 2012.

Design Public is a high-level conversation among a select group of thinkers, decision-makers and opinion-leaders who seek to transform India into an innovation society. It brings together influential actors from all sectors of society to deliberate the best ways in which innovation can serve the public interest. The larger goal of the Conclave is to serve as an enabling platform for building the necessary partnerships and consortia that will bring this agenda to practical realization.

This third edition of the Design Public Conclave is focused on issues of trust and participation and how they relate to innovation. We will be addressing key questions like:

How can we overcome deficiencies in trust and participation to better facilitate innovation?
How can we better imagine India as an innovation society?
How can we build smarter cities and ensure sustainable urban development?
What does rural innovation really mean and how do we do it?
What are the necessary consortia and cross-sectoral alignments for driving innovation?

The Panelists

	Aditya Dev Sood Aditya Dev Sood is Founder and CEO of the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS), an innovation consulting firm that provides design services of a kind that Indian industry never thought it would even need — User Research, User Experience Design, Design Strategy and Innovation Management. Through his consulting work, and also through his writings and his public presentations, Aditya offers a compelling vision of the central role of design and innovation for emerging economies such as India. The focus on his firm has remained on lower income and rural groups, and through contractual consulting engagements it has sought always to bring about market successes as well as the greater societal good. Dr. Sood is a Fulbright scholar with two doctorates from the University of Chicago and a wide range of disciplinary competencies, gained through a long and diverse education, including Architecture, Art History, Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Sanskrit Philology, Philosophy of Language, Cultural Anthropology, Social Theory and Political Economy.
	Arun Maira Arun Maira is a Member of the National Innovation Council, a part of the National Planning Commission of the Government of India. In addition to being a prolific author on leadership and organization transformation, as well as the future of India, he has worked as an experienced consultant for companies all over the world and for a diversity of industries, from automobiles and pharmaceuticals to international agencies for economic development. Prior to joining the National Planning Commission, Arun Maira worked with the TATA Group in India, the Boston Consulting Group, Save the Children in India, the Axis Bank Foundation, and CII’s National Councils, among many others. He received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Physics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
	Aditya Mishra In addition to leading a sales team for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ltd., Aditya Mishra began his own not-for-profit company to promote entrepreneurship in India called Headstart. Headstart is run by volunteers dedicated to creating space for and promoting innovation in India by fostering individual entrenpreneurs, research, and the adoption of new technology. Aditya advises early stage start-ups and incubators through Startup Saturdays events to aid in the development of products and service, busines planning, and sales and marketing. Headstart is headquarted in Bangalore, but through the Headstart Network of entrepreneurs, academics, and industry professionals, activities are carried out in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Kolkata.
	Sukumar Ranganathan Sukumar Ranganthan was a founding member of Mint, a business paper of the Hindustan Times in association with the Wall Street Journal. Launched in 2007, Mint brings “Clarity in Business News” to readers across the country. He has worked in several capacities in business news, from Marketing Editor at The Hindu Business Line to Managing Editor of India’s leading business magazine, Business Today. In addition to a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Sukumar holds a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and another Master’s in Mathematics.
	Bhairavi Jani After graduating from Miami University, Ohio, USA, and working with KPMG Consulting in Washington D.C., Bhairavi Jani returned to India in 2001 and began her career in business. After setting up and scaling up a fourth party logistics company, Bhairavi accepted the role of Director for all companies under the SCA Group in 2005, which manages shipping, customs, warehousing, logistics, and IT. As Group Director, she works with different teams from the respective companies withing the Group, providing them strategic advice. In addition to being a successful businesswoman, Bhairavi has worked closely with the late C. K. Prahalad on India@75 of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a grassroots initiative for realizing an inclusive, sustainable, and developed India by 2022. It works to accelerate India’s transformative into an economically vital, technologically innovative, and socially and ethically vibrant global leader. Having served as a National Chairman of Young Indians, CII, Bhairavi has since 2011 taken a five year hiatus from her own businesses to serve as Executive Director for India@75.
	Ashwin Mahesh Ashwin Mahesh is a professor of Public Policy at IIM Bangalore, but his innovative ideas and dedication to service has brought him outside academia. In 1998, he co-founded India Together, an online magazine of public affairs, policy, and development in India. He has also started Mapunity, an independent R&D company designed around reversing the trend of government lagging behind technology. Ashwin Mahesh has a PhD in atmospheric remote sensing from the University of Washington, and he does research in exploring the expanding role of technology & IT in urban traffic management.
	Yamini Aiyar Yamini Aiyar is the founder and director of the Accountability Initiative, an organization working to strengthen accountability and engagement in Indian governance, which has received praise from Indian government officials and even President Obama. She is also presently a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, focusing on understanding accountability tools in order to institutionalize accountability methods and strengthen public service delivery systems. Prior to the Accountability Initiative, Aiyar worked at the World Bank and the Ford Foundations in New Delhi. She holds a MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics, and M.A. in Social and Political Sciences from St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from St. Stephens College, Delhi University.
	Scott Burnham Scott Burnham is a creative director, writer, and designer who has worked on strategies for cities to use design to reprogram relationships. He has created several projects for European cities including Urban Play for Amsterdam with Droog Design and Bairro Criativo for Porto, Portugal. Currently, Burnham directs the Trust Design project for Premsela, the Netherlands Institute for Design, exploring the relationship between trust and design from products and shared urban spaces. He is the editor of a special 4-issue publication series with Volume Magazine, and a guest lecturer at Design Academy Eindhoven. In addition to writing and speaking, Burnham worked as the Creative Director for the UK’s Urbis Center for Urban Culture from 2003-2006.
	Samanth Subramanian Samanth Subramanian is a journalist who has written pieces for The New York Times, Mint, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, and many others. Though he prefers long-form narrative articles, he also has written several shorter pieces, as well as a non-fiction book Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, which won the 2010 Shaki Bhatt First Book Prize. He currently writes for the New York Times’ India Ink blog. Subramanian completed his undergraduate degree from Pennsylvania State University in journalism and received his Master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
	Sunil Abraham Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of The Centre for Internet and Society, which aims to criticaly engage with the interaction between the internet and the public, including concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability, adn pedagogic practices. While serving on the board of directors for CIS, Sunil has worked on many projects exploring the internet and information. He has been elected an Ashoka fellow, where he explored the democratic potential of the internet, and was granted a Sarai FLOSS fellowship as well. For the United Nations, Sunil managed the International Open Source Network for the Asia-Pacific Development Information Program between 2004 and 2007. The next year, he managed ENRAP, Knowledge Networking for Rural Development in the Asia-Pacific region, which worked to share knowledge amongst the projects and stakeholders of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
	Shanker Annaswamy Shanker Annaswamy is the Managing Director for IBM India Private Limited, and Regional General Manager of IBM in India and South Asia. He is responsible for all sales, marketing, services, and delivery in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. In addition to holding a senior position in IBM, Annaswamy has been President and Chief Executive Officer for GE Medical Systems in South Asia, Managing Director of Wipro-GE Medical Systems, and Adviser with the Ministry of Health for the Sultanate of Oman. He currently serves as Chair of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) National Committee on Intellectual Property Owners, having previously co-chaired CII’s advisory committee on its National Innovation Mission. In 2009, BusinessWeek listed Annaswamy among India’s 50 Most Powerful People. He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Madras University and a Diploma in Business Management Education from the All India Management Association, New Delhi.
	Ashok Alexander Ashok Alexander is Director of Avahan, the Global Health Program’s HIV prevention initiative in India, which was founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003. As Director, he works with India’s federal and state governments, NGOs, and corporate partners. Before joining Avahan, Alexander worked in Hong Kong, the United States, and India for 24 years. After joining McKinsey & Company in New York, he moved to India to become the head of its New Delhi office. In addition, he has extensive experience working with NGOs, being a leader in the creation of the American India Foundation (AIF) and serving on the Board of Advisors. Alexander holds graduate degrees in economics and management from Delhi University and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
	Jeby Cherian Jeby Cherian is the Strategy Leader of IBM in India and South Asia, and also serves on the India Leadership Team. He provides guidance to IBM’s Corporate Development team in India, leads and positions IBM’s Security solutions portfolio to the Government of India, and provides executive sponsorship for growing the High End Server business in India. Before this, Cherian worked in Bangalore with IBM’s Global Solutions Delivery Center and with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Finance Transformation services. Cherian is a CPA with a Master’s degree in Accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
	Pankaj Jhunja Pankaj Jhunja, now General Manager of Design for Tata Motors, has had the opportunity to work in a diversity of businesses each with different responsibilities and complexities of products. Before Tata Motors, Jhunja worked for Dilip Chhabria Design (DC) specializing in Custom Built Cars, Homeflow Inc. in Pune as Product Manager, and with Renault Nissan India in Mumbai as General Manager Design. Jhunja holds a Bachelor’s degree from the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, and a Master’s degree in Design from IIT Mumbai.
	Chakshu Roy Chakshu Roy is a lawyer who heads technology initiatives at PRS Legislative Research (PRS), New Delhi. PRS is a unique initiative that provides non-partisan analysis to all Members of Parliament in India. Chakshu is developing a comprehensive technology strategy to engage large sections of the population in the policy process. He has conceptualised and developed India’s only online database of all state laws. Chakshu has conducted capacity-building workshops for over 1000 journalists on tracking the work of legislators. He specialised in real estate law and commercial agreements before joining PRS. He has earlier worked in corporate law with the Chamber of Law, New Delhi. He holds bachelors degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi University.
	Ekta Ohri Ekta Ohri is the Head of Project Operations at the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS). She holds experience of applying ethnographic and user experience research methods as well as principles of design thinking for addressing a variety of innovation challenges in emerging economies – ranging from improving rural public health delivery systems, providing financial services to the poor and bridging their information and communication gaps through telecommunications to enhancing urban mobility and luxury experiences. As the head of innovation at CKS, she works with different teams providing them strategic advice around innovation approaches, developing context (urban or rural) specific research methodologies and analyzing research insights in ways that leads to concepts that create maximum value for the users, as well as disseminating some of these ideas in the public domain through publications. Ekta has multi-disciplinary background in Architecture (Sushant School of Art and Architecture), Visual and Critical Studies (California College of the Arts), and Anthropology (Northwestern University) and is particularly interested in exploring linkages between design, culture and lived experiences.
	James Crabtree James Crabtree is the Mumbai Correspondent for the Financial Times since November 2011. He covers Indian corporate news and social and political trends in the country’s financial capital. James joined the FT in 2010 and was previously the Comment Editor based in London.He was previously an editor and essayist at Prospect. Before returning to journalism, James worked as policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and also for various think tanks. He has also spent a number of years living in the US, first as a Fulbright Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and then living in Washington, working as a senior policy advisor at the New Democrat Network, another think tank. James is a trustee of the charity mySociety.org, one of the UK’s most innovative technology organisations.
	Theo JJ Groothuizen Theo JJ Groothuizen is currently the Counsellor for Science and Technology at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New Delhi India. He is member of the steering committee of the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2008. Born in 1949 in the Netherlands, he graduated in industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, and is since 1986 principle of Landmark Design Holding (Netherlands and Switzerland). Groothuizen served as executive board member of International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the Association of Dutch Designers (BNO) and as advisor for the Bureau of European Design Associations (BEDA). He was active in several international advisory boards and was tutor in international design workshops, initiated international exhibitions and has been invited as speaker, guest lecturer and jury member all over the world. He is fellow of the Foundation Design for the World, advisor for the European Institute for Design and Disability (EIDD) and honorary member of the BNO. He taught at the Delft University of Technology and served as member of its External Research Advisory Board. He also taught at the Design Academy and functioned as international curator of the Gwangju Design Biennale 2005.
	Sam Pitroda Sam Pitroda is an international figure known for his strong support in India’s communications revolution and redefining the role that technology can play in India by linking it to better delivery of services to the underprivileged. He has long worked in government, business, and innovation in India. He served as Technology Advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is founder and CEO of C-SAM, Inc., with offices worldwide, and chaired the National Knowledge Commission from 2005-2008. Now, in addition to Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information, Infrastructure & Innovations, chairman of India’s National Innovation Council, charting the roadmap for India’s ‘Decade of Innovation.’ Pitrota completed his Master’s in Physics and Electronics from Maharaja Sayajirao University and subsequently received another Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 2010, he also received and Honorary degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
	Darshana Gothi Chauhan Darshana is an architect and urban designer. She has varied experience in designing new towns, regeneration of town centres, transport action plans and urban extension projects. She is passionate about participatory planning and the approach of empowering local people to create better cities. Darshana is currently working at Urban Initiatives in London as a Managing Consultant. Her recent works at UI include Southall Big Conversation, a public consultation process in a culturally diverse area in London . Darshana is also the Chapter Development Manager of INTBAU India, a charitable organisation promoting traditional architecture and urbanism in India . As part of INTBAU India, she has been instrumental in organising public consultation events backed with intensive baseline and capacity building work for the regeneration of the inner city of Pune in India. Darshana has simultaneously worked on projects for other consultancies such as The Max Lock Centre, London . Her works at Max Lock include a Spatial Planning Framework for Kaduna , a city of 3 million people for the Central Government of Nigeria. She has previously worked with the Ministry of Works and Human Settlements in Bhutan to develop the master plan for a new administrative capital in East Bhutan as part of Christopher Charles Benninger Architects.

Agenda

Day 1: Certificate in Innovation Management

Venue: CKS House, New Delhi: 19th April, 2012

09.30 a.m. Icebreaker Dialogue
Participants will introduce themselves briefly and talk about their perceptions of innovation and its application in their work. A CKS member will aggregate the thoughts that emerge from the audience in order to articulate the multiple definitions of innovation that emerge. This will be followed by a quick call out on the value of innovation.

10.30 a.m. Analysis of Innovation Case Studies
CKS Innovation Experts will present various case studies of innovation in order to present the different tools, approaches and stages of innovation.

12.40 p.m. UDE Approach to Innovation
CKS Innovation Experts to present the U-D-E approach to innovation and demonstrate different uses of the Innovation Cycle.

01.15 p.m. Wrap Up and Invitation to Innovation Consultations
CKS Innovation Trainers conclude the morning's session and invite participants to sign up for Innovation Consultations post lunch at the Chaia Innovation Campus.

02.15 p.m. Innovation Consultations
Participants meet mentors on a one to one basis to receive consultation on how they can apply this approach in the specific context of their work or a particular challenge? Where are the opportunities to apply the approach and what value can that have?

Day 2: Design Public Conclave

Venue: National Museum, New Delhi: 20th April, 2012

09.45 a.m. Word of Welcome
Aditya Dev Sood, Center for Knowledge Societies, gives a word of welcome and short introduction to the logic of the conclave.

10.00 a.m. Crises of Trust are Crises of Creativity, Design, and ultimately of Innovation
by Samanth Subramanian, Scott Burnham and Yamini Aiyar
This opening panel will address questions of trust and participation in the wake of the global spring. How can institutions respond creatively to include the networked public? What are the inter-relationships between trust, creativity, design and innovation and why are these important for our future?

11.00 a.m. Participation, Collaboration, Innovation
by James Crabtree Ekta Ohri, Sunil Abraham, Ashwin Mahesh and Aditya Mishra
Crises of trust are often linked to failures of participation and inclusion. How can activists and critics of institutions be more creative in their approaches so as to restore and repair the public trust? What channels for feedback and more substantive modes of participation must be created so as to promote innovation through dialogue and collaboration?

12.00 p.m. Imagining India as an Innovation Society
by Aditya Dev Sood, Ashok Alexander, Shanker Annaswamy, Sukumar Ranganthan and Arun Maira
This panel brings together industry and government experts to imagine the values, behaviors, ways of working, societal institutions and diverse other dimensions of society that would have to change in India to transform it into an innovation society. But first, what is an innovation society? Do we understand this correctly?

02.00 p.m. Breakout One: Smarter Cities
by Darshana Gothi Chauhan, Ekta Ohri and Jeby Cherian
Jeby Cherian of IBM will lead this breakout session on smarter Urban Management and Civic Administration.

02.00 p.m. Breakout Two: How can we do Rural Innovation better?
What should or could we mean by Rural Innovation? Is this the same old thing as jugaad, indovation and tinkering? This panel brings together designers and innovation experts to talk with management thinkers to describe the specific steps and stages involved in innovation processes and how they could apply in rural areas. What do steps individuals and organizations need to take to reeducate or empower decision makers at all levels in different sectors in India to bring about an awareness, understanding and orientation towards innovation?

02.00 p.m. Breakout Three: 50 Steps to an Innovation Society
by Theo JJ Groothuizen Bhairavi Jani
Bhairavi Jani will lead this thematic breakout session on specific steps governments, corporations, social agencies, academics and individual citizens can take to better imagine and then build an Innovation Society.

03.30 p.m. Mutual Presentations
Breakout sessions will cross-report to one another.

04.00 p.m. Concluding Plenary: What Do We Need to Do To Build an Innovation Society?
by Chakshu Roy Aditya Dev Sood Bhairavi Jani
This plenary session will include leading thinkers from government and media along with sectoral experts to discuss specific steps we must now undertake in order to work towards innovation in different domain and activity areas. In some ways this is the most challenging and important session of the day, for it will lay out the next steps and future path of the Design Public process.

06.00 p.m. Wrap-Up and Word of Thanks
Aditya Dev Sood gives a few concluding remarks and concludes the day with a vote of thanks to all advisors, sponsors, partners, speakers and participants at the Design Public Conclave.

07.00 p.m. Dinner
All participants are invited to a dinner and celebration of 10 years of CKS at the Chaia Innovation Campus in Chattarpur Enclave, New Delhi. Transportation will be provided.

For registration, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-delhi

Design!publiC - II

praskrishna — 2011-10-13T07:00:43Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with the Center for Knowledge Societies, Venkataramanan Associates, Center for Law and Policy Research, Headstart Foundation, Chaia Innovation Accelerator, MXV Consulting, Mint Newspaper and Confederation of Indian Industry is organising the second edition of Design Public on October 14, 2011 at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore. There will be a series of pre-conference research outings on October 13, for which participants may register in advance.

Innovation and the Public Interest

Design Public is a series of conversations about whether and how Innovation can serve the Public Interest.

At our inaugural event, in New Delhi on March 18th earlier this year, we focused on the question of whether innovation in governance is needed and how it can be achieved. An excellent overview of the event can be found in a Mint Newspaper article by Aparna Piramal Raje. While we discovered wide agreement in principle as to the need for innovation in India, there was much uncertainty about how government systems relate to innovation, and some doubt as to whether governments are in fact capable of innovation. At our upcoming event, we aim to widen the ambit of the discussion, to ask how innovation serves the public interest, thereby opening up the question of innovation to the social sector, to corporations, to venture capitalists, designers, students, academics and more.

Following Schumpeter, we understand innovation to be a fundamental part of modern economic and social life -- in fact the very source of the momentum that drives us forward into the future. However, we have also found that innovation need not be limited to entrepreneurs in the private sector, but can also be accomplished, in various ways, in government, in the public sector, and by social and developmental agencies. Moreover, if the specific components of innovation can be identified and learned, it would be possible for many more organizations and individuals to successfully drive beneficial social and technical change.

If the term Innovation describes the business or economic dimension of the forward movement of society under capitalism, then the immanent, cognitive or mental aspect of this forward movement can be captured by the term Design. It is the multivariate, parallel, sometimes collaborative process of finding solutions to problems that have no obvious and available answer. Whereas the language of design gained prominence in the Industrial Age as a means for the rendering of surfaces and finishes for the more effective marketing of consumer products (posters and toasters), the concept has far wider application in the present. Design and Innovation are by definition the strategies through which the most intractable, complex, and multivariate challenges encountered by individuals or groups.

At our event, therefore, we seek to articulate exactly how these strategies can be brought to bear on the Grand Challenges facing our society, in areas such as:

Complete and Effective Healthcare for Mothers and Children
Increased Use and Acceptance for Toilets
Broad-based Higher Education
Participatory and Responsive Civic Administration

Over the course of the day-long event, we will consider different approaches and paradigms of innovation and how they may be applicable to these grand challenges. We will break out into sessions in order to apply these perspectives and approaches to specific challenge areas. At the end of the day we will seek to expand the circle of innovation in order establish new ways of collaborating and sharing knowledge such that we are able to accelerate and intensify the application of innovation to addressing these and other grand challenges facing the public.

Panchayat meeting on Village Sanitation in Khera village, Budaun District, UP

Agenda

09.00 Word of Welcome and Mutual Introductions
10.00 Innovation and the Indian Corporation

- Samar Halankar, Hindustan Times (moderator)

- Anil Narayan Sondur, TATA Elxsi

- Harish Bijoor, HB Consults

- Ekta Ohri, Center for Knowledge Societies (respondent)

11.00 Is Innovation in the Public and Social Sectors Possible?

- Sunil Abraham, Center for Internet and Society (moderator)

- Rohini Nilekani, Arghyam Foundation

- Ramesh Ramanathan, Janaagraha

- Ashwin Mahesh, Mapunity

- Sneha Raman, Center for Knowledge Societies (respondent)

12.00 The Challenge of Start Up Innovation

- Amit Garg, MXV Consulting (moderator)

- Mahesh Murthy, Pinstorm

- Zackery Denfeld, Pacific Northwest College of Art

- Naresh Narasimhan, VA Group

- Aditya Dev Sood, Center for Knowledge Societies (respondent)

13.00 Lunch: Regional Cuisines of Karnataka prepared with Local Ingredients
14.00 The Theory and Practice of Innovation
- Aditya Dev Sood, Center for Knowledge Societies (moderator)
- Reto Wettach, Interaction Design Studios Berlin
- Shiv Vishwanathan, Sociologist of Science
- M. P. Ranjan, Design for India
15.00 Grand Challenge Breakout Sessions
A: Online Higher Education
Moderator: Sunil Abraham, Center for Internet and Society
Innovation Expert: Sneha Raman, Center for Knowledge Societies
Domain Expert: Udhay Shankar, Intel
B: Quality Maternal and Child Healthcare
Moderator: Jayna Kothari, Center for Law and Policy Research
Innovation Expert: Shehla Hussain, Center for Knowledge
Societies
Domain Expert: Lakshmi Menon, G.E. Healthcare
C: Toilet-training for All!
Moderator: Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Center for Law and Policy Research
Innovation Expert: Namrata Mehta, Center for Knowledge Societies
Domain Expert: Sunita Nadhamuni, Arghyam
Tea Served During Breakout Sessions
16.30 Reports Back from Breakouts
17.30 Conclusion: Planning and Policy for Innovation and the Grand Challenges of Society
- Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Center for Law and Policy Research (moderator)
- Harsh Shrivastava, National Planning Commission
- Anant Shah, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Jamuna Ramakrishna, Hivos Foundation
- Dilini Wijeweera, LIRNEasia
- Gaurav Gupta, Dalberg
- Riku Mäkelä, Finnode

Individual Participation

In order to make each voice count, entry to the conclave will be by arrangement only. Others who are truly interested, should please drop us a few lines on how they would like to contribute and we will be glad to get back in touch. There are no registration fees. However, we would like to see participants take their own initiative in covering their own travel costs and making their own arrangements for stay so far as possible. If specific needs are perceived, please communicate them to the organizers. If you are interested in participating in this conversation on innovation, design thinking, and the public interest please contact Anand Vijayan at anand@cks.in.

Institutional Participation

Confederations of industry, associations of management, departments of government and diverse development sector and civil society organizations are invited to express their interest in supporting this event.

Organizers

Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS)
Center for Internet and Society (CIS)
Venkatramanan Associates (VA)
Center for Law and Policy Research (CLPR)
Headstart Foundation (HF)
Chaia Innovation Accelerator (ChIA)
MXV Consulting (MXV)
Mint Newspaper (MN)
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)

For participation: contact Anand Vijayan, Innovation Planning, CKS
For media: contact Ayesha Vemuri, Innovation Research, CKS (ayesha@cks.in)

For more info, click here [PDF, 496 kb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/design-public-in-bangalore

Design!Public (6th Edition)

praskrishna — 2015-11-30T02:11:45Z

The sixth edition of Design Public conceptualized and hosted by CivicLabs, an initiative of the Center for Knowledge Societies was held at Vihara Innovation Campus, New Delhi. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a panelist.

The event created a platform through which urban administrators could engage with a wide range of expertise representing innovation, public policy, development, technology and entrepreneurship. The event brought together leading global and Indian practitioners representing these fields, to share and exchange best practices, learnings, approaches and philosophies in an attempt to chart a way forward for an ecosystem for civic innovation for India’s cities.

For more information see the Design Public website. Also see the blog post by Khusbhoo Dixit on this.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/design-public-6th-edition

Design!Public

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T11:14:52Z

Centre for Knowledge Societies is organizing this event in partnership with Grameen Foundation India, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNDP, et.al. Sunil Abraham is a speaker at this event to be held in New Delhi on March 14, 2014.

Schedule

8.30	Registration and Coffee Background Track: Hamsa Dhwani
9.00	Breakfast Dialogue: Three Perspectives to Citizen-Centricity by Shazia Ilmi Somnath Bharti Namrata Mehta Aditya Dev Sood and Sunil Abraham Three distinct approaches to Governance Innovation are seen in India today: citizen activism, the open data and open governance agenda, and the integration of design and innovation into government processes. Representatives from each of these spaces begin the day with an open and friendly public dialogue.
10.20	Word of Welcome
10.30	Session One: The Elements of Governance Innovation by Sumandro Chattapadhyay Raman Jit Singh Chima Arndt Husar Esko Kilpi Chakshu Roy Divya Datta Namrata Mehta How are people thinking about Governance Innovation around the world in terms of process, data and systems change? What is the success of various Lab models and how do they exactly work? What is the relevance of these approaches to the Indian scenario?
12.00	Session Two: Social Innovation through Partnership with Private Sector by Nehal Sanghavi Daniel Radcliffe Louise Pulford Chandni Ohri Ada Wong Aditya Dev Sood How can we promote social innovation through new partnerships between the social and private sectors? How can we take advantage of the new Companies Act to develop new alliances and partnerships across sectors that will actually drive innovation? How does the concept of social innovation fit into these needs?
01.00	Networking Lunch Talk and connect with people outside your comfort zone!
02.00	Convene for Working Group Breakouts
02.30	Working Group One: Design a Social Innovation Exchange for India by Mike Knowles Nehal Sanghavi Daniel Radcliffe Louise Pulford Chandni Ohri Abhimanyu Nowhar Ada Wong Aditya Dev Sood The Social Innovation Exchange is a global organization with several regional hubs, such as SIX Asian in Hong Kong. What if there were to be a SIX India? What would be its mandate? What activities and goals should it pursue?
02.30	Working Group Two: Building an Action Plan for a Civic Innovation Lab The assembled group of thought leaders at this Design Public Conclave have the potential to reorganize as a new non-partisan community dedicated to achieving governance innovation. For this to be possible, however, they must first breakout into articulating challenges and goals in each of the three areas identified below.
03.30	WGII Breakout Two Alpha: A New Agenda for Citizen-centric Innovation by Sumandro Chattapadhyay Soaib Grewal Ambrish Arora Usha Alexander Ishan Khosla MP Ranjan Sunil Abraham How can design and innovation methods benefit the citizenry? How can mobile networks and different kinds of data be used to create better urban experiences? How can India’s new urban activism better align with design and data approaches?
03.30	WGII Breakout Two Beta: Institutionalizing a Civic Innovation Network by Lysander Menezes Suhas Mhaskar Rajesh Khati Shweta Banerjee Arndt Husar Jatin Modi Esko Kilpi Rajesh Sawhney Chakshu Roy How do we bring together the natural allies of Civic Innovation into a larger network? Which government agencies, startups, and social development organizations need to work together towards this goal? How could Civic Innovation be operationalized? What institutions, individuals and networks might support Civic Innovation?
04.30	Coffee Jam with Music
05.00	Public Presentations from Each Breakout by Prashant Bhushan Balasubramanian Munuswamy Harsh Shrivastava Anant Shah MP Ranjan Sukumar Ranganthan Thought leaders and decision makers critique and review public presentations made by each of the breakout sessions. An open dialogue ensues.
05.30	Dialogue: Framing Conclusions and Charting Next Steps An open dialogue to articulate possible next steps, possible coalitions, alliances, research programs and funding prospects for these areas of work.
07.00	Cocktails, Dancing and Dinner After a heavy day at the office, you deserve to twist that spine.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/design-public-2014

Design! Public

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:44:24Z

pdf file

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/design-public.pdf

Design Public Conclave, 6th Edition

amber — 2016-06-18T16:45:05Z

The 6th edition of the Design Public Conclave was hosted by Civic Labs, an initiative of the Center for Knowledge Studies, and part of the Vihara Innovation Network, in partnership with Social Innovation Exchange, Okapi, Business World, Business World for Smart Cities, and the Delhi Jal Board.

This edition of the conclave was focused on the challenges and opportunities faced by Indian cities. It sought to explore new mechanisms for integrating collaborative dialogue and problem solving into processes of government and citizen interaction. Participants included individuals from organisations such as Okapi, Hyderabad Urban Labs, Fields of View, Innovation Academy, Hewlett Packard, LIRNEasia, among others.

The conclave began with a round of light yoga before moving into the introductory session. Namit Arora, a member of the Delhi Dialogue Commission, who gave the opening remarks introduced some of the subjects to be discussed and raised issues of citizen engagement, massive migration, pollution, unplanned growth, housing, water and power shortage, social problems like sectarianism and crime as some of the challenges faced in civic innovation. He stressed the lack of engagement between public and private parties and the issue of having no sense of commons in civic life in India.

What is Civic Innovation?

The first panel titled “What is civic innovation?” comprised Diastika Rahwidiati from Pulse Lab, Pavan Srinath from Takshashila Institution, Sriganesh Lokanathan from LIRNEasia and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. Pavan raised questions about how more people can be involved in civic issues, and spoke about the training program for public governance run by the Takshashila Institution as a means towards that. He also shared the example of Bangalore Political Action Committee, a citizen’s collective that includes several eminent personalities from the city that aims to improve the quality of life in the city. The panel continued to discuss how technology can be harnessed for social activism, and how the data revolution and data sciences can be used for civic innovation. Questions were asked about whether digital activism, such as civic hackathons, is not just a passing fad. A lot of solutions that are only technological in nature, can be misinformed, and so it is essential that other actors are involved along with technologists.

The Vision of a Smart City

Next, Sumit D. Chowdhury from the Ministry of Urban Development, Karuna Gopal from Foundation for Futuristic Cities, Parvathi Menon from Innovation Alchemy, Debashish Rao from HP, Bharath Palavalli from Fields of View and Namrata Mehta from CivicLabs spoke about how smart cities can be built. Parvathi Menon kicked off the conversation by saying that while it is impossible to design smart cities, it is possible to design smart communities. Sumit Chowdhury shared some of the factors that, in his opinion, make a smart city—the creation of scalable infrastructure, transparency in governance, velocity of business and quality of life. A city that can measure itself and use that knowledge to improve itself is a true smart city. Bharat Palavalli chimed in that while technology can make cities more efficient, efficiency can be dangerous. It can become easy to forget who the city is becoming more efficient for. Here, Sumit brought up the example of Shivpur in Maharashtra, where there are water meters in every village, public consciousness about planning and services and timely payment of taxes by citizen to drive the point that smart cities are driven by communities, and technology plays a role in enabling processes and the State in institutionalizing successful solutions. Finally, it was pointed out that under the 100 Smart Cities Initiative, the MoUD does not have a consistent understanding of what smart cities should be.

Dialogue between Society and State

This panel was followed by Elizabeth Elson’s keynote talk, “The dialogue between society and the state.” She spoke about the the power struggle between citizens and the government even in the case of technological application about who brings about change. She shared her experiences from the MAMPU programme. She pointed out some issues faced during the programme like too much focus on symptoms without really understanding the underlying causes, the use of intermediaries, creating mutually empowering coalitions. Elizabeth Elson pointed out that the terms, innovation and technology are used interchangeably . She pointed out that this was problematic as all technological solutions were not innovative. Another important issue that she raised was the need for technological intervention make media more accountable to the society. This session was followed by lunch.

Changing Society and Governments

The next session was moderated by Sumadro Chattapadhyay of Centre for Internet and Society. This panel included Garima Agarwal from Ashoka Innovators, Bangalore and Maesy Angelina from MAMPU programme, Jakarta. The session focussed on what were the appropriate modes of dialogues between civil society, private sector and government. Maesy Angelina focussed on design thinking as one of key methodologies for social innovation. Garima Agarwal emphasised on the importance of developing empathy as an institution. The panel said that while civil society and private sector could continue to point out the issues to the government, very often there is a failure of the government apparatus in that they do not know how to respond to these issues.

Civic Tech Demos

After lunch, there was a small session of brief pitches of examples of civic technological innovations. These include Local Circles, Meri Awaaz, SocialCops, On Track Media and BusBud. The issues that the solutions sought to addressed ranged from citizen engagement, awareness about reproductive issues, MNREGA, public transport and parking. I was reminded of the words of Pia Mancini who felt that she had failed in leveraging technology to solve governance issues as those problems were not technological but cultural. Having said that, a number of the ideas and the desire of use technology to solve social problems were laudable and one hopes to see more applications like these in future.

Breakout Sessions

This was followed by three simultaneous breakout sessions on the following topics – 1) Form and Function: Data Protocols for Civic Innovation, 2) Water Management for Improved Urban Health, and 3) Gaming for Decentralized Waste Management. I was part of the group discussing data protocols for civic innovation. Various question were raised with the implications of open data. One of the recurring themes was the question of ownership of data and who had a rightful claim over it. We broke the discussion down into two heads – risks of data and opportunities for governance and solutions. Among risks, we discussed issues such as privacy risks, chilling effects on free speech, reliability of data, profusion of data without clear insights, social profiling and re-identification of anonymised data. We look at different forms and opportunities for governance including licensing and control, cross linking of data silos, clear guidelines on who controls and owns data. The failure of conventional data protection principles like collection limitation and data minimisation principles were also considered and alternate models which involved having hierarchies of different kinds of data based on potential harm through misuse were discussed. After the breakout sessions, each group made a presentation of their observation.

Concluding

The final session was on accelerating civic innovation. The panel comprised Kartik Desai from ASHA Impact, Delhi, Nishesh Mehta from Water Co-Lab, Ahmedabad, AIyong Paul Seong from USAID, Delhi, Santosh Singh from World Bank, Delhi and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. The discussion was focussed on what kinds of services can have an impact on the way citizens interact with the state. Elizabeth Elson’s keynote on the dialogues between the state and the citizens is also relevant with regard to this discussion. Different actors including citizens, civil society actors, government institutions and industry were discussed as agents who may create the new platforms for interaction. The conclave concluded with dinner and drinks in the lawns of the Vihara Innovation Campus.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-conclave-6th-edition

Design and the Open Knowledge Movement

saumyaa — 2019-04-01T12:13:00Z

With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other. In this post, Saumyaa Naidu shares the learnings from the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.

Introduction

Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge

Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice

Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education

Conclusion

Introduction

Design has historically been functioning in a closed paradigm, both with regard to practice and education. The design process, resources, and products are largely proprietary and limit who can access them. On the other hand, increased use of digital technology offers the potential for greater access and knowledge sharing. In this setting, a dialogue on design and openness becomes essential. There is a need to build sensitivity among designers towards open knowledge and open access practices. Such an exchange can not only allow for design resources and products to be available in the open domain, but also help designers build an extensive shared knowledge base.

With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation from 28th to 30th September, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other.

The discussion was preceded by an introduction to the open knowledge movement and its potential in creating access and inclusion, by Satdeep Gill. Satdeep is a community outreach coordinator for India at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also one of the founding members of Punjabi Wikimedians User Group. Satdeep was the programme leader for the Wikiconference India in 2016. The introduction provided a brief history of copyrights and the beginning of the copyleft movement. It discussed creative commons licensing and the role of Wikipedia in the open knowledge movement.

The panel included Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, Pooja Saxena, and Shyamal. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan is the dean at the School of Design in Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Her research has been on multiple areas such as history of craft and design, and design education in India. Her practice focuses on social communication design. Pooja Saxena is a typeface and graphic designer whose work centres on multi-script design. She has designed an Ol Chiki typeface for Santali language which is available for free and open use. Pooja also teaches typography at several design schools including Pearl Academy, National Institute of Design, and Srishti school of Art, Design, and Technology. Shyamal is an independent researcher and an ornithologist. He has been contributing to Wikipedia for over fifteen years now. In addition to his contributions about the biodiversity of birds, he has also created several illustrations relating to the same. The panel was moderated by Saumyaa Naidu, a designer and researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

The discussion was aimed at addressing three primary questions around design and the open knowledge movement; how academic materials in design inform unstructured or open knowledge spaces and in what ways do these unstructured spaces come back into design education?, what are the potential means of engagement with open knowledge in design practice?, and in what ways can it be applied in design education?

Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge

The discussion began with an enquiry into the challenges faced in the design of knowledge production and the knowledge production of design. It was directed at understanding the various ways in which design education and academia interact with open knowledge. Prof. Suchitra responded by saying that it is still early days for such an interaction to take place as the discipline of design itself is very proprietary in its approach. The work created in different areas of design is often guarded. Locating the discussion at the School of Design in AUD, she suggested that the Social Design course, which looks at the social application of design, believes in socially produced knowledge and contributing to it. However, the university is constrained by the academic environment which does not facilitate the open exchange of knowledge. There is a culture of copyright and protection of work in academia, and heavy funding is required for journal subscriptions. There is an imbalanced gatekeeping of knowledge as countries like India, which have weaker currencies, cannot access this knowledge or contribute to it. The social design community, a small community yet, is interested in making this knowledge freely accessible, in community participation, in co-designing, and in challenge the idea of one ‘super-designer’ who gets all the credit.

Open knowledge spaces such as Wikipedia often make their way into classrooms when students use these resources for assignments. It was pointed out by Prof. Suchitra that there is a lack of regard among students for giving due attribution to material taken from such platforms. Social Sciences universities also consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source, and discourage its use. There is a need to build the culture of knowledge sharing, borrowing, and contribution. She believes that this should be initiated at the level of school education, and not just design schools, so it is internalised at an early stage. She also shared an epistemological concern regarding such a cultural shift in design as it is commonly believed that the knowledge designers produce belongs to them and their livelihoods are connected to it. Hence, open knowledge and open source are antithetical to the profession. This means that the profession itself has to be imagined differently. The social design programme, in this regard, is trying to ensure that when students create work based on interactions with a community, also go back and present it to the community. This is to say that the work produced cannot be exclusively owned by the designers.

The open knowledge movement in India is closely tied to accessibility of information in Indian languages. The availability of a design knowledge base in Indian languages was discussed in this context. Prof. Suchitra explained that most design education in India is in English and is borrowed from another cultural and geographical setting. Design is a discipline of making, and making has its own language. In that sense, the act and content of design transcends language. But, it is the pedagogy which is held by language. The act of making, which is ubiquitous, and is done naturally by everybody, gets held back when it comes to the transmission in different languages. There can be sanskritised words for design terminology, but the vocabulary of everyday use should be applied to represent this knowledge. The School of Design is looking for ways in which important and more provocative texts in design can be made available in other Indian languages. When students are exploring a career in design and they want to learn about it, the information about courses, programmes, and universities should also be available in their language.

The students at AUD recently demanded that education at the university be provided in multiple languages. Since AUD is funded by the Delhi state government, the students want the medium of instruction to include languages of the state (Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi) apart from English. However, in order to accomplish this, the university would require multilingual teachers. At a personal level, Prof. Suchitra feels that the medium of instruction cannot be monolingual, and that it is good to be multilingual. There is also the conflict that it doesn’t do justice to either languages, and there is no neat answer yet. She believes that technology provides some answers in the sense that students can access the material through translations in whichever language they prefer. Being located in Delhi, the university attracts students from all parts of the country, so it needs to be multilingual in different ways. Technology can intervene and provide a layer by which access can be given in the language of one’s choice. She inferred that this is not a question of one or two languages, but of languages everywhere.

Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice

Presently, there is limited participation from design practitioners on open knowledge platforms. From the perspective of a design practitioner and educator, Pooja Saxena explained that apart from Wikipedia, designers use The Noun Project, which offers both free and paid ways to use icons. She mentioned how students also use this platform but it appears that they are not as interested in contributing to it. They are guarded about the work they create but are fine with using someone else’s work that is available for free. Pooja suggested a much needed change in the understanding that open knowledge simply means that it is open for use. It must be seen as a community which one needs to engage with in whichever capacity and give back to. Agreeing with Prof. Suchitra, Pooja also observed that students fail to give fair attribution when any work is available for free. There is a lack of training and communication around attribution among designers. Regarding open source softwares meant for image making and creating illustrations, Pooja said that despite her several attempts of using them, she has always gone back to proprietary softwares. She believes that there are not enough people contributing to making these open source applications better to work with. A middle path she recommended for designers is creating work in formats which can be edited across applications, so that the work created can be built upon in any application, and is not bound by a proprietary software.

As an experienced Wikipedian, Shyamal also stressed upon the idea of finding ways to productively give back to the open knowledge community. He talked about the opportunities that design students have in terms of creating quality images and graphics, and making them available for public use. An example of such an opportunity could be creating clipart or icons that can be used for roadside signages or other such public resources. Another possibility he proposed was publishing rough drafts or discarded work on platforms like Wikipedia, so it can be refined and used by others. It is not well known that aside from the textual part of Wikipedia, there exists a larger environment which includes projects like Wikidata, which is a semantic database, and Wikimedia Commons, which is meant for a variety of media such as images, video, audio, and even 3D models now. This offers a variety of options to designers to make their work available for open use. Another aspect that Shyamal brought attention to in this regard is to make the work available in a way that it can be easily found by others, by effectively using metadata and writing appropriate descriptions.

A relevant example of engagement of design with the open knowledge community was shared by Pooja through her type design project. This included designing a typeface family for the Ol Chiki script, which is used to write in the Santhali language. The project was initiated by Subhashish Panigrahi at CIS in order to set up the Santhali Wikipedia. But, at the time there were no unicode compliant fonts available for Ol Chiki. This was a clear example of how a design intervention in the form of a typeface could lead to knowledge being shared and possibly even created in the future. The project was then funded by the Access to Knowledge programme at CIS. Pooja described the process of designing the typeface. She mentioned that even though the Santhali language is spoken by over 6 million people, Ol Chiki is not a commonly used script. The script itself was invented less than a hundred years ago, which meant that there is little documentation available of the script to look at. The team then engaged with the community to understand how they would like the letters to look like, and whether the letters in the font were correct. This was done through comprehensive feedback forms to test the letters and ask specific questions around their form and placement. The exercise was repeated a number of times to get accurate letters.

Through this process, Pooja made a key observation on perfection. Designers are often trained to share or show their work only when they think it is perfect. But, in the case of the typeface, it was impossible to achieve something even close to being finished without showing it and seeking help from the community. The project also led to inspiring a design student from the National Institute of Design, who belongs to the Santhal community, to create letters in Ol Chiki script as part of the ‘36 days of type’ challenge on Instagram. The typeface thus, can contribute towards such projects as well. Pooja concluded that the typeface being available for free can also lead to students making a version of it that serves their purpose better.

Further on open typefaces for Indian languages, Shyamal spoke about the several issues regarding the use of Indian languages, specific to Wikipedia and in general as well. He correlated the lack of academic disciplines in Indian languages with the lack of vocabulary of technical terms. Several people also oppose borrowing words from other languages. In an example of needing to translate the labels of an illustration of a four-stroke engine into an Indian language, the engineer would not know the terms in that language, and the language expert will not know enough about engineering. Shyamal suggested transliterating English words as a first step, so that somebody who doesn’t know English can understand what the word sounds like. Another technical concern is the use of open source fonts of Indian languages for better compatibility on Wikimedia Commons. The platform replaces proprietary fonts with equivalent open source ones during the process of uploading. This changes the typesetting in the illustration in terms of spacing between the letters and sentences, and the resulting design can end up looking different from the intended one. Hence, it is important to include identification and use of open source fonts as part of the learning process in design.

Shyamal further talked about the need to create more awareness about copyright. He explained that the fact that anything we create is automatically copyrighted is not really understood by most people. People posting images on Facebook and Instagram would allow others to use their work when asked, but would hesitate to give a written permission. It would be useful to license out the work. This lack of copyright awareness hinders the creation of a vast visual database on Wikimedia Commons. There is little visual information available online about objects, monuments, maps, places, etc. in India. The advantage of using systems like Wikipedia is that you can geotag places, you can semantically describe them so that people who speak other languages can find that content. The value of availability of such content online for an outsider is not well understood yet. As a practice, when learning something new, Shyamal himself tries to add it on Wikipedia or on related projects, so that it can be of use to anyone else looking for it as well.

On encouraging designers to contribute to open knowledge, Pooja advised that designers can contribute through side projects or self-initiated projects as they are not looking to make any money from them to begin with, and would be able to share the work for free. These side projects can take the form of resources or tools that other people can use to build something else. She also pointed out that it is not necessary that designers cannot get paid to do open work, and shared the example of the Ol Chiki typeface, which was paid for by a patron. There are also organisations that commission projects which are supposed to be available for free use because those organisations need that product to be available for free. Google fonts for example, commissions the typefaces to designers which are eventually available as free and open fonts. It is important for designers to be aware that such opportunities exist, and that they need to be sought.

Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education

The discussion led to several suggestions on involving design students in the open knowledge movement. Pooja recommended that students can be encouraged to make their assignments available on Wikimedia Commons. Design students are often expected to work on projects that address problems that exist in the real world. In most cases, these projects remain with the students and not get implemented in the real world. If such projects were available on open platforms like Wikimedia Commons, they can be taken forward by others who are tackling the same concerns. It is also something that design students would benefit from because their work will be publicly available.

In order to address the disregard for attributions pointed out earlier, Prof. Suchitra stressed upon the need to build a culture among design students to attribute fairly. This would allow for acceptable acknowledgement to someone who has produced work and contributed it to the open domain. She added that this is being initiated in other design spaces such as the Decolonise Design group, which some design faculties are a part of. The group looks at ways of finding different cultural anchors for design. One such project is where design faculties have gotten together to share design assignments, in order to see what kind of assignments we set in the classroom for teaching various kinds of concepts in design. The faculties are trying to form an international platform where teaching methods can be shared and a bank of design assignments can be created. These methods and assignments are otherwise considered proprietary.

Prof. Suchitra also talked about the onus on public funded educational institutions to make their work available on open platforms, at least in projects which have a larger use. The Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Powai already has a portal on which design related educational material is available for anyone who is interested. They offer an online course in design which anyone can register for and attend. It is only for the certification at the end of the course, that one needs to pay to take an exam. Design courses otherwise tend to be quite expensive. She mentioned that the School of Design at AUD has been contemplating sharing the thesis work that students produce on Academia, a platform for academics to share research papers, where it can be downloaded for free. This allows for the work to be viewed by people outside the school, which is a significant step for young designers. Design as a profession fundamentally does not allow sharing, and this certainly needs to change. She gave the example of textiles, where the traditional artworks and motifs are picked up from different sources and placed on fabrics. Such reuse borders on unethical practice. Therefore, we need to identify the boundaries of open source. The ethical aspects of it need to be opened up and discussed, otherwise it can lead to asymmetrical knowledge practices. The attribution or acknowledgement that the work individually or culturally belongs to somebody, needs to be recognised.

On the learning by doing approach in design education, Pooja raised the concern that there is a lack of attention towards ‘learning by reading’. Design related reading materials are not available on open platforms and in different languages. She suggested that even if the readings are available in English, it is also useful for them to be available in a vocabulary that is more acceptable for someone for whom it is not their first language. Further, the ‘doing’ is also framed by a certain perspective, and often that perspective is quite closed. It does not take into account where the students is coming from. For example, a branding assignment for a product for new mothers does not consider how eighteen year old students would understand the product without any interaction with the users. It doesn’t ask why does it have to be branding to begin with. It also limits the objective to ‘selling something’ while there are other ways in which design can intervene. In the assignments where students engage with a community, there is often a clear asymmetry between the students and the people they are designing for. There is a vast gap in the knowledge and experience shared by the two. Consequently, students are forced to either assert themselves in this community or misrepresent themselves. This also takes away from students wanting to share their work on open platforms. Pooja recommended that they would be more willing to put the work out in the open when they are working with their own community because they can then see how it affects people in a much more direct way.

Conclusion

The discussion brought forward various intersections in design and open knowledge, and the possible ways in which the two can lend to each other. Broader interventions such as a cultural shift in design around sharing work and discussing its ethical aspects, availability of academic material in design on open platforms and in different Indian languages, sensitivity around fair attribution and copyrights among designers, and designers seeking out or self initiating projects that contribute to the open domain were discussed. In terms of specific steps, ideas including design practitioners creating works in formats which are editable on open applications, adding more visual content on platforms like Wikimedia Commons, creating and using more open typefaces in Indian languages, and students sharing their assignments on open platforms were considered. Other ways of engagement with design education could be through internships and workshops that demonstrate the need for open knowledge systems.

During the interaction with the audience, another key concern was brought up by Govind Sivan, a student at the School of Design at AUD. He spoke about the prevalent approach in design schools of giving primary importance to originality. Students work towards thinking of unique ideas and any similarity between their own and a classmate’s assignment is seen as a failure of creativity. Such an approach goes on to curb shared knowledge and collaborative working, and needs to be changed in order to make way for openness in design. Prof. Suchitra also advised that there is more value to design in thinking of it as a collaborative project.

Design is also gradually opening up its process to include the people being designed for through open research methods such as co-design and participatory design. All aspects of a design process such as need identification, data gathering, and the end product can be conceptualised for openness. These directions can be explored by both designers and the open knowledge community for the creation of a greater and more accessible knowledge base.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement