Reflecting on semester 2

Copied from the post on 26th January:

"Outline of the new semester:

The second semester started this month. With slight modifications from the previous semester, we had the option of doing an independent project.

I have taken up some new courses, while I intend to continue few of the old projects side by side. So there is the ideas to experience class, part of S.Labs, which will introduce topics related to interfaces and context related problem solving. Then there is the course on illustration. It is a studio based course that will help us understand illustration with respect to the context and medium. Then there is postmodernism. And lastly I have signed for the independent course.

I think the first semester helped me understand areas where I could focus and areas that needs to be worked on. Taking cue from that I choose a mix courses this time. 

The postmodernism course would give me an in-depth understanding of the various concerns in the current timeline, the illustration and the S.Lab course is much more practical and finally the independent project is a rather focused trail. 

The idea behind selecting the courses was to get a balanced learning experience. Also that each of these somehow build on one another and utilizes what I am learned previously. For example, though my background is in painting, I still find illustration difficult. My drawing skills are there but to synchronize a text with an image, I find it rather hard. In the previous semester, one of the project outcome was a series of illustration. But I somehow wasn't satisfied with the end product. So this course will hopefully help me get a better grasp of the subject."

This is what I had written in the beginning of the semester. I thought it would be a good idea to look back and see where I stand compared to where I was.

It's been a great journey so far. And not that I have achieved anything as planned initially, but I have managed few things well and surprised myself once in a while.

Let me start from the beginning. I was initially overloaded with courses. I mean it was a neck break schedule. But the courses went on and I realized that it was getting impossible to concentrate on any one fully.

The S.Lab course was meant to run for 30 days but the workload was such that I was spending at least 4-5 days on just this. To make matter worse, we were a team of three and one member ditched us. So we were now unofficially a group of two people. And we ended up picking up new skills as the visualizer had left us. So not just I learned Illustrator decently, I have also been understanding the complexity in the graphical interface of a mobile.

The after-effect of this meant that I had to ditch two classes: postmodernism and illustration. The illustration wasn't progressing well. I never got any feedback and that was quite discouraging. So in a way it was again an opportunity.

I ended up sitting with the transcultural design department. This is where I met M P Ranjan. Also the students are busy doing a system design for an MNC company. Sitting with them helped me analyse what I am learning at the S. Lab. They are using similar methods to design a system. I could see through their faults and reflect on my journey at S. Lab.

Group dynamics is a crucial part in any design process. And given the fact that one of my team member had been unproductive, it made me think on how group dynamics work, what is the best management strategy etc. The primary reason is that as much as a bad team player could be an obstacle, I believe if human resource is used well, it could be really benefit the team. Losing out on a visualiser was stressful.

The other thing was the independent project. I could not start the work as hoped. I had spent considerable time on research. But I could not figure out how to write a proposal. I later attended Katherine's workshop on 'What is a Good Idea?'. It was really helpful, but a bit late. Also I was jumping into the idea stage which wasn't helping. The S. Lab project helped in explaining the importance of a process and how to integrate research and conceptualization. But in the beginning of the semester, I was quite helpless with how to go about the independent project. I decided to stall it for this semester.

And since I now had some time, I started attending events outside college. It starts with the Bangalore Service Jam. I took forward few of those network to build a team where we decided to jam regularly and design stuff. Basically focus on the 'creating' part than just thinking.

And so far we have attended two competitions. Not that we won anything, but we come from multi-disciplinary background- computer science, painting, interface design, product design. We get to share our ideas, learn from each other and have so far worked as a team well. We are operating unofficially from NID, Bangalore and now Srishti.

As a choice, I don't want to look back on the missed opportunities  Rather focus on the small successes that I attained. Its a long way from here, but it's interesting to see myself learning from such a diverse platform and that itself makes me happy.

Data visualization: First steps

Compare them and see if you can understand anything:

This is the current stage of visualization that is part of the S.Lab project. Just to give an idea: The first screen is the screensaver on an iPhone. Each circle represents one family member. It gives a basic overview of their environment and health of each family member. The bands stand for various dimensions: health, activity, their physical space and proximity.

The second circle expands the anomaly of one such circle. And the third further opens up into more sub-divisions.

I have done multiple iterations before reaching here. Yet I could see many unresolved issues.

Challenges: 

• How do we create it in such a way that the viewer at one glance understands the physical and physiological environment of each person? The problem here is that we can see each variable in isolation but cannot see the potential correlation between them.
• What sense the viewer gets in reading this? Initially I wanted to do away with any kind of graph, but the amount of data we had present plus the fact that we are not interpreting the data, led us to retort to the graph format.
• How friendly and unobtrusive does it look? The colour schemes used so far hasn't helped so far. They seem to be a bit sterile.
• And lastly, one of the important criteria was not to turn this into a task. So we wanted that the screensaver helps you glance at your family members. Only if you are interested, do you probe deeper. In such a case, how is the information to be presented? And can we give them the option to play with the settings?

This project would take two more weeks to finish. So I am guessing that I will make more changes and improve it further.

And just to take inspiration, I read few stuff:

1. Envisioning Information, pg. 67: This book is written by Edward Tufte. He refers to something called small multiples. 'At the heart of quantitative reasoning is a single question: Compared to what? Small multiple designs...answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives. For a wide range of problems in data presentation, small multiples are the best design solution.'
2. http://dataremixed.com/2012/10/interactive-visualizations-or-small-multiples/: This website is a nice compilation of few such examples. Though I don't fully understand either the games or know anything about the players. But what I liked here is the interactive visualisation. It lets the user to see what and how they want to see.

Attending Design Day and roaming around Microsoft Accelerator

So we start yesterday by (the Three Musketeers) attending the Design Day. There was Kshitij Anand and Poonam Bir. Though the talk was more directed towards non-designers, I liked the way Poonam explained her design experience from an educator to the founder of Daily Dump.
Design education system in India seems to be an elitist idea. And though we might be using design processes some way or the other in many more disciplines than acknowledged, its full potential has been under used due to various reservations one has with the very concept of hiring a designer. Poonam was one of the founder of Srishti, so from the role of an educator to that of a entrepreneur, it was interesting to see the reflection of her thoughts in her work. She mentions somewhere something interesting, that though daily dump could have been a high tech kind of a service, but it is not. Because often designers are not just creating but collaborating between different agents.
Poonam's talk as good, but then I deviated towards the Microsoft Accelerator. I had heard a lot about it, the the amount of work each companies put in, the 3-4 months compact incubation with mentors etc.
So I met Avinash, the tech guy from Supportbee. Our conversation started from the logo of the company. I initially googled the wrong company, supportb. Supportb has a honeybee for a logo, and the form is very regular. so it is quite difficult to recognize from the user's point of view.

The one below belongs to supportbee. The thing that works is a unique perspective of the bee and the typeface  What goes against it is the absence of colour in the web format, thus making it quite difficult to recognize if kept alongside other logos. From the design aspect, the conversation moved towards the kind of apps that are built today and how the entire funding system works. It was heartening to hear that places like silicon valleys move with trends. So if today the latest trend is education, all resources will be put mainly on that leaving at times other ideas high and dry. Then the fact that places like India make it quite difficult for start-ups to do cash transactions often lead then to the USA to set up their companies. The other features of most of these start-ups are the lack of design participations  In fact the conversation made me realize that people generally tend to believe designers to do just bright colourful  graphics. It's cringing to learn that there are hardly any product development company in India that leds designers explore the entire product process. Most of the investors end up pursuing only the mobile apps.

Though these were not regular conversations, but it helped me develop a better understanding on how the industry works first hand.

Burning the midnight oil at the NASA Space App Challenge

NASA Space App Challenge: 

spaceappschallenge.org

One day past, and my team has temporarily paused work. We are a group three, very diverse set of people: a computer science-cum-interface designer student (Rasagy Sharma), a developer-gamer-geek (Akash Manohar) and lastly me, fine artist-interaction designer.
We have one idea already set. It is based on the relativity of gravity on different planets. We intend to make a small interactive infographic that lets the person learn how high he/she will jump with known sets of relative heights of buildings on earth.
The second idea is based on a game that is currently 2-D. We plan to convert it into 3-D. More details soon.
The third idea is the based on the exploration of space through light. A recent research suggests that the speed of light decreases over time in space. We use the same logic and plan to create a game on a spiral surface. The idea is as high you go, the speed lowers. You are given a set target to reach within a set time. To do so, one needs to keep collecting points/lights through moons and orbs and go forward. As the distance gets covered, your navigation gets harder.
It kind of sounds easy at this stage, but looking at the time limit we have tomorrow, it might be quite a struggle.
That said, the good part lies in the fact that though even as virtual participants we have managed to join the off-site participants at CIS, Bangalore. There are people from statistical background to robotics, so there is a good mix of people here.
I am learning to code along side because Akash plans to use Java script, which I am completely not acquainted to. But in the morning, I am guessing we will sit together and work on it. Hopefully, if nothing happens, I will just end up picking up a new skill set/process and would have had a great time working with my new set of teammates.

Importance of collaboration in a design environment

My recent experiences have made me realize the importance of collaboration.

Starting from group dynamics, multi-disciplinary works, building on ideas like at IDEO, to creating random stuff. Collaboration is the need in the design process.

Group dynamics is one part of this entire process. But before that, why work in a group? Group would mean that you don't just sit on one idea rather add multiple layers and filter the idea as it goes through multiple stages and people. A similar approach is used at IDEO where it is believed that no idea is a bad idea.

Also design problems are much wider and is impossible for one person to handle it alone. This brings people from other areas of expertise in your team. And hence collaboration becomes a key word.

My personal experience has not been that good. In one my project we were a team of three- product design, graphic design, fine arts. It so happened that the graphic designer didn't enjoy the project as well and hence left it midway. It has since made me question on group dynamics. M P Ranjan explained that the success of a group depends on multiple factors: group dynamics, how we react to each other, how we feel about the work, how we approach each other as a team member, how we react to the views expressed on our work etc.

On the Bangalore Service Jam, I actually had to take the lead as there were disparate views and the team was not working together with one dominating member, who was as much resourceful, stopped another rather silent but resourceful member. At times it is about the ability to express your views. And it  helps when we don't underestimate or dismiss an idea as blunt. I worked as a facilitator, my work almost took a backseat but the team management took priority. But thankfully we worked together and finished the brief.

I also think that being a designer is not always about creating new things. A similar line of view was opined by Charles and Ray Eames in their NID report. They said at times our job is nothing more than a catalyst and a collaborator where we manage to create a system that facilitates the design process among the necessary stakeholders.

Currently I am part of a group that has people from fine arts to design to technologists. Each one brings their own level of expertise and thought process. As much resourceful the members are, it is a challenge to work as a team without discouraging anyone. One of the tactics have been to ensure that all ideas are worked on in the first stage and only those which manage to interest the group is taken forward. This ensures that nothing is rejected, the success of the individual is seen rather than assumed and most importantly we create a positive competition among the members where we build upon each others' ideas after the first stage.

Collaboration is the key. It is not just a challenge but a skill that if learned can go a long way in bringing forth very effective output. As a multidisciplinary group, it has helped that we build on each other's ideas and that has led us to create random concepts that holds more potential and are interesting to work on.

12th year plan- Data Hackathon

The Government of India came up with a All India competition on 6th and 7th April'13 that allowed the common man to access the 12th 5yr Plan. The scope of the competition was that one can participate as a team of max 4. We were given the options to make mobile apps, infographics and short films.

We were given a fixed range of topics to choose from the 12th 5yr Plan. We chose the area of energy. It was further subdivided into more sections.

The experience of meeting people from varied field was exciting. We participated in the IISc Bangalore campus venue. The competition started with a small presentation by Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Sam Pitroda.

It was interesting hear and see them live. So all the event sites were web telecast simultaneously, so one could see all the participants across India. It is commendable to learn that the government has taken up such an initiative. Few of the reasons been:

• The 5year plans are quite vast and it touches upon all section of national interest. But interestingly it is not directly used by the common man. But it's importance lies in the fact that the plans are referred to see the progress of the nation and is consulted during budget preparation etc. All of which matters to the common man, yet they are aloof from the process and documents that the government uses to make budgets, schemes etc.
• The important fact is that the data which is used to make the plans are way too scattered and too many to understand. The government ends up giving the statistics and direct graphs, but there has been no effort in translating the numbers to words to held the common man understand the plans.
• Also speaking to a nation of over a billion people in multilingual is difficult.

We took part in the infographic competition. The competition lasted for 24 hours. It was difficult to narrow down our them from something as broad as energy to its sub-section and relate it to the bigger context of how those minute make a difference in the nation's GDP.
This is how the ideation process:

We documented the relation between the need for an energy efficient country and its effect on the GDP. Also the map helped us understand the challenges the nation faces in distributing power to a billion plus people.

The next chart were the wireframe ideation that helped us resolve how we will explain the story. It also helped us build on the hierarchy. That said,  due to some last minute glitch we could not do as planned So we have comparatively less information in the final poster. Here the first slide documents the basic questions that we are trying to answer.

This poster was made with the rural folks in mind. So in terms of scope this could be multilingual. The important aspect is that if this is printed into books, the infographic can easily be divided into two.

The challenging part was to scoop through datasets. There were multiple data set, some incorrect, some insufficient and some so vast that calculating would have taken all  our time. So after going through all the data sets, we decided to focus on the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana.

The final draft

Sourced from: pic.twitter.com/rhTKOl4DT7

The team
From left: Rasagy, Kenneth, Paulami