Its a pretty crazy feeling to see your stuff adorning the walls of an office space that you walk into after one whole year. I guess these graphics are meant to keep the team on their toes and from what one of my friend says, “these serve as a constant reminder of what we ought to aim for”.
I’m hoping they’re doing their job well.
I needed to put up something on my softboard at PHFI. John Maeda’s laws of simplicity should do me a whole lot of good for the time to come.
Icons, titles and captions from the book itself.
News just came in last night. Project Plus is selected to represent NID at the Microsoft Research Design Expo 2013 in July at Redmond, WA. Wooooooot!
Details on the project blog, here!
The relationship between citizens in India and the police force is rapidly deteriorating. There has been a widespread unrest and a sense of urgency among the people for a better (citizen-friendly) and more efficient police force. People are scared of approaching the police, and have no faith in the service. The police on the other hand is battling a multitude of internal issues as well as fighting the ugly image they have created for themselves with the lack of accountability and transparency. So when Microsoft announced their Design Expo 2013, Shreya Chakravarty and I decided to dive deep into examining why the relationship between citizens and the police is so grave, and what could be done from a design point of view to bridge the gap between the citizens and the police.
Project Plus (Police & Us) has reached a stage where we have mapped the complex functioning of the police (pertaining to the filing of complaints, which is only a small part of the justice system but is the first point of contact between the citizen and the police, and therefore becomes extremely significant), and have identified multiple design opportunities. We believe that these are viable and practical opportunities that need to be pursued in the near future. We invite people from all spheres to talk to us regarding the project, and collaborate with us. We want you to bring your diverse view points and skill sets and think about ways in which this project can be taken further. We have laid a foundation on which we hope more opportunities will arise, and solutions and systems be devised to create a free and safe society.
Get in touch with either of us via the blog, or write to us.
I find myself staring at the moon, off-late. And as I stare at it, a part of it becomes fuzzy like someone put a Gaussian Blur filter on it. Looks like a crescent moon has come out of the full moon. What if, the moon had its own moon? It wouldn’t be that lonely up there, yeah.
Today, I had a realization. Today, I spoke so quickly to myself, it has become imperative to jot this down. Today, something inside of me woke up.
Belief systems are best not tampered with. If you’ve grown up in a stereotypical god-fearing Indian household, you absolutely do not want to do that. You do not want to be in a position where you have to explain to your sixth aunt (who’s name you can’t remember at this point in time) why they haven’t seen you at the weekly keerthan for the past four years or so. Beliefs, I think are bestowed upon us as kids. Those are then supported with The Ideal Boy posters. That takes care of you ever having to think about anything other than what clothes to wear to the next big wedding in the family of the cousin you haven’t spoken to in about the same timeframe (four years). And then, the threads loosen up. What they told you was the biggest fear in all of the post 9 PM TV shows. Why do you think they have the highest TRP anyway? Because they’re comforting. They tell you its absolutely okay not to think for yourself. Not to embrace any kind of change. Stay put. Stay constant.
In the past couple of months, as my belief systems shatter, one by one (and I gladly let them despite desperate attempts by the only one who loves me unconditionally), I knew what was happening. I didn’t quite know why. I knew it was human nature to devise tools and techniques to make life easier to navigate, but who in their right mind would want to complicate it further, or be okay with being unsure? But then, I don’t think we were designed to stay put. Aren’t we perfect examples of the phenomenon of emergence? Wasn’t the first particle in the universe programmed with two simple rules? Fusion and Fission. And look at us now. We’re all products of emergence, based on those two simple rules. See, this is where the God bit comes in. I cannot be an atheist, for I believe the first particles came pre-programmed (unless they were programmed to program themselves, in which case, they were still programmed). Thing is, I don’t think anything’s overseeing the progress of that little experiment right at the beginning of the beginning. In that sense, God probably lasted a Planck time (10 power -43 seconds). God was a programmer of natural phenomenon, and he like many of us got kicks out of watching things being take form – units coming together based on a set of rules to form something new. God put time in an infinite loop (as far as we know) and was extremely savvy of ultra-advanced cloud computing (imagine the kind of processing power required to run that kind of a program). Respect.
So if we are emergent beings, how is it that we’ve managed to cage ourselves in constancy. My dilemma with any belief system is that it is that–a system that is constant, based on a belief. And all constant systems are rigid, and hence they fall. There is nothing that has not been preceded or succeeded, so how is it that we find comfort in an all-enduring, unchanging cocoon? Why is it that we want to institutionalize everything around us, and create products that obey? It is quite disappointing that we aren’t tolerant of our own natural state of constant change. But then we aren’t tolerant of a lot of things completely natural to us. Refer to what’s ↓.
Film posters for Film & Video Communication students (their films) are an extremely crucial part of any graphic design student’s portfolio. It tells anybody looking that this person has been through the drill at the National Institute of Design.
When I was approached to design a poster for Anta-Taha, a film by Saurabh Vyas–I thought I’d be able to deliver in two days, max. After all, he’d come to me because he’d seen my work and especially what I had designed for the Langa folk musician tribe from Rajasthan (the project). Since his film was also based on a folktale, he thought I would be able to interpret it best and create an image for his film.
The film itself is beautifully shot, has a very iconic character and an expressive story. The narration is lovely, and the poem Saurabh wrote to sum up the film does complete justice to the narrative. All of this, became my problem. He didn’t want me to use the iconic character (complete with a beautiful mask) and I didn’t want to make a collage of screengrabs from the film. We were out in the pursuit of something that captured the essence of the story–and however unjustified a two month (not a two day) time period is (for the placing of words and images on a 17 x 22 inch sheet of paper), it was well worth the effort.
From start to finish, the stuff I kept doling out.
One NID film poster in my kitty. I’m branded.
Open Data. India. What?
If you asked me a week back, I’d say those two words don’t fit in the same sentence. I realize I was terribly mistaken. Its hard to talk about data and the likes with people in design school. For someone who’s been dabbling with data and trying to make sense of stuff that goes on in this country, it’s quite surprising that I did not even know that such a community of open data enthusiasts existed. The Open Data Camp happened, and I was pleasantly amazed to see a gathering of about 120-130 people at the venue. I even met a couple of classmates from JIIT. Although, it would appear as if nobody in India is keen on working with available data, or making data available, the truth is that there is an extremely enthusiastic community of hackers, social scientists, policy researchers and a few designers among others, pushing for the same–so that questions can be raised, patterns identified and socio-political phenomenon understood.
The two day camp laid the foundation for dialog between the open data community and the Government who have recently set up a national data portal, by the looks of which is a potential goldmine for data enthusiasts. The positive aspect being that the National Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) Ecosystem takes into consideration citizens, civil society and data evangelists. The datasets are steadily pouring in on the website, and the hope is there will be an abundance of good quality data soon enough.
It was quite encouraging to see that a lot of discussion was centered around public interest issues and the ways in which open data can be used to shape civil society. As a designer/visualizer, I’ve mostly been concerned with what happens after one has the data in place. The camp provided an insight into the process of data collection and cleaning, to make it usable. Mostly comprised of techies and hackers, the community has been doing some amazing work. That being said, not a lot of emphasis has been laid on making the visualizations understandable or user-friendly. They provide insight, but you need to look hard. Work on visualizing elections by S. Anand was fantastic. A lot of it is direct representation of hard numbers but the analysis and insights were very interesting. I actually felt quite stupid raising a question about the usage of form and colour in a particular visualization that depicted state election results from 2004. Clarity of representation and re-usability is the next step that needs to be taken.
If data is going to be open, then what we do with that data needs to be understood by the general public as well. Not everyone understands or responds to numbers and representation of facts. Stories need to be weaved from the data, that can then be told and understood and re-told. Two talks focussed on this–encouraged data enthusiasts to start crafting narratives out of data, one from a business management background and the other from a designer. Although both the talks seemed like they were quite out of place and the response wasn’t that great, it feels good to see the community realizing the need to make data usable to the general public. Its one thing to be able to write python scripts and another to make the output understandable and useful. But then again, I guess that’s our job. Its something we, as information designers should contribute to.
An interesting discussion on the controversial UIDAI, brought up some thought provoking insights.
There is nothing like inaccurate data. If you can’t manage it, you don’t want to count it.
Privacy Protection needs to be inversely proportional to Power.
All in all, the experience was pretty amazing. It was great to have plain rice and sabzi (served at the venue in contrast with the fancy design festivals) with a bunch of like minded people, striving to do some good. I personally feel its time for some reflection. If the gates are going to open, we need to be able to take the load and hopefully harness it. Set a platform to enable citizens to ask more questions, perhaps.
We’re all going to need one of these soon.
Go ahead. Watch the rough video Nikunj put together of the Sound Sensitive Generative Art Installation we created.
