History that could have been

New idea! How about this. When a major event is anticipated to happen soon, the newspapers prepare two cartoons envisaging all the outcomes. For example, the day before election results are to be declared, there are three cartoons made, one for BJP’s victory, one with Congress celebrating and one with hung parliament. So, what happens to the cartoons that do not deliver the truth next day. Forgotten in oblivion. So, the idea is to write news stories, of the events that could have turned and discuss the possible impacts the ‘what if’ event would have.

So, come 23 December 2007, I will attempt to write the first piece on what if Gujarat election results had gone the other way, on:

what-if-news.blogspot.com

[draft] Looking for ...

Looking for ... is a non-profit collaborative project targeted at bringing together anthologies of thematic images in collaboration with amateur photographers and writers (verse, short stories, anecdotes etc). The book(s) will be published by independent publishers that allow printing-on-sale to reduce initial overhead and inventory costs.

It is the broader aim of the project to donate surplus funds (beyond publication and shipping costs) to organizations committed to supporting the cause for which a particular anthology is created through various means such as association with a certain set of NGOs working in the field of the chosen theme or creating funds for supporting people related to the theme. This will ensure that the looking for ... community at large can be aware of the use of the funds.

Since the content - photographs and texts - submitted to the project would eventually result in a book, it is required that the contributors submit content to express their interpretation of a certain theme. This theme is expected to be finalized very early in the project and should reflect or explore the spirit of the project. The themes will vary with each anthology we will try to prepare. Please refer to the section below on possible themes for the first anthology that we will proceed to prepare.

All content submitted, generated by the looking for ... community will be released under the Creative Commons (by-nc) Licence and all rights will remain with the original creators where-ever possible. The content, format and design of the book will be finalized through community vetting though in certain aspects where the community is unable to reach a common consensus the sponsors could be asked to intervene.

Certain volunteers supporting the cause will be assigned the responsibility for overseeing the design and form of the book through community consensus. At any time volunteers can submit independent designs for the community to decide if the design is better.

Creative Commons Licence Attribution Non-commercial licence
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses

Lulu.com - Print-On-Demand Online Publisher
Print on demand (POD) is a method of producing books or other media (such as CDs and DVDs) one at a time. With print on demand, a printer produces hard copies of a book from a digital file. That way, the book is only printed when someone buys it. With Lulu, an author gives us a digital file of the book and we create a print-ready version of the file. When a customer buys that book from Lulu, our printer prints that copy (or copies) and ships it within days.

Possible Themes:

Looking for Education. The theme spans through educational institutes in India and strives to reveal the spirit of an institute in terms of its culture and academia. We invite photographs, anecdotes and stories of people, places and occasions in educational institutes all over the country as a way of celebrating the notion of education. We hope to reveal a story about education which spans beyond the classroom and the teacher-student interaction into the environment that reveals a deeper inter-connectedness of an institute with the lives of the people who spend half of their childhood and youth in them. The broader aim of the project on this theme is to donate surplus funds to organizations committed to supporting education through scholarships and child-sponsoring.

Looking for Age. The theme is a juxtaposition between "old age" and "power". It spans to look at how old age is looked at by the youth of the present generation and how the old look at themselves? It plays with the idea of change in status of an individual with growing age and how there is a shift in the balance of power between the young and the old. We invite photographs, anecdotes and stories of people, places and occasions that span the through the notions of joint families to the Old Age Homes. We hope to reveal a story where passage of time is captured in the essence of the notion of Old Age and how people perceive it? The broader aim of the project on this theme is to donate surplus funds to organizations committed to supporting Old Age Homes and other such activities.

Primary Ideas/Ideals
Theme
Online Community
Independent Publishing
Provide exposure to Amateur Photography
Non-profit
Creative Commons Licensing
Themes

Mumbai and local trains.

This a random thought from this morning. What are socio-cultural effects that a local train system can have on a city (except for the obvious ones). Being now a resident of Mumbai and one without a bike, I often travel by train and there are some interesting effects that the trains have on public of Mumbai.

1. A greater sense of groups. In a non-local-train city working or visiting a same place regularly and not interacting with others is a common occurrence. For example, a group of thirty students may go to same tuition class every day and still remain aloof to each other since only face time they get, they are listening to the teacher not interacting. On the other hand when they are all commuting by same train (if they are not rich brats) they get face time with each other where they can interact. Hence, more socializing and creation of groups according to railway timetable.

2. Quantization of foot traffic. Again in a non-local-train city people arrive at any point in a manner that can be plotted normal distribution graph, max at peak and min at extremes and continuous in between. While in places like Mumbai there is a clear quantization with large no. of people arriving at train arrival time and falling low the rest. Accordingly most of the places being involved with walk-in traffic are affected. For example, a cafe near station might be empty most of the time and overloaded the moment train arrives.

3. Redefined Geography. Location and existence of stations often redefine geography which has a huge impact on local population especially in cities like Mumbai where people often draw their identity from the locality they belong to. For example two stations Vashi and Sanpada are only five minutes (walking distance) apart from each other yet both places have their separate cricket clubs and teams.

There might be many other phenomenon that I might be missing here. Any thoughts?

Mapping their Food

" You are what you eat. Last year’s publication of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan (NY Times 10 Best Books of 2006), amplified this age-old sentiment to a clarion call for confronting our entire industrial food system, not just to improve our nutritional health, but to save our societies. The Slow Food Movement, the Community Supported Agriculture Movement, Farmer’s Markets, the Grass-fed meat and small organic food producers’ trends, all are expanding exponentially. Northern California is a hub of these discussions, but for the average person, and certainly the average urban youth, taking advantage of the availability of local healthy food in season is still complicated. The local store, filled with processed goodies, is where youth end up spending their money. What if they had a direct relationship to the producers, if they intimately knew the stories of local farmers, and became aware of how processed or industrial foods are essentially making us sick and destroying our local landscapes? This is the question Mapping Our Food hopes to address.

This Spring we will work with a group of youth from Martin Luther King, Jr Middle School to map and capture the stories of our local agricultural providers, as well as what the local industrial food distributors know about their food. MLK Middle School is known as the home of the Edible Schoolyard project started with support from Alice Waters of Chez Pannise Restaurant. "

Source: http://storymapping.org/mappingourfood.html

[draft] Innovation Systems in India: A Polysemic Approach to Innovation

Abstract:

Innovation in India is seen not as a top-down activity but as a participative, interactive, argumentative and dialectic interface. The democratic genius of the innovation system lies in the fact that different communities are subject not only to multiple histories but they also live in different times. Innovation connects these different times and contexts of knowledge into a coherent narrative while letting each group retain its context of culture, livelihood and meanings. This paper is an attempt to offer to understand innovation not just as a community or organizational activity but also as an interaction of sub-cultures with demands on the democratic framework in India. It attempts to move beyond the standard ideas of innovation theory which appear linear and mono-paradigmatic towards a cross-cultural discourse taking place in multiple times where the very diversity adds to the plurality of democratic encounter. The paper attempts to understand the future that the Internet and other globalization processes would bring about by an evaluation of the micro-worlds within which Rural India operates. It looks at the notion of user-led innovation as dialectic of Jugaad (bricoleur’s approach) across the sub-cultures existing in India. It incorporates the notion of customization, translation and indigenization that are being practiced in Rural India as a theory for studying the impact of personalization of products in the global market. Looking at innovation in India as a rule-based game, it identifies the various levels of players, the rules of the game as a set of problem-solving methodologies and play as an activity defining the range of permutations and combinations available while indigenizing a product. Innovation is played as a game where communities with different systems of knowledge operate and interact. Looking at examples of grass-root level innovation in India, we create dialectic of processes employed by the players within the contexts of their problems and generalize them as the rules of the game. These rules should not be seen as a mono-paradigmatic site of improvisation, but they are polysemic in their implications. What we wish to establish is that each game play is an inclusive knowledge network similar in structure but different in style. Each does not substitute for the other, each supplements the other. No story is complete without all of them present.

[pre-draft] Anil Gupta's Innovators

(indigenization of von Hippel - 2005 - Democratizing Innovation)

"Studies of innovating users (both individual and firms) show them to have characteristics of 'lead users'." Lead user is a term developed by Eric von Hippel in 1986. Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them. Furthermore such users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs. (wikipedia[en] - Lead User)

It has also been found that higher the intensity of lead user characteristics exhibited by an innovator, the greater the commercial attractiveness of the innovation that the lead user develops. (Franke and von Hippel 2003)

It would be interesting to reflect these findings of growing user-innovations in the mature (developed) markets on the theories of user-led innovations (or grassroots innovations) champion in India - Prof. Anil Gupta.

The narrative of consumption in India is sung by a myriad of actors interacting with each-other across the traditional domains of ideation-production-distribution-consumption. Consumption in India is a process of production in itself with users translating / interpreting the consumables into their own structures of ritual and belief.

A majority of the Indian population has long expressed itself through the process of Jugaad or tinkering. This inventive re-use extends artifacts into new domains and sometimes bridges the gap between the imagined and real ecology of needs that a product fulfills. These remixes, freely shared within communities represent the gaps in translation of products into a specific ecology of needs. The gaps are more pronounced in developing or new markets where the need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information ( generated by manufactures specializing in a particular type of solution ) very weakly correlate (von Hippel 2005). Both need and solution information is 'sticky' - costly to move from the site of generation.

The growth of 'modern' industrial products in Jugaad rich spaces creates a curfew on individual adaptation / adjustments and thus expression. The strict distinctions between the manufacturer and consumer are clearly reflected in the closed nature of designs - to be handled only by experts - and the resulting fear in the minds of the unaware 'user'. The consumer thus, is denied his creativity and freedom to adjust his generic purchase into a 'perfect fit'. A tinkering community sees products not as a non-argumentative black box but as an action agent to be used to his fancy.

The characteristics and attitudes that define the usage patterns of Anil Gupta's grassroots-innovators can help create parts of the ecology of need and re-use in India. Can the relationships between the 'trends of Innovation Attractiveness' and the 'characteristics of Local-Hackers' help in selecting and refining the most promising tricks in the NIF databases. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of innovation and the expected future generality of its market demand).

Most 'innovations' lie silent in the archives of Anil Gupta despite efforts to package jugaad for mass-market because not many translate into a wonderful purchase. It is more the process of discovery, creation and learning which forms the motivation for use - just like Sudoku for an enthusiast, who would not enjoy being given the very solution, that he/she so strongly seeks.

Maybe the Indian innovator can teach more about the design and use of customization toolkits - a model for the market of jugaad and creative adjustment. Indian jugaad can provide a framework for democratizing innovation, with its own interpretations of the unusable and misfit.

Just like the conversations of a neighborhood lady with the tailor about her newly bought ready-made dress teach us so much about the perfect fit.

[Thoughts] Food as Cognition: Contour Maps of Ahmedabad

The Food Project has been more of a Bribal ki Kichdi than any other project that I have been a part of. But the idea has been brewing and refining itself as we work on it. To trace histories, the original ideas can be referred to at this link.

The Food Project was originally planned in terms of distribution systems. So we had discussions about Food Miles and then we planned to have a look at the Mandi and its operations. Special focus would have been on the rearrangement of the Transport System for Food Distribution in face of a Disaster situation.

Then we came up with the idea of Food Map which later on grew into the concept of mapping the Food Stalls in Ahmedabad, tracing their histories, the cultures around these places and recording the changes in their distribution with time and space. We figured that you have to look at Food in terms of time, spaces and people. Within these three axes of representation, one could create a holistic preview of the semiotics of Food.

The problem statement then boiled down to the set of questions that need to be answered or a set of end objectives to be achieved, so that one could figure out the methodologies of going about it. What follows is an independent interpretation of a conversation between Praneet, Mohit and Ranjit making attempts at figuring out a basic methodology.

Food should be looked at with a holistic perspective of its life-cycle. Hence considering that there are four distinct phases in the life-cycle of Food viz. Production, Distribution, Consumption and Waste, you could make attempts at looking at these phases individually and then mapping them together to create a representation of the life-cycle.

Taking an example, one could look at Bhutta (Corn). There are two major varieties of it viz. the Desi (hard to chew and bite off) and the American (the softer ones). Thus the production module involves the varieties whereas the distribution module involves the various thellas that sell the Bhutta on highways, roadsides and cross-roads. One could look at the kind of people that stop-by at these stalls, their placement at various times and days of the week which would in turn create a movement pattern that could be mapped. The set of people who stop-by make up the consumption module and finally the act of throwing the remains on the roadside after consumption would fall into the category of the waste module.

The problem with the example is that it has only one attribute (Bhutta itself). So, one would have a very limited understanding of how systems with multiple attributes (two or more raw materials) would be represented. The discussion moved to a Paani Puri stall (two attributes… Batashe and Masala Paani) and the Bhel Stall (greater number of attributes).

While these two stalls were under consideration, we figured that the life-cycle of the raw materials runs in parallel to the life-cycle of the processed food. That is, the Batashe will have their own dynamics of production, distribution, consumption and waste and the Paani Puri will have its own. Though they always intersect either at the level of distribution or consumption. Thus one can focus on the distribution and consumption modules as the major interest areas.

In the process of documenting these modules, one needs to find the set of actors that play a crucial role in defining these modules. For example, the farmer is the most important actor in the production module while the Mandi, a vendor and the stall owners all makes up for the distribution cycle. The consumers for the processed food or the stall owners for the raw materials would make up for the consumption module and the same would be a part of the waste module.

In fact, looking at the entire problem in terms of actors… the stall owner plays a pivotal role being a part of three distinct modules. You could look at food through the eyes of a food stall owner. You just need the right ethnographic methodology to get this information out of the food stall owners around.

Primary Ideas/Ideals:

History of Food Project
Problem at Hand
Food Life-Cycle
Example: Bhutta
Raw materials vis-a-vis Processed Food
Actors