Hasta La Ideas

From L to R: Ashoke Chatterjee (Jury Captain), Vikram Parmar, Suchitra Sheth, Anil K. Gupta, H Kumar Vyas

This marks the final live broadcast of this year’s inaugural Core77 Design Awards winners! Please note, all broadcast times and dates are Eastern Standard Time (Greenwich Mean Time -4:00).

Jury Captain

Ashoke Chatterjee
Development volunteer and Former Director, National Institute of Design
Ashoke Chatterjee’s career has spanned engineering, marketing, international civil service, as well as India’s public sector and its tourism industry before his appointment as the Director of India’s National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) in 1975. After serving at NID for 25 years, he now assists design education in India, Pakistan and the UK. Past President of the Crafts Council of India, Chatterjee is actively concerned with the future of artisans and hand activity in India and globally. A development communication specialist and volunteer, he focuses on drinking water, sanitation and other environmental priorities, education and the needs of special children. Chatterjee serves on the boards and teams of development institutions in India and elsewhere.

Jury Team

Vikram Parmar
Associate Professor and Director of VentureStudio – Center for Innovative Business Design at Ahmedabad University
Dr. Vikram Parmar is an Associate Professor and Joint Director of the VentureStudio – Center for Innovative Business Design at Ahmedabad University. He also works as an adjunct faculty with the department of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. He received his PhD in Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands on Design Framework for Developing ICT Products and Services for Rural Development – A case of Persuasive Health Information System for Rural Women. His expertise lies in designing socially and contextually aware interactive products and services particularly in the area of emerging markets. He has published in journals such as Communication of the Association of Information System (CAIS), Information Technology and International Development (ITID).

Suchitra Sheth
Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at CEPT University
Suchitra Sheth is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Since 1987 she has worked with grassroots organisations and national and international NGOs in developing communication materials on issues such as women’s health, water and sanitation, child rights and human rights. She has written, with co-author Achyut Yagnik, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond and Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity, and is currently editing (with Sharmila Sagara) a volume on Ahmedabad’s art, architecture and crafts to be published in 2011.

Anil K. Gupta
Professor at the Indian School of Management and Executive Vice Chair of the National Innovation Foundation
Anil K. Gupta 
is a Professor at the Indian School of Management, Executive Vice Chair of the National Innovation Foundation, and Founder of the global Honey Bee Network. Among the vast number of accolades bestowed on him, he is the Visiting Professor of Innovation Management in Emerging Markets at the European Business School, was chosen by the leading weekly India Today as one of the 50 Pioneers of Change in the country. In 2004, he received the Padma Shri National Award from the Honorable President of India for distinguished achievements in the field of management education. He also established the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions and the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network which converts grassroots innovations into viable products.

H. Kumar Vyas
Chairman, Education Council at Maharashtra Institute of Technology Institute of Design
Professor Kumar Vyas trained as an industrial designer at Central Saint Martin College of Design in the United Kingdom where he subsequently worked as a professional designer for over five years. In 1962 he joined the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad to start its faculty of Industrial Design. His contributions have included the education kit Design and Environment, a major step toward countrywide awareness and understanding of design. His other publications include Design the Indian Context and Design: the International Movement with Indian Parallel. He is the recipient of the 2011 Sir Misha Black medal for distinguished service to design education, has taught at CEPT University (Ahmedabad), and helped establish the MIT Institute of Design in Pune.

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A. Meunier: Paris, Comédie-Française, 18th century watercolour

Innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box, unbounded thinking, lateral thought, design thinking—all terms that have gone into and out of fashion, but which hold the same goal—unconventional and novel approaches to problem solving. Everyone is trying to find the new twist and harness the insight and innovation contained within their organizations in order to better prosper amid today’s competition and uncertainty. With every new label there seems to be a wave of interest, speculation and further inquiry into how one goes about making both individuals and groups more effective at creatively tackling challenges to arrive at novel solutions. However, today’s challenge isn’t coming up with what to call ‘it,’ but how to quickly and effectively set the foundation for discovery and insight—cognitively, emotionally and cooperatively within groups.

To me, and I’m sure many of my colleagues in academia and in the design profession, all the focus on labeling is counterproductive and confusing. It also seems ironic since there is so much we’ve already learned about personal and individual psychology that are universal drivers of behavior, and much that has been learned about innovation from the world around us—military forces in times of conflict, great sports teams confronting a nemesis or the thousands of survival-based adaptations nature has conjured through evolution. Innovative and novel approaches to problems are everywhere and the riddle no more complex than in the past.

Thirty years of practice has left me an ardent believer that both social and individual psychological principles must be understood and managed, and the emotional stage set, for the ‘spontaneous magic’ of professional groups to be realized effectively. It is not just about setting the cognitive stage. I’ve come to realize that innovation and creativity is about replicable, meaningful preparation, then bringing expertise to bear while directing creative energy effectively—with inspiration, purpose and diplomacy. Creativity is sometimes an individual sport, but seldom, and so aspects of group dynamics must frequently also be managed. To use a simple metaphor, setting the stage for creativity within professional organizations and teams is a lot like a theatrical production in both its preparation and execution, and might best be understood in the context of four principle stages: casting, stage building, rehearsal and performance. I’ll attempt to illustrate key aspects to consider while using this broad analogy.

CASTING

An effective director must assemble a cast appropriate for the script. When casting in business I’d highly recommended hiring based on five measures to ensure you have a truly meaningful performance—intellect, technical skills, creative aptitude, work ethic and EI or ’emotional intelligence.’ This is because you need folks with the necessary skills and intelligence as well as introspection and empathic abilities. The ability to empathize—to see the world from viewpoints of others—is a critical first step in the ability to attack a given challenge from new perspectives. While IQ measures spatial and algebraic reasoning, verbal comprehension, information and memory, EI is a function of being able to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions—to detect and decipher, harness, comprehend, appreciate, describe and regulate them. So, to get to creative and insightful, first establish empathy within your organizations and become more comfortable with qualitative findings rather than quantitative data. While data can provide meaning, direction and analysis many of my most insightful discoveries were borne of qualitative and emotional observations. To be truly empathetic I’ve also found you need to find fellow cast members who can check their egos at the door; in stage parlance: ‘No divas!’

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In the past three years, BSR’s HERproject has reached over 100,000 women in the workplace worldwide. The program uses a peer-to-peer education methodology to bring health awareness and services to female farm- and factory- workers. Their 2010 report on their local and international programs gives an impressive breakdown of the impacts these programs have had in the workplace and in communities around the world—Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Last month BSR and Berkeley-based design consultancy Tomorrow Partners launched HERproject Toolbuilder, a web-based application to build training tools for health education.

Tomorrow Partners gives some insight into their process:

We worked with BSR to map out the graphics needed to cover all the curriculum topics. In the process, we learned that while women everywhere share some universal needs, in order for information to resonate with them personally, it is critical for images to be culturally specific. What the partners really needed was a library of illustrations that cover topics spanning from general, reproductive, maternal, and mental health to family planning, nutrition, and harassment for each country.

The talented and well-traveled storyboard artist Marc Ericksen joined our project team to create seven archetypical families, representative of the cultures in which HERproject currently operates. Every topic and every detail, from the design of a salwar kameez to the placement of a hand to the way a family stands together, was considered, extensively researched, and vetted with HERproject’s global partners. Marc used these families, along with his skill for capturing emotion and subtlety to build a relatable narrative.

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