Sonderiya
Participatory Design
Social Design | Ethnographic Research
In association with the ‘Deccan Living Labs’, Sonderiya is a Social Design project targeting Bidar, a third tier city in Karnataka, India, which employs street art as a medium of social education.
This design inquiry aimed at identifying what modernisation in harmony with Bidari society looks like - the principles of Design Anthropology hence lies at the heart of this endeavour.
Design anthropology methods of Participatory Design and Ethnographic Research helped define two things:
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Education is the main institute that Bidaris view as the key to modernising society. However, there is a cap on freedom when it comes to choosing the stream of education based on deep rooted gender roles.
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The community of commercial painters within Bidar are actively engaged in educating their society about important social needs via street murals and hence can help co-design for the social need of ‘Equal Gender Opportunity’.
Research Process
Ethnographic Research
Above: There were two workshops conducted in collaboration with the art students of Bidar from two different colleges. The aim of both the workshops was to understand the current metaphors that influence the idea of prosperity for a woman in Bidar’s society and what are the visions of broadened gender roles for women that the artists of Bidar imagine and how can art help achieve that actively.
We also see six ethnographic maps of different areas in Bidar. A,B,C and D are of specific sites while E and F are of photographic insights from Bidar as a whole. Further the tool of Causal Layered Analysis was used to analyse the ethnographic findings.
Design Process
Participatory Design
Above: The iterations of the participatory workshops designed for research, ideation and feedback respectively. To the left are the collaborators, Artists of Bidar, sharing their ideas of how they would use their city’s culture of street art in the future after being a part of this project.
Above: We see illustrations based on research findings and workshop insights that represent the ideas of art as a form of educating society. Art is used as a medium in furthering idea of prosperity for a woman in Bidar. To the left the first illustration shows
‘Kala Kranti’ the face of the artists of Bidar lending a helping hand to their friend ‘Naaz Hansi Singh’ who wants to become a politician despite society promoting the idea that politics is not a woman’s profession. The second illustration is the illustration of ‘Naaz Hansi Singh’ asking Bidar to vote for her when she joins politics in the future. The third illustration shows
‘Spasht Sonderiya Rao’ who represents the birth of the idea of art as a medium to help society expand the society's collective mind, in this case the idea of a woman's prosperity as seen in the first illustration.
Below: We have the artist collaborators rendering the illustrations ,based on the research and workshops, in their own style.
