Urban of, by and for the Rural
Design Thinking
Design Anthropology | Speculative Design
'The Next Billion Users' has been an integral concept for all Indian designers to understand their own end users better but how truly can the typical designer, who is urban born and usually from a higher class, empathise with their rural or semi urban end users?
The mission of Urban of by and for the Rural was to discover how to innovate on the design thinking process to increase empathy amongst designers trying to solve a problem far removed from their own life experiences. This design enquiry aims at increasing empathy amongst designers with regards to the ‘Indian Agrarian Crisis’.
In India, Over 58 per cent of the rural households depend on agriculture as their principal means of livelihood. Agriculture, along with fisheries and forestry, is one of the largest contributors to the GDP.
Despite this, why are rural Indians moving to the city? Why is farming as an occupation not promoted? Why do we have farmers committing suicide? Despite being a profession recommended by the entire society why do we have engineers and engineering students committing suicide. Why does this happen? How can we use design to address and understand this present duality of the favoured Urban and side-lined Rural professions ?
Methodology
Design Anthropology
Above | The image to the left above displays the use of ethnographic mapping adopted in Design Anthropology. They include the images of Rural and Semi-Urban Mangalore. The image on the right shows an affinity mapping of insights derived out of primary and secondary research.
Above | The diagram to the left shows how the Design Thing of ‘Participatory Performance Theatre Workshop’ was innovated which takes Participatory Design from the field of Design Anthropology and combines it with theatre as a mode of education and communication, similar to the Theatre of the Oppressed introduced by Augusto Boal During the 1970's. To the right is the structure of the workshop as a Design Thing, a novel concept learned during this project which is used to design for design to make in order to facilitate a better design.
Workshop Implementation
Above | This workshop explored the evolution of man and the human civilisations concept of prosperity. To the left are participants embodying humans from the stone age. To the right there is an image that shows the discussion between a wheat crop and a Dollar bill embodied by the participants arguing about who is more important and how the two are codependent and even related as forms of currency during different time periods. These workshops aimed to bring out and recognize the urban myths that govern todays world and to question them.
Above | The videos above showcase a workshop that presents to its participants the crisis of farmer suicide due to helplessness brought about by not being able to fend for their family. To the left we see how when all the members of a family bear their weight on the head of the family they fall apart when the family leader can no longer carry on. We then continue to see the family stuck in a loop just being able to meet ends meet without being able to progress in any direction. To the right the image displays another attempt at handling the crisis by taking decisions that help them share the weight of their family. The workshop is designed to make them empathise with a national crisis they are not directly affected by through a tactile and bodily experience that attempts to replicate the chaotic state of mind a farmer facing this crisis would feel.
Feedback Analysis for Future Possibilities
Above | To the left we see images of the workshops added to the initial ethnographic map to derive insights written on the port-it notes. They are separated by a transparent sheet in order to revisit past layers of the map. Above is a diagram that shows how one workshop added to the curation of another and how this design could facilitate as a tool for future design within such a sphere.