Three of us (Sands, Alexis & Rahul) were in India in mid January to lead a week long workshop for Indian undergraduates about Civic Innovation. Students and alumni from the MIT Media Lab have organized large Design Innovation workshops in India for the last few years, focused on a bottom-up approach to changing how engineering education happens in India. There are certainly exceptions, but Indian education is typically very traditional, and there aren’t many opportunities for sharing ideas and approaches across disciplines.
Our goal was to work with the 30 participants in our track and explore a few questions:
- What does “civic innovation” mean in India?
- Can we help these students apply their skills to problems that matter?
- Do our methods and approaches for doing civic work apply in India?
Field Trips
To explore what civic innovation means in India, and to provide some inputs into our design process, we took a few field trips around Ahmedabad.
Ahmedabad is home to the Sabarmati Ashram, our first site visit, where Mahatma Gandhi lived with his wife for twelve years. At the ashram, Gandhi set up a school to teach manual labor and fabrication to promote India’s self-sufficiency. In 1930, Gandhi led his famous 241-mile Dandi march to protest the British Salt Law, which taxed Indian salts to promote the sale of British salts. Against this backdrop, we discussed the roots of activism in India and Gandhi’s continuing influence on contemporary civic activity.
Nearby the Ashram, we also visited the Toilet Garden, built by Ishwar Patel. Patel dedicated his life to researching and building toilets which he never patented or sold so that they could be accessible to all. Through co-design with communities, he refined his prototypes and built over 200,000 toilets across India. The Toilet Garden (and accompanying cafe) is an experiment in elevating sanitation work and providing a gathering place for researchers who work to improve Patel’s toilet designs.
We also visited Manav Sadhna, a community center inspired by Gandhi’s teachings. Manav Sadhna focuses on serving women in marginalized communities, particularly those who pick up the trash in the city at night and sell it to recycling facilities through a middleman. The director of the center showed us one of their innovative projects to bypass the middleman and pay the women a higher price for the trash. Key to their approach was creating a space and protocol that would make these women feel respected for their work that keeps the city functioning.
Our last site visit — and one which helped the participants cement relationships with one another — was to a restaurant called Seva Cafe. Seva Cafe is a restaurant and an “experiment in ‘peer-to-peer’ generosity.” At the cafe, there are no prices and visitors are invited to help cook the food, clean the dishes, and perform on a community stage. The students took part in all of these activities, ate a delicious dinner, and watched a theater group perform a participatory play about women’s rights in which the audience was invited to come on stage and discuss opportunities to combat double standards for young men and women in India.
Working on Real Problems
After some amazing field trips to inspiring local sites, and exploring what civic innovation means together, we helped students organize into teams and start building things! Here’s a list of the topics they focused on:
Gaja Mitra: Detecting Elephants to Reduce Man-Wildlife Conflict
Inspired by one of our speakers, this team wanted to address problems of man-wildlife conflict in India. In many farming areas, elephants can be very dangerous to humans; they often trample crops (destroying farmers’ livelihoods), and they can unwittingly kill humans if they encounter people walking on streets at night. This team wanted to develop an elephant early warning system for farmers so that they would know when elephants were in the area and prepare accordingly. The team created a simple piezoelectric pressure sensor with no digital electronics, and tested it at a nearby zoo.
Rag Pickers: Tools for Marginalized Populations
After our visit to Manav Sadhna and hearing about the work of the women who collect trash at night (referred to as “Rag Pickers”), this team wanted to redesign the cart that the women used to make it more efficient and ergonomic. They took a co-design approach, and went out in the middle of the night to visit with the women and speak further with the director of the program at Manav Sadhna. They prototyped several designs for a new cart, and modeled their final design out of bamboo.
Virtual Braille: Assisting the Blind
Building on lessons learned from interviews with the blind in nearby communities, the Virtual Braille team built a suite of tools to augment reading and social interaction. In addition to building a device that allows individuals to have text recognized and translated to speech, the team also built technology that allows one to orient themselves to the object being read by detecting its edges. Further discussions led them to ideas for identifying the number of people in a room using facial recognition to approximate the number of people present.
ShieldON: Protecting Alzheimer’s Patients
Having found common struggles and sympathies with the impact of Alzheimer’s on families, the ShieldON team decided to apply technology to this human challenge. Using geo-fencing, a mobile application sends alerts to an individual’s care network, whether that is a family member or a community of neighbors, if an Alzheimer’s patient leaves the geo-fence. They have further ambitions to present the patient with directions back to their home in the case that they cannot find their way back.
iBins: Reducing Food Waste
The iBins team took on the challenge of encouraging people to reduce the amount of food waste at a cafeteria by creating an interactive, physical data visualization kiosk. The team had access to data about the amount of food waste at a particular cafeteria over time, and designed a system to allow people to browse through past data to evaluate progress towards reducing the amount. In their design, the team tried to avoid lecturing or shaming people as a behavior change strategy, and instead focused on promoting progress and pledges for future waste reduction.
Sense Makers: Humanizing Numbers
In order to make the impact of disasters more relatable and allow people to empathize with their scale, the Sense Makers team created a data visualization that translates disaster statistics into culturally relatable events and figures. The visualizations are location-specific to the target audience, putting the impact in terms that are familiar to them. Additional work was done to understand what events may be culturally significant enough to convey impact. They hope that through personalized news that is translated in relation to familiar events, there may be better cross-cultural understanding.
Blood Collective: Connecting Blood Donors to Recipients
Blood Collective aims to draw on existing social practices in India to leverage social networks to connect blood donors with recipients. The team noticed that people are often using social media — like WhatsApp and Facebook — to find people with a certain blood type to donate in situations where blood is urgently needed. The team created a phone app to formalize this process and make it more efficient. Key to their design approach was creating a visual language to reinforce generosity and the emotional connection between donors and recipients.
Illuminati: Publicly Accessible Data Kiosks
An off-the-grid file sharing system was developed by the Illuminati team to allow those who have traveled to a new city and perhaps do not speak the language, or simply for individuals lacking internet access. By building small wifi hotspots connected to storage to be installed at locations such as bus stops, these data kiosks would provide contextual information to its users. In addition, it attempts to address concerns around file sharing, information consumption, and surveillance.
Outcomes and Impact
The event suffers a bit of an identity crisis – living somewhere between a workshop, a hackathon, and a conference. With that in mind, we focused on helping the participants have an experience they hadn’t had before.
A number of teams continue to iterate on the ideas they prototyped at the workshop. Gaja Mitra is taking their sensors to test with elephants in the wild, and Sense Makers is modifying their initial prototype and pushing forward research questions about how people connect emotionally with data. Blood Collective is continuing to develop their app and collaborating with a non-profit partner to test it out with users.
The workshop participants, who traveled from all across India, continue to communicate with one another. The students set up several networks, including a Facebook group and a WhatsApp channel, to share civic innovation ideas and links to relevant projects. We look forward to seeing the collaborations that emerge in the future!
As for us as mentors, we come away with a number of outcomes. First off, we were inspired by the students’ energy, ideas, and attitude! In addition, trying out our approaches and ideas to India gave us new insights into how to introduce other groups to civic innovation. We care deeply about how to localize our approaches to facilitation, and practicing those in a new place helped us refine them. Finally, the list of projects is a great set of examples we are already using in other settings to talk about what civic innovation means.
