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So the main and most confusing question we had was, How has more power to drive the change, The people or the producers? Whom should we target and concentrate on?After talking to the Experts, visiting the malls and shopping malls and reading more about it, we felt that maybe a User-Pulled approach would be best. Our understanding was based on the fact that, if we could bring about a behavior change, and people start demanding things, the business and producers would be forced to change their design and supplies for that. We were convinced and decided to go forward with that when out of nowhere Sameer Shukla popped into our cubicle. We briefed him about our topic and our approach and he gave us a totally different approach.

He said a User driven approach maybe be permanent and a long term approach, but it might take around 4 to 5 generation for the effects to be seen.While Business on the other hand have a fast impact and implementation. Similar to a democracy and a dictatorship, the business power being a single entity, its easier and faster to make a change and see it happen. Users on the otherhand, being a fragmented entity, have a diverse random group which might become difficult to decide as a whole.The executive power would be incremental in people but more direct in a business.

So should it be a Pull system(user driven) or a Push system(Business driven)?or can we find a way out in between?

The days followed reading a lot and trying to understand the topic in depth. Praveen advised us to dive deep into our individual areas to know more , it would connect on the way of the journey. And so we did, the next 3 days were all about me trying to understand consumer behaviour, buying patterns, brand loyalty, how ads play with our mind, the psychology of buying.What was learned from that was a deep need of people to feel importance , personalize yet confirm to the crowd and social proof . Its also showed the business side of the game where these areas where tapped very beautifully to tune us to buy what they wanted us to buy.

So, Can we use their technique to propagate our idea? Instead of fighting the system, can we tweak it for our benefit?

So the straight forward and one of the things to do was to map the stakeholders. But as we kept adding it we realized, who wasn’t a stake holder in this system? Everybody is a very easily either a buyer or a producer in one way or the other.

STOP.BREAK.BREATH.

Wait!There is no much already, some and talked about. What are we gonna do differently.Just Collecting data and making redundant collection would be of no use if nothing was done with it. So we stopped. And thought.

Where could we make an impact as a designer. What was our role out there?Where do we fit in and how can use the power to make a difference. And mostly what difference did we wanna make?

So we tried looking into people, companies and startups and initiatives that are trying their bit to help the planet. We created the ‘Wall of Honour’.

Also the question bank- throwing in all the questions that pop-ed up in our head.

Parallely Ju tried to trace the journey of a product to get an idea about what might be happening. She choose the common villian of the planet- a water bottle.

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And the process also gave her with new insights. The plastic in a Pet bottle is the same as polysterene that is used in textile industry.Then why isnt it talked about? Who is passing on this information that something is bad. Where does our information come from?

So, we got excited and we wanted to do it all, address it all and know it all. Introducing the Data Dumping wall. We read , searched , tried to make sense, slept off, had chai, tried reading again, slept off(again), got mind-fucked, ran away from the studio and helped each other stay not depressed and or insane.

We were initially looking into

1. Psychology of Buying –
   • why do we buy things
   • what pushes us to buy things we already have
   • why are there so many varities of a product
   • what makes them happy ?
2. Materials
   • who makes the material decisions
   • how is a material decided for a product what are the parameters
   • does the product drive the material or vise versa
   • what is the life cycle of a product
   • how much and from where does a user get information ?
3. Economy
   • who makes the decision to launch a product
   • when to launch the product
   • who bears the actual cost of the product ?

So we started (randomly) dumping every word we could think was related,every topic, every word, every bit of information. We dumped it all. After almost a week of watching videos,trying to read books and talking, we asked ourselves, ” ok… what are we doing ? we are going through existing data and collecting them and making another set of data.For What? Are we just collecting Redundant data? what is our purpose of this project? what are we trying to achieve from it? what are we doing ?”

So finally the most heard about, the most anticipated course for Product Design was here. It welcomed us with mixed emotions-Should we be happy that finally we get to see the bigger picture of a system and understand it from a broad perspective or should we be sad that there is only 10 weeks left for us in this campus.. 10 weeks(thats just 2 and a half month) and we are not ready to go….Just not ready to say goodbye.

Anyway back to Systems.

The first day first class of Systems . Praveen(Our course Guide) took us through a small walk through a few previous projects done before, the Giga maps just to give us a gist of the kind and range of problems we can deal with.

Well, Interesting and tempting but still very unsure.What do we do again?

The first two weeks classes are with TAD ( Transportation and Automobile Design) and PD(Product Design) combined. It was good and refreshing to have new people and faces around for a change and I must bring it to the readers notice that even with an hours travel to and fro, the TAD guys had so much more energy and life!!!

The first activity -1.How are we feeling today ? 2. What are we expecting out of this course? A few games in the lawn to understand how Systems work and back to the classroom

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So then Praveen told us to think of bigger problems, ‘Wicked Problems’.. wicked problem?? Interesting word ‘wicked’, but whats a wicked problem?

WICKED PROBLEMS:

So what is a wicked problem? Is it like a villian in the story,Is it like an anti-hero? Should we be scared of it?

So, Wicked problem unlike what it might sound like arent wicked in their nature, just in wicked in ways it can be tackled. By definition a wicked problem is, “wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The use of the term “wicked” here has come to denote resistance to resolution, rather than evil.”

So simply put in laymen terms,do you know something that has

1.Many layers of problem that are unknown,

2.No clear solution, unforseen outcomes,

3.No stopping point ,

4.High interdependence ?

Voila! you have found yourself an idle wicked problem.

Large volumes of newspapers, old magazines were pulled out to expand our thinking horizons, stalking news(maybe people too..;)), social platforms, talking to people (everywhere )and here is our data collections of problems we could qucikly pull out of our minds.

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And after 15 minutes of starting at the board full of problems we narrowed down a few (4 votes each for problems excluding your own). These-

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A few days were spend debating and collecting brief data about each topic that excited us and we finally found peace (or was it disturbance?) with “Over consumerism” .

And so a team was formed (Juthika, Shibin and Tanya)and a broad mutually excited topic was agreed upon and shaken hands upon.

And thus we start.