Circular economic service system design for community based flood resilience: Integrating systems design and behavioral science to address a public sector challenge from within

The role of a designer is gradually being believed to be that of a social scientist and a leader who designs or facilitates innovation of newer ecosystems of products, services and systems; developing social capital along with resource effectiveness and economical benefits. The social and environmental imperatives have compelled designers to look beyond satisfying human desires, from merely creating problem-solving products towards focussing equally or more on generating overall well-being in the society — both individual and societal, and thus engender meaningful interactions of users with their surrounding environment through corresponding product-service-systems. As Professor MP Ranjan, a notable design educator blogs, “…(design offerings) are synthesized and developed in such a way that they vibe with the context and add value to the social, geographic and historical situation that is being addressed.” In current times, emerging world issues like climatic aberration, exponential increase in population, heavy product consumption, it’s post-usage waste generation and poor resource management have been gradually leading to chronic problems of sustainability, such that the vision of a plausible tomorrow questions the mere existence of humans and the symbiotic relationships it share with its surroundings. With multiple causes and its complex interdependencies, these problems are deeply entwined within our lifestyle behaviours, aspirations, desires, social beliefs, and our response to the evolving environment. Shifting from the linear process of resource usage, consumption and disposal, circular economy believes in the core principle of re-circling material resource and preserve existing stock for a sustainable and resource abundant tomorrow. Enabling resource effective ecosystems today by ensuring collaborative usage, shift to renewable sources of energy and improved manufacturing processes and logistic cycles, Design-for-Circular-Economy (DfCE) is one of the first stepping stones towards creating future ecosystems of well-being living. As a part of an academic applied design research project, this paper explores design of a circular economic service-system to facilitate community based resilience and enable a well-being ecosystem among the annually flood prone communities of the Brahmaputra Valley in the state of Assam, India. Threatening a sustainable lifestyle and scope for socio-economic development, the villages in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, India, experience massive floods annually, leading to basic need deprivation, impoverishment, weakness and extreme social, physiological and cognitive vulnerability. Primary ethnography and design research revealed that being exposed to an annual vulnerability to basic survival needs, accompanied by the absence of adequate and permanent flood resilience systems, these communities have been completely dependent on external aid for relief and rehabilitation. This dependency, however, has reduced the overall desire and capacity for self-reliance and the community’s resilience to such situations of emergency. Approaching through holistic design thinking and system oriented design intervention, this project attempts to collaboratively design a service system to facilitate an ecosystem of self-reliance, effective community interactions, resource effectiveness and participatory local innovations for flood-resilient village development. Understanding and mapping the process of systemic circular design intervention In order to understand and decipher the methodology and process of thinking and designing holistically, several social design methodologies, community well-being design frameworks, philosophies and narratives were studied to create a design artefact, 10-Q-2-d-i. The tool enabled to evaluate a generated design concept or idea from multi-stakeholder design development perspectives. Analysing various case studies of circular economic design interventions, a set of circular economic design trends have also been compiled and segregated as idea trigger cards — ‘Design Intervention Cards for Design-for-Circular-Economy (DfCE)’ to engage into participatory design ideations. These cards, as initial design directions, focussed on the design objective of enabling circular economy in a given context and aid designers and design students to channelize concepts generation process. Exploring circular economic design opportunities for cultivating well-being among the flood prone communities of Assam, India As primary research and end-user design inquiry, ethnographic research was carried out in three flood-prone areas of Assam to understand the current lifestyle scenarios, the severity of experienced problems, perceptions of well-being and prevalent behavioural biases of the primary stakeholders. Design dimensions for well-being and social sustainability ecosystem generation were mapped to the principles of circular economy in order to generate a system design approach framework. This framework was used to identify the leverage points for design intervention in the contextual system. Subsequently, a trans-disciplinary co-creation workshop was curated for idea generation, concept segregation and collaborative design development. Contributing to flood-resilient village development: developing a collaborative grain storage and service system through social entrepreneurship Using the system design framework, a social entrepreneurial model was conceptualized for the flood prone communities of Assam to facilitate and enhance self-reliance of food availability. Collaborative Grain Storage and Service (CGSS) System enables a user family to effective plan their farm-produce consumption patterns, and have on-demand access of food grains during any emergency scenarios like floods. The different service touchpoint implementation strategy was further developed and validated with the users. Effective implementation of circular economic behaviour today in terms of collaborative or shared services that generate higher numbers of livelihood opportunities, effective user experiences, and aids communities to adapt renewable energy sources that reflect visibly on their household expenditures will make communities and villages in India evolve to a more resource effective system. Within the contextual constrains, service system design can be approached through stakeholder participation and systemic design methodologies. The paper/presentation highlights how system oriented design can work on complex social problems by creating product-service-systems that enables the stakeholders in their capability-building, addresses local sustainability issues and creates a global implication through its replicability

Scaling-up nutrition: Bridging the great Indian hunger divide

This research reflects on the wicked problem of malnutrition in India by a case study of an academic project carried out in National Institute of Design, India titled ‘Bridging the Great Indian Hunger Divide through Systems Thinking and Design’. The project is an inquiry into the perplexing ubiquity of hunger, poverty and malnutrition in a fast growing economy like India. This project is an attempt to understand and analyse the multi-dimensional complexity of the myriad branches of the food system in India and the various components that back it. The key questions was- ‘How can the Indian food system be designed to ensure food security?’ The project built upon the principles of system thinking to understand the various opportunity areas for intervention. With a vision of a nourished India, the project concluded with the mapping of opportunities across all dimensions and conceptualisation of possible interventions that can bolster the existingsystem

ACCESSCITY – A systems enquiry & response on urban transport in Indian megacities

ACCESSCITY is based on a core hypothesis — as commute-durations keep increasing, there will be a crisis soon; where an individual will be commuting for 6-8 hrs, and will only be left with time to work, eat, & sleep, but nothing else. Milton Friedman explains “…There is enormous inertia – a tyranny of the status quo – in private & especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis – actual or perceived – (can) produce real changes.” This crisis: CONGESTION, is not an uncertain problem that we may face in the future, but is affecting us today, growing disruptively. This is urgent & important. It began with a simple question: What is the utility of a city? Mumbai Metropolitan has nearly equal population as the whole of Australia – what attracts people to cluster so closely? A city offers a citizen access to a social-life, job opportunities, healthcare, service & educational options, shopping & recreational facilities, etc. On the other end: the same city also makes this particular individual accessible to all the other citizens, job market, service market, real estate industry, healthcare & educational institutions, etc. This MUTUAL ACCESSIBILITY, is the core utility of a city. And denser the cluster, the more attractive it becomes. Lets bring another parameter: TIMING. History has lead us to specific activity timing (like office hours) – which clusters us even closer, in extreme densities. These hyper-clusters mostly take place in small areas, exponentially increasing accessibility. This high population flow through the limited street-network consequently leads us to our primary concern here, CONGESTION. Congestion is a very useless and ineffective TIME-TAX, that it is paid to no one, and no one benefits from it. Delhi NCR supposedly looses 14,000,000 man-hours/day due to congestion. The COMPLEXITY of the situation is more grave. Teilhard de Chardin elucidates, “…(Complexity depends) not only on the number and diversity of the elements included in each case, but at least as much on the number & correlative variety of the links formed between these elements.” So, we’re not dealing with just the number of vehicles, but the variety of relationships. When I was looking for a metaphor – the human-body fitted appropriately. A megacity’s transport-system is compared to the body’s circulatory-system – both the systems are indispensable for their meta systems’ survival

Using design methods to identify opportunities to prevent train-elephant collisions in India

Asian elephants are an endangered species of ecological and cultural significance in India. Human development activities frequently pose a threat to the elephant population in the country. Trains are believed to be the second highest contributors (after electrocution) to the unnatural deaths of elephants. With faster trains and a demand for connectivity, the threat to elephants and passengers alike due to elephant-train collisions is bound to increase. Addressing train-elephant collisions requires engagement with both the Indian Railways and the state Forest Departments. This project was an attempt to use participatory design tools and methods to involve grassroot stakeholders and identify opportunities to reduce train-elephant collisions within the scope of the operations of the Railway and Forest Departments. The stakeholders served as experts and were involved through qualitative discussion sessions to help us understand train-elephant collisions and ideate on the potential interventions. The problem was subdivided based on the major contributing factors which could each be tackled individually to contribute to mitigating train- elephant collisions: attraction of elephants to the track, detection of elephants on or near the tracks, conveying information about elephants on the tracks to relevant loco pilots, and easing exit of elephants from the tracks. Interventions to address each of these challenges are discussed

A systems approach to sustainability in space

Man has been fascinated by space since the beginning of civilization. There have been major advancements made in this field over many years. But if history has been witness to anything, it is that, for every advancement we’ve made, we’ve left something behind. Space missions over the past many decades have left behind over 7500 tonnes of debris in orbit. But it is still a problem which is out of sight, hence out of mind. There are millions of objects in space, most of which are too small to be able to track. Recent trends show that the number of launches are increasing each year. Thus, the amount of debris is only going to increase. This problem is a complex one since space is a global resource, and there is no central authority to keep a check on it. Satellites play such an important role in all aspects of our lives, that a threat to them is a threat to our current way of life. Over the years, there have been inter country disputes, increased tensions and unchecked misuse of space. The president of United States recently announced that Space is a place for war. If this problem is to be solved, there has to be cooperation at a global scale. Major policy changes and space laws need to be implemented in this field, along with co-operation on a large scale. Fifty years back, everyone was dumping plastic into the oceans, thinking that they were so large that a few bottles won’t make a difference. Now, there are huge islands of ocean plastic floating in the Pacific. Space debris is very similar to this problem, and we are at the advantage of not having gone too far yet. As designers, we may not have all the answers, but we can ask the right questions. Systems thinking allows us to associate seemingly unrelated aspects of the problem, and connect people from different fields. We have the advantage of looking at the entire picture in a holistic and unbiased way. A problem as complex as this needs intervention at multiple levels. It is a problem that is going to have major repercussions in the coming years, and needs foresight, which we attempt to add through this project. Through this project, we are expanding the boundaries of design. Design thinking is rarely used in the space industry and employing it on a system level is what is needed to solve the problem of space debris. As part of the project, we met with professionals, engineering students, policy makers, academicians and researchers. We organised co-creation workshops with school kids as well as scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Dividing the scientists into groups based on temporal scenarios, such as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, we came up with diverse solutions. We drew connections at each stage. We translated the raw ideas that kids came up with to tackle space debris into feasible solutions, using scientists’ expertise. We collated data from multiple primary, first hand sources and used it to come up with solutions. Due to the importance of policies in solving a problem as huge as space debris, we developed a first draft of a national policy for space debris. The policy lays down the guidelines to be followed by any space agency operating within the country. It also proposes maintaining a registry of space objects in orbit. It suggests a method to carry out threat assessment of a particular space debris. We also introduced a credit system for all space operators within India. This policy not only regulates private and public parties of the space industry, but also give guidelines for possible future scenarios. A major aspect of space debris as a problem is that relatively less people know about it. Even within the science community, many people know about the problem, but aren’t working towards it. There is a need for awareness among the masses. The more people know and understand the problem, the more brains working towards it. As designers, we can act as facilitators to promote awareness and dialogue about the topic. To do this, we developed the character of ‘Satellite girl’ and made a comic series, showing the effects of Kessler’s syndrome and how it can devastate the 21st century world. We developed two directions of speculative scenarios; A utopian future showing how global cooperation can bring about a positive change for mankind through space technology, and a dystopian future, that shows the after effects of a Kessler’s syndrome. The final systems intervention in the subject was in the form of solutions. Talking to people, employing co-design methodologies and iterating on ideas helped us to come up with potential solutions to help tackle space debris. These solutions could be as basic as redesigning a satellite to as complex as changing the whole system of how we launch and collect satellites. This is an ongoing project, and we hope to use systems thinking in more innovative ways to tackle this issue on multiple levels. We plan to pitch our policy draft to law experts, our ideas to ISRO and our awareness campaigns to publishing houses. We will be following up on our previous stakeholders and constantly contacting many more. We also intend to propose a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model for space flights. We would like to visualize all the different aspects of Space and sustainability and make people aware about the problem at hand. We want to create a common platform for people from different expertise levels to come together to solve this wicked problem. Democratization of space is something that our project also has in mind. We hope that this project will give enough clarity and push to the right people in the right direction, so that we can start working towards solving the issue. By clearly stating the future steps and sustainability opportunities, we hope to not repeat our past mistakes

The story of demand and supply of resources

The control over resources like money, commodity and information can lead to a drastic socio-economic inequality and mindless consumerism has led to climate change. Our project is a systematic exploration of the most basic physiological need of food and highly influential control means called markets. As the market system has alienated the producer from the consumer and vice versa, it has bred apathy in our society and when a call for collective action is raised it becomes an echo chamber and is almost impossible to come to any conclusive actions. Our project is an attempt to fight and end problems like socio-economic inequality and climate change catastrophe through better usage, awareness and control of resources which cater to the material needs of the human beings and help build the community, through economic, social and ecological consciousness. Systems thinking helped provide us with a perspective of a much larger scale and intricacies of interconnectedness between the different elements in the said system and the problems identified from this point of view seem to be at the very core of the wicked problem at hand. We approached to intervene in the system to either overthrow it or change it or subvert it

The Story of Demand and Supply of Resources

Description Farm Food Produce The control over resources like money, commodity and information can lead to a drastic socio-economic inequality and mindless consumerism has led to climate change. Our project is a systemic exploration of the most basic physiological need for food and highly influential control means called markets. As the market system has alienated the producer from the consumer and vice versa, it has bred apathy in our society and when a call for collective action is raised it becomes an echo chamber and is almost impossible to come to any conclusive actions. Our project is an attempt to fight and end problems like socio-economic inequality and climate change catastrophe through better usage, awareness and control of resources which cater to the material needs of the human beings and help build the community, through economic, social and ecological consciousness. Systems thinking helped provide us with a perspective of a much larger scale and intricacies of interconnectedness between the different elements in the said system and the problems identified from this point of view seem to be at the very core of the wicked problem at hand. We approached to intervene in the system to either overthrow it or change it or subvert it. Reading the map The gigamap can be accessed from ReManthan: Gigamap and is divided into five parts: Introduction – Setting the basic premise for the project. A resource point of view – Here we have deconstructed resources into its 3 main aspects, i.e., usage (what and why use it?), control (who and how do they control?) and the problems that usage and control have brought upon (climate change and socio-economic inequality). Focus area: Farm food market system – Since the realm of resources is massive we had to focus on something workable and we chose to work on the most basic physiological need (food) of human beings and chose to study the most important means of control (market) in the modern globalised world while keeping the problems associated to resources in mind. Contextual system mapping – Essentially took the learnings from the previous section and contextualised it to the state of affairs of India. Interventions – Three major ways we intervened the existing system to solve it was to – overthrow, change or subvert and each of which is explained in the map along with the proposed solutions