Village life: Everyday experiences from a rural Indian community challenge the design skills of RSA Design Directions design students
Thursday 21 February 2008
The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) Design Directions scheme has this year linked with the Digital World Research Centre (DWRC) at the University of Surrey on the development of an exciting student design project involving a rural community in Southern India.
Winning students have now been selected and two of them will visit Budikote Village near Bangalore for one week leaving on 23 February 2008.
Surrey, in collaboration with four other universities, currently leads a project called StoryBank, sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), StoryBank is investigating how to facilitate the easy creation and sharing of audiovisual information for village communities in the developing world. As part of StoryBank’s output, Surrey collaborated with the RSA to develop a fascinating student project called Sandals. Digital stories in the form of short two-minute films comprising of a series of still images with a synchronised voiceover, were created by villagers and an ethnographer in the Southern Indian community of Budikote near Bangalore, were made accessible to UK design students through the Design Directions project, in order for them to observe different aspects of Budikote village life, to ‘step into the sandals’ of another’s life. This included everyday problems and challenges and formed the starting point for students to respond to what they observed and learned with proposals for products, services or technologies that could improve and enhance village life.
This project broadens the reach of the work that the RSA has already done in the area of inclusive design by extending it globally to ensure people from all areas of the world can benefit from well thought through and appropriate design solutions.
The sixty-eight student responses from twenty-five different universities, included ideas ranging from solutions to sanitation problems and other hygiene issues, dealing with insects, and various income generating ideas.
Sadie Bossom, from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication won £2500 and has also been selected to travel to Budikote with StoryBank principal investigator, Professor David Frohlich to meet the villagers and to work with them to develop her winning idea. They will be joined by a member of the winning team from Kingston University, Kathryn Moores, who will use part of the £3,000 award given to her team to also take part in the trip.
Sadie Bossom's response grew from her wish to establish a scheme that would be both easy to operate and direct some financial benefit back to the local community. She calls her project budi-soap – a simple idea that proposes the manufacture of soap from the sap of aloe vera plants grown locally, where each soap is packaged to denote the locality of origin. Sadie sees the market as largely western and has already discussed a possible link for the village with Body Shop which has expressed an interested in the concept.
Joanne Clarke, Claire Edwards and Kathryn Moores from Kingston University whose proposal won them £3000, settled on the idea of designing a simple composting system which, they suggested, could be used in every village house. They also thought that street theatre, very popular in India, could be a method by which to explain the notion to the villagers. Their idea proposes that any empty vessel could be used for the compost and this would sit inside a wider pot around which tulsi plants could be grown to ensure the whole receptacle looked attractive as well as being functional. When full of organic waste, this indoor pot would be emptied into the exterior 'leave-it pot' which again could be made from any disused vessel with a lid. Once the compost was ready, it could be used for agriculture or could be sold.
A team from Glasgow School of Art also won an award for their proposal to design the Greywater Recycling Basin. In addition, Chloe Temple from the Arts Institute, Bournemouth won a £1500 award for her project focusing on a system to make local, alternative medicines more generally understood and accessible.
StoryBank is a project lead by the University of Surrey in collaboration with the universities of Swansea, Loughborough, London (Queen Mary) and Nottingham Trent.
