Natural Design: An Introduction

Last week, I got a wonderful oppurtunity to listen and interact with Prof. Dhimant Panchal, a thought leader and a known personality in field of product design and design education.

Theme of the seminar was "Designing in sync. with nature". He beautifully described how designing inspired by nature is important, easy and benificial, socially as well as economically. There were several examples presented by him, diciphering various natural acts which we fail to observe and appreciate in our daily life and how we can implement those natural phenomena in our day today work and activity. The best thing about natural designing and conceptualization is that they are always sustainable and scalable. Here is an example.

I tried to jot down few points which i feel can help you in designing naturally.

 Observe:

            Spend time

            Look at surface/textures/colors/forms/shapes

            Expression of natural form, physical and non-physical

            Seasonal metamorphosis, change/ growth

            Connect between animal and vegetable world

Be Curious:

            Discover patterns in nature

            Reason out observation

            Find rationale
            Investigate your observation in your own way; you are part of the Nature

            Apply connect the dots technique to appreciate larger picture

Categorize and Classify:

            Animal worlds / plant / insect / micro bacterial / marine

Connect the seemingly unconnected:

            Establish connection

            Nothing in nature exists in isolation

            Inter-dependency

            Discover synergetic co-relation

Touch / see / hear / taste Nature:

            Do not just use one sensory receptor

            Experience through other senses also

            Try and see what can't actually be seen

            #there are very few adjectives for smell - why?

Apply un-conventional logic:

           Feel free to be unique and think what seems to be stupid at first
           There is no specific rule to understand nature

Though the session was more to do with product design, I am sure your aspiration to design a awesome software or a complex business solution for a client can very well find sense in natural happenings and the ideas it has to offer. 
Feel free to share your thoughts / ideas or projects.
Cheers,
Abhinav

  
Desclaimer: All pictures and products used for illustration are copyright of their respective owners.

India : The Art of Surviving

"If not continuous water supply, at least get us a water tanker once in a day", pleads an old man while talking to government officials while they are on their visit to...wait a minute, not a remote area, but a well to do colony in a tier 1 city of urban India.

Surviving in India is not just a luxury, but an art, which everyone masters overtime.
We don’t have value based education; we are never taught to explore anything new, engineering / medicine / law or at the most business administration are only options which we are exposed to, taught and motivated for.

"If not continuous water supply, at least get us a water tanker once in a day", pleads an old man while talking to government officials while they are on their visit to...wait a minute, not a remote area, but a well to do colony in a tier 1 city of urban India.

Surviving in India is not just a luxury, but an art, which everyone masters overtime.
We don’t have value based education; we are never taught to explore anything new, engineering / medicine / law or at the most business administration are only options which we are exposed to, taught and motivated for.

Ok, so those freshly baked muffins (read children) are now out of the oven and are ready to be delivered to the retail centers (read colleges) around the country.
As we were never provoked to think about why we are learning the xyz subject, quite naturally we choose, rather made to choose the 'safe' career option under the able guidance of previous survivors (read parents/guardians). Testing untested waters is simply absent in the social fiber of our motherland. For example, we make engineers who may survive recession or a job lay-off, but have we even tried to make Techno-leaders who can provide and create jobs?
I would certainly choose not to blame the great Indian middle class for keeping this tradition up till now. After all it's not about living your dreams, it's about survival.

For instance, non-private government jobs (where 'generally' there is no need to have any competency in first place, let alone keeping it up, and virtually no one can remove you from your job) have a clear choice, either get corrupt or be dead/singled out /framed in false charges. I hope we all here agree that there are two types of corruption, viz; "Mujhe toh karna hai corruption" and "Mujhe karna pad rha hai corruption".
Most (read almost everyone) choose one of these. After all it's not about serving the people and performing your duty, it’s about surviving.
If in case, till now you have not understood the reason behind naming the topic as such, let me help you.
The basic idea which is being conveyed here is, though six long decades have passed by since we have attained 'freedom', we still are merely surviving. Look at the world at large; do we honestly see any value addition that India is making despite being 2nd in population and 7th largest economy?
We serve and get paid by courtiers like Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and France which are not bigger than Madhya Pradesh even if put together. Very simple and realistic reasons which I see and have felt are; ill will of our law and policy makers and the equally adjusting and accepting nature of us all. We always choose safe slavery over dangerous freedom, you see, it's in our culture. I still believe that, had we gotten freedom by Netaji's way rather than simply waiting for British oppressors to get bored and go back, we ‘may’ have been living our freedom and not just surviving it. (This might sound irrelevant, but just read it again, I am sure you'll find a connection here)

Enough of cribbing, let's see the positive side, despite the fact that more than 70% population still doesn't get social/economical or judicial justice, we are surviving. Non-efficient public distribution system, lack of sanitation and absence of waste management system, no social security, bomb blasts everyday !! Doesn’t matter, we can survive. If not anything else, we are at least number 1 in surviving, give any condition to us, we were surviving and we will survive.

People are welcome to add their cribs as well as thoughts for better India.