Why I think we are missing a lot…
There are many occasions when you hear a lot about the innovations going around in other universities mostly abroad and there was this opportunity to be remotely associated with them as a part of the Design Innovation 2015 workshop in Ahmedabad, Gujrat being conducted by the MIT Media Lab.
Pursuing my majors in Design from The Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati , I often see people complaining a lot about the design community in IITG being very lucky and face to face with a lot of opportunities which appears to be coming without any effort. There is a stereotype that Designers in IITG are people who do very little as a part of their course curriculum and yet enjoy fairly decent placements. However, my experience has something else to say. It is like the Frog in the well story where we live totally unaware of the world outside. Before, I start highlighting some points, I would like to add that I am not at all criticizing IIT Guwahati or the Design Department or any other department in particular but it is just an attempt to stress upon the fact that there are yet miles to be covered before we sleep.
Wikipedia defines MIT media lab as an interdisciplinary research laboratory devoted to projects at the convergence of technology, multimedia,sciences, art and design and that is not even an introduction to be very frank.
What is totally mesmerizing about MIT Media Lab is that someone from a psychology background(Just for an example) ends up doing coding, collaborates with the required designing team, the electronics group etc and the end result is an inspiring innovation. It is usually a confluence of people not all necessarily from one background and some not even remotely related to engineering or design or the field the project is related to. It’s just a very diverse collection of people who get passionate about something which they like and work on it happily.
I would demonstrate my experience through my story about the workshop. There is so much of freedom that these people carry in their thinking. We started with a workshop which was supposed to last for 8 days. The track I had finally settled for in the workshop was Immersive Storytelling and I say settled because I had to fill in some options and it was very tough to decide which one was better. Immersive storytelling as a track as per my understanding dealt with telling tales but I was suggested to take it by some people. I however was highly apprehensive because of fixed mindset that storytelling is so stupid! Who tells a story and what would I learn from it???
The first three days of the workshop passed and we had taken field trips to local markets, had many session on telling stories literally and we got bunch of stories from our mentors working at the MIT Media lab as well. Never had I abused people so much in my life for having suggested me such a stupid track. It is always nice to listen to stories but then what was I learning?
At the midnight of the third day, we were given a bag each and told that we had 4.5 days to come up with an immersive storytelling experience. The bag was allotted to us in teams which were decided by our mentors based on our skill set. The bag contained a list of gadgets that we might need and which we had to indicate and an instruction to return the bag with the team name engraved on it in next twelve hours so that the materials could be distributed. Thus began the chain of sleepless nights. We had come up with so many ideas in the first three days that settling for the idea as a team was in itself challenging. The gadgets that were in the list included everything from a simple arduino, a raspberry pi, google glasses, unicycles, oculus kit, Xbox kinect, quad copters to almost everything I could imagine!
Definitely the story telling simply sounded childish but with all the resources at our call, I had to change my mindset and I started believing that it wasn't at all necessary to tell a story for a story! It could be something like an immersive experience where you forget everything else about what is going around as soon as the story starts and we often stumble upon a lot of such experiments if we refer to the social media and follow some right topics.
Now what the organizers had done was put in a bunch of people based on their skill and passion in teams, give them some direction to think on in the first three days and finally all the resources to create some epic shit. The mentors were available for any kind of suggestion and help 24X7 and they literally meant 24X7. The day the final presentation and showcasing was to occur, we had some amazing outcomes like replicating the LSD drug experience using oculus, Interacting with animations which recognized gestures using kinect and processing, sandbox environments and 3D mazes which interacted with you, the realization of a loss of a sense organ and performing tasks, Use of conducting fabrics to design a playing carpet for children, making the visually impaired see using sound as a medium to give them visual images in the brain and so on. While there were over a 100 projects in display all around, the best part was direct interaction with the likes of research team members from Microsoft, Samsung etc. who came to give live feedback and extension of opportunities from various business leaders to continue working on the project in the future.
While my fixed mentality of not joining a track which tells stories would have deprived me of an amazing opportunity to work with people I now consider awesome, the experience overall left me wondering as to what was I doing in a department such as Design which contains enormous potential and can fabricate inspiring outcomes when merged with other fields.
Unfortunately, In a country like India, the potential of Design is being recognized but very slowly. We are not only depriving the designers by having a stereotype about what the Designers do or are capable of doing but also other potential partners who could make wonders happen by a mutually rewarding merger of Design and Technology. It is high time we shut ourselves up from the fixed line of thinking and doing that we follow in India mostly. It is time we break the conventions and step out with confidence to do what we always wanted to do.
Writing ‘Make in India’ or tagging ‘#Follow_your_passion’ is not gonna work. It’s time to act! Let’s innovate! Lets think wild!