Recombine.net

projects

Open both your eyes and look out through the cone of vision. And what if you could see through many pairs of eyes?

What would you see? What would you say then? What would you do? And how?

This was the territory, Srishti’s course in Communication for Change (C4C), launched in January 2002, sought to explore. The attempt was to create a platform where people from different fields could come together in a space that was rational and lyrical.

Communication for Change meant looking into the need for building bridges, linking differing viewpoints and creating a common language among stakeholders like film-makers, design students, social activists and workers from NGOs, policy makers and artists. It also emphasized the notion of design as an inclusive and collaborative process. For information to be translated into knowledge and understanding, the experiential dimension had to be added, a space where the flexible use of information was made possible by deliberate design.

The hope was that the process could help develop models of social communication that moved away from traditional, vertical and top-down design to more lateral and participatory models that could engender a genuine appreciation of, and grappling with issues leading to positive social changes.

The ideas, methodologies and the learning from the C4C course cumulated in a participatory workshop (SUNOH) that was entirely conceived and organized by the lab. This workshop brought together multiple stakeholders – NGOs, social activists, designers, artists, ICT professionals, media and communication professionals and students - to explore how communication and ICT could be used in alternative ways to bring about social change if an issue like HIV/AIDS were to be tackled.

One of the ideas that came out of this workshop was building a prototype of an online platform to demonstrate and test how via the Internet, we could facilitate post workshop collaboration between the participants and their respective groups. I took up the responsibility of designing the prototype and the workshop documentation website along with my peers. I choose to build the collaborative platform over the open source content management system (CMS) called PLONE by customizing it to fit the scenario based design approach that we used at the workshop. This experience thankfully exposed me to the work ethics and the spirit of the open source community. I have since this experience been inspired and motivated to direct my practice towards the commons and have grown aware of the reasons and benefits of placing production and use of knowledge in the public domain.

The Collaborative Space

The Scenario that I worked on with others at the workshop