The blog below was written by Josh Treuhaft, reflecting on his first couple months at the National Innovation Foundation. We’d also like to direct your attention to new photos from each of the projects that can be accessed through the individual project pages: NIF, ARTI, MS, DG, and Quest.

Do you ever get the feeling that no matter how much background research you do about an organization (or a person, or place, or whatever), that you can’t really know the story until you actually meet them, and see their world, and experience at least a piece of it for yourself? I don’t mean to make a shameless pitch in favor of Empathy-based practice, or Human-Centered or Embedded Design (though I have no problem admitting that I’m a firm believer in all those concepts). I raise the question because it nicely captures the essence of the first leg of our journey here at the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) in Ahmedabad.

It’s a truly ambitious organization, tasked by the Department of Science and Technology of India (DST) with helping ‘India become an innovative and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies.’ It’s hard to summarize all their activities in one short post, but for now let’s say that they strive to achieve the above objective by cultivating, scouting, collecting, evaluating, protecting, supporting, financing, refining, commercializing and disseminating Grassroots Innovations – i.e., innovations submitted by individuals who are mostly uneducated, informally trained, and typically not affluent – from all over India. As you can infer, based just on that short list of verbs, it’s a complicated, multi-faceted organization, not easily summarized or understood at first glance.

Multi-tasking seems to be the default mode at NIF. Here’s the FabFive (all engineers from the VARD Team) illustrating that point.

So with an eye toward creating a lasting, long-term relationship between DI and NIF and setting our project on a firm foundation, we spent our first few weeks really trying to get to know NIF: Who’s working here? What do they do? How do they do it? What’s the NIF process? And over many cups of chai, many informal conversations, a few select formal interviews, and some collaborative working sessions, we pieced together some organizational process maps to capture the key activities of each department, the key stakeholders, the organizational structure, the workflows (at least in theory), the network, and basically anything we thought would be useful to really understand the organization.

The Intellectual Property Rights team is one of the six streams at NIF. They focus on trying to get patent protection for the grassroots innovators who submit their ideas and also take care of other legal issues on the innovators behalf when needed. (Click the image to see it bigger.)

In the long run, this exercise will help us understand NIF well enough to identify strategic opportunities to build Design into their process. And by doing so, we should be able to help them improve outcomes for the grassroots innovators they support, and benefit society by bringing sustainable and useful innovations to market.

Obviously, that’s no easy task and probably won’t happen overnight. So, in the nearer-term, we’ve started working on one small piece of the NIF puzzle: VARD. The ‘Value Addition, Research and Development’ team consists mostly of engineers and tends to focus on technically improving innovations from the NIF database in hopes of bringing them to market. We’ve worked with the NIF team to select some really interesting innovations to start working on, hopefully from a more user-centered perspective to compliment their engineering focus. Last week, we ran a workshop to prioritize a set of shortlisted innovations across our key dimensions: 1) Potential for social impact, 2) Potential for commercial success, and 3) Internal interest (both NIF and DI).

Innovation prioritization workshop with Rakesh (Senior Fellow – VARD), Mahesh (Director of Business Development) and Nitin (Senior Fellow – Scouting and Documentation)

It was an enlightening meeting both in terms of learning about running collaborative exercises here at NIF and in helping us refine the scope of our project. It wasn’t easy, but it seems that we’re on the right track now. We’ve narrowed in from a database of more than 150,000 innovations to four potential innovations for long-term evaluation and project development, and one innovation that we’ll start working on immediately. The four long-term innovations are:

1) A Pedal Powered Rice Paddy Thrasher for small-scale, low-income rice farmers

2) A Bicycle-based Water Pump

3) A Bicycle-based Sprayer for fertilizing crops

4) A Multi-purpose Wood Working Machine for small-scale carpenters

And for our near term project we’ll be refining a Bicycle-Based Weeder/Hoe/Tiller for small-scale, low-income farmers. Check out the picture below…

Gopal Malhari Bhise is a farmer from Jalgaon, Maharashtra. That’s him with his bicycle weeder. It’s easy to operate and ideally suited to the needs of marginal farmers who can’t afford to maintain bullocks.

If you’re interested in the project (or any of the short list mentioned above) and want to discuss, feel free to get in touch. We would love the support.

And now, back to work.

Over the next few months each of the Design Impact Fellows will guest write a blog. The first up is Ali Maiorano, who is working on rural education solutions with the Quest Alliance in Bangalore. Below, Ali talks about her first week with Quest and discusses the scalability of e-learning platforms.

But first, a quick note of general DI news. We wanted to draw your attention to our first Annual Report—this is a great document to catch up with our newest ideas and to see what we’ve accomplished in the past year. Also, if you’ve got extra holiday cash, we we’re recommended by the Design Observer as one of ten design non-profits to support this season!

And now, here’s Ali:

So much can happen in a week. I went from a state of overwhelming uncertainty to a place of more comfort and resolution with the chaos. It was a great week. Don’t get me wrong, I am still navigating through waves of confusion and fear, but I am more at peace with it somehow.

My coworkers at QUEST and Bhagya Rangachar, the founder of Children's Lovecastles Trust.

I focused this week on getting to know my coworkers. I set up hour long interviews with everyone to get a grasp on who they are, what they are looking for in life, and where they see the organization going. All of this is to help me best see where I can fit into the mix. It’s a little complicated though, because I am not designing a six month project just for me, but a longer engagement that another fellow will pick up with wherever I leave off. So it gets tricky. I need to choose a direction with research, design and a series of iterations, but know that I will probably only make it to the design phase while I am here. After the interviews, I felt more in tune with the team. I now know more about their experiences and, more importantly, their aspirations for the future. It was good to just listen and be. It was an exercise I found which I appreciated and will probably use in the future.

Children at a learning station in after school.

This week, the team went to visit a program that is sponsored by Cisco, HP, Intel, MIT and the Boston Children’s Museum. It is called Children’s Lovecastles Trust. These guys have been doing distance learning for 10 years; they have their system mostly worked out and it is impressive to see. The teachers translate state-regulated subject curriculum into 30 minute e-lessons. Each lesson contains a digital presentation that the teacher creates in PowerPoint and includes supplementary learning videos, if necessary. All communication is done through Webex. Each classroom is outfitted with a camera, screen, and internet. One teacher uses video conferencing to teach a lesson to an average of 5 different classrooms at the same time. The teacher skillfully pairs classes against each other and facilitates interactions between the students. This approach obviously relies on a lot of donated technology and a stable internet connection to the schools, so it isn’t completely scalable, but it is an amazing case study for distance learning.

E-learning is a challenge anywhere it is done. I am learning this after my first few weeks at QUEST. Students are individuals, with independent needs and learning styles. Learning must be flexible enough to accommodate your targeted user group and in India, there is an additional layer of regional challenges that must be factored in. India is not a homogenous community. That is its beauty and biggest provocation.

A teacher using Webex to do long distance learning.

One of the arguments supporting e-learning is the potential for scalability. I am beginning to question this agenda. Scalability is a great goal to have in regards to access and impact but the question becomes, how impactful is a scalable solution? If the digital structure is too rigid and restricts the creativity required by the pedagogy, then how useful is it? One challenge with some e-learning applications is that teachers have a structured plan they feel they must follow to complete a course. It takes a self-aware and confidant teacher to understand her student needs and craft the course accordingly. E-learning is a channel for delivering lessons but should not eliminate a student’s need for a meaningful adult relationship. Only a teacher can offer the guidance, support and relevant challenges to move a student forward in life. It takes two to tango. This is the challenge I am facing at Quest, understanding the roles of the teacher (or facilitator, to be more accurate) and the digital lesson. Both players must be intelligent and flexible enough to step aside and allow the other to take control. It is a dance, that when done well is fluid and powerful enough to engage a student to join the journey.

If you want to know more about Ali’s project, we’ll post monthly updates on the project page.