We are delighted by the new Rupee Symbol! Designed by Uday Kumar, a graduate of IIT bombay (Industrial Design center), it was chosen from among 3,000 designs competing for the currency symbol. He gets an award of Rs. 2.5 lakhs (= 5300 USD). The government aims to have the symbol adopted in six months within [...]
Last week I was invited by Simon Roberts to talk at WCIT2010, on a panel with Tom Steinberg (Mysociety), and Adam Greenfield (Urbanscale/Nokia). Simon had suggested that I try and link street/geography of India with local innovation and soft services. With the spiked interest in “emerging markets”, I thought it might be a good idea [...]
The idea of a having a supermarket at your doorstep, or selling products door-to-door as a form of ‘customer service’ is very popular in India. In most parts of the country fruit and vegetable vendors go in their carts, carrying fresh supplies for the residents. But apart from these usual suspects, we also have unique [...]
First up in our investigation into local Indian services is the rather unlikely ‘Blood Selling Service’, available as an ‘underground service’ in many large cities. Teen Darwaja, one of the most populated areas in the old Ahmedabad, used to be one of the hangouts for the ‘donors’ and agents. Few years ago I had worked [...]
We are working in India currently, which gives us an opportunity to observe the local services and the service economy that thrives in our country from a ‘service design perspective’. Specially becaus ‘service design’ as a new ‘saleable’ design service is only just getting attention, while age-old services designed from necessity, often through ‘jugaad‘ are [...]
Few weeks post TEDIndia, I am still a bit overwhelmed, trying to decompress the experience. Sunitha Krishnan’s images of the many thousands of young girls she continues to rescue from Indian brothels through her organization Prajwala shook the soul. Her words “Very often you find that the victims have an incredible sense of ‘giving’, they [...]
Next week I will be attending TEDIndia as a TED Fellow, and I am definitely looking forward to it. The theme of the conference is ‘Future Beckons’ and conference line-up is absolutely fantastic. Some of the speakers I am very keen to listen include Hans Rosling, R.A. Mashelkar, Banny Banerjee, Kiran Sethi, Anil Gupta and [...]
Its exciting times here at Superflux. We have a brand new, clean, shiny website! We are still uploading content, but its up in its ‘beta’ state. Thanks to Jon Ardern for the development and drupal expertise. On 22nd September we are opening the Power of 8 project to the wider public as part of the [...]
I spoke at Interesting 2009 yesterday, a fabulous one-day conference organised by Russell Davies. The most important rule of the conference is: “Talk about something interesting as long as its not your work”. My talk was titled “Superpowers I grew up with”: I talked about the Superpowers not in the marvel sense of the world, [...]
As part of Superflux’s endeavour to understand the values that will underlie the changing design scene in the India in the coming years, especially when there seems to be a sudden interest in the country’s economy, I thought I’d start with ‘Eames Report‘ (written in April 1957). Charles and Ray Eames Although hugely famous in [...]
