Design is in

The role of designers is constantly changing, and this is clearly visible in the new courses developed by institutes across the world. The lines between D schools and B schools are blurring to create a new breed of design-managers, or management-designers. One such place is the D.School at Stanford.

Started by none other than David Kelly, also the founder of the design firm IDEO, the Stanford D School believes that great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers. Known as the Hasso Plattner School of Design, the focus is on radical collaboration, and a multi-discipinary approach. Design thinking is the glue that binds people of different disciplines together. Worldwide, B-schools are slowly turning towards D-schools to better their own way of working. Today, just management is not enough, and B-schools realize the value of design thinking, a systems level approach, and the difference it can make in problem solving. Innovation has become critical to management as corporations are increasingly striving for increased revenue. Hardcore administration is not enough anymore, as creative leadership is increasingly needed in a globalized world that is facing some level of crisis in economics, environment, and sustenance.

The Stanford D-school is not the first of its kind. There have been other such programmes in different places around the world, such as the one at MIT, and the program at Parsons. There is also Design London, a collaboration between Imperial College Business School and the Royal College of Art. All these schools have a strong focus on research, collaboration, entrepreneurship, incubating new ideas, and the inter-disciplinary nature of design.

This move to mix management and design is not welcome by everyone though, as many designers feel they would not like managers ‘telling them what to do’, or ‘interfering’ in the design process. Management might help designers better articulate their decisions and strategies, how to manage teams, encourage designers to research thoroughly, and help designers to deal with facts and figures in a better way. A lot of designers do have these skills, but they are not honed in a traditional design school, and often graduates fresh out of design school struggle to pick up these skills in their first few years of industry experience.

Design is much more than just making things beautiful, and design education needs to cater to the new roles that design is playing in an increasing number of sectors. Design is not exactly art, its not exactly science, and not exactly management, but somewhere involves all three and much more. There are always ongoing debates on whether design and management should merge, whether design is art, and so on.

Previously, the business world was using design, now design is the business.

By Armeen Kapadia

In the developing world, clean drinking water is a luxury. More than one billion people worldwide are without access to safe drinking water. Each day, around six thousand people, mainly children die from water borne diseases. Water is life, and clean drinking water could transform the way people live. It could save lives, keep families healthy and working, help keep children in school, reduce the need for women to walk miles for water, and is the first and most basic step of poverty alleviation.

An invention of Vestergaard Frandsen called LifeStraw, may be the first major step in providing millions of people with this most essential resource. It is a 25cm plastic straw, which is a low-cost water purification system. It does not need electricity, has no removable parts, and positive test results have been achieved on tap, turbid and saline water against common waterborne bacteria such as Salmonella, Shigella, Enterococcus and Staphylococcu. It has proven to be effective against waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea, and removes particles as small as fifteen microns. It has a lifetime of 700 litres, which is around one year's water consumption of the average person. Like any straw, one simply has to suck water through it, which even a child can do, and the germs are removed inside its plastic body.

LifeStraw is priced at around $3.50 (£1.85) a straw. A spokesman for UK charity WaterAid, which works to supply clean water and sanitation in 17 of the world's poorest countries, condemned the device as overly expensive, and said it was not a real solution. This is like telling a drowning man that you won't throw him a life-jacket because a ship 3000 miles off is coming to save him. If one considers the lives that LifeStraw can save, even if it is a so-called 'short-term' solution, then it is commendable. The 'long-term solution' is total eradication of poverty, which if not utopian, is definitely a long way off. If we sit around waiting for that solution to strike, millions will continue to die for lack of clean water, and it is exactly this need that LifeStraw fills. It takes years for governments and international organisations to provide drinking water infrastructure to vast areas of the developing world. Till they achieve their goals, LifeStraw can help thousands of thirsty people.

LifeStraw is protecting users from the deadly Guinea Worm disease. Besides LifeStraw, Vestergaard Frandsen also manufactures ZeroFly, the insecticide-incorporated plastic sheeting, which not only creates shelter for displaced people, but also prevents diseases like malaria. They also have PermaNet, a long-lasting insecticidal net that also helps prevent malaria. This is no small feat considering 40% of the world's population are at risk of malaria. PermaNet is a ready to use fabric, containing insecticide, that stays intact even after several washes, and is safe for children and pregnant women to use.

A straw, a plastic sheet , and a net were just ordinary items used by the poorest family in any developing country. Vestergaard Frandsen has transformed them into LifeStraw, ZeroFly and PermaNet, designs for the other 90%.

Companies that design for the most basic needs of people, are the companies of the future.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

Two Stanford graduates, Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, have a mission to eradicate kerosene lamps in the world. To accomplish this mission, they have started D.light Design. They could have taken a 'not-for-profit' approach, but they didn't, for a reason. In an article in the New York Times, they justify their approach, “We could have done it as a nonprofit over a hundred years, but if we wanted to do it in five or 10 years, then we believed it needed to be fueled by profit,” he said. “That’s the way to grow.”

1 in 4 people do not have electricity and live in the dark. Many families in India are dependent on kerosene lamps. Nearly one third of a family's monthly income in rural India is spent on procuring kerosene. Apart from its cost, kerosene lamps cannot work in wind or rain. Houses with kerosene lamps are also prone to fire hazards. The solar powered portable lamps designed by D.light Design are safe, affordable and offer bright light by use of LED.

Studies suggest that one kerosene lamp emits one ton of CO2 over its lifetime of five years. On the other hand, D.light lamps initiates healthy environment, better study environment, income savings and safety. Families using these lamps have become more effective since they can work at night as well. Chodhei Birsingh, one of the users, says, "For work, I use it while milking and foddering the buffaloes early in the morning. I also use the light regularly at night to go into the fields to switch on the water pump for irrigation."

The Nova light costs between $15 and $30. Its solar or AC-chargeable battery is built to last two years. If charged all day in the sun, the solar panel is supposed to provide up to eight hours of light. The Comet desk lamp, which costs between $8 and $15, is the world's most affordable solar light.

D.light, in collaboration with Beyond Solar and a local NGO, has made a village in India 100% solar powered. This project 'Shine a light' is going to improve the livelihood of tribal villagers in Orissa, an eastern Indian state.

Golman and Tozun had conceptualized the idea of such solar lamps in one of the semesters at Stanford that was entirely dedicated to creating solutions for extreme affordability. This is a prime example of how an idea can be transformed from the classroom to the real world.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

Some ancients believed the earth was not a sphere, but flat, much like a piece of paper, and you would fall off if you carelessly wandered too close to the edge. We now know that the earth is spherical, but something tells me its flattening itself out again, in terms of knowledge being freely shared. Increasingly, more people have access to knowledge and resources that we could not imagine ten, or even five years back. 

There is a young website Academic Earth, brainchild of Richard Ludlow, that seeks to make world class education freely available to all. They have uploaded thousands of videos of recorded lectures from the world's top universities, from some of the most brilliant scholars. You and I can see all this, yes, we can literally listen to classes happening miles away. As a student at Yale, he was struggling with a linear algebra class, and while hunting online he came across a full video from an MIT professor. You can read more about him and Academic Earth here and in a q&a round here.

The website is well structured, with a clean design, and not that boring academic look. It is extremely user-friendly, letting you browse by universities, subjects, top rated instructors, or top playlists, depending on your need. At the moment the six participating universities are (hold your breath!) Berkeley, Havard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. Subjects comprise everything from computer science to religion, and astronomy to physics. You can choose to listen to 'courses', which can comprise of several (as many as twenty-four) separate videos of a little over an hour each. Such courses will give you an in-depth view of the subject. There are also featured lectures of much shorter durations, anything from four minutes to an hour. 

What they have done, is create a sustainable, democratic, ecosystem for world-wide education, with the belief that knowledge is meant to be shared. This, like Ted Talks, is one of those ideas that can change the world. Students in small-town India, in Tokyo, in Egypt, anywhere, with access to a computer and the internet, can avail of knowledge sharing with the top universities. Of course some may argue that learning through a video is not the same as actually being there, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is a big step forward in education. With already more than a million visitors, and more than 50% of those from outside the US, this is the future of education, and is going to empower millions world-wide.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju