BREAKING NEWS - It's raining ships!

Sometime back (http://entersection.blogspot.com/2008/06/bangla-chronicles-day-15.html) I had blogged about how excited I was to see a ship breaking yard in Chittagong, Bangladesh. I think I had failed to mention how dangerous it is to be in a ship breaking yard and also how difficult it is to get in since they have been getting a lot of international flak on thier inhuman working and environmental conditions.

Four out of five of us that entered a ship breaking yard by sweet talking the manager, walked in with cameras in their hands. A stupid mistake! The manager immediately wanted to kick us out for bringing cameras with us and so everyone kept their cameras back in the car. I for one, had smartly placed the camera inside my pants, good thing that digital cameras are small and light. :-)



This place was a graveyard of ships from all over the world; ships were dry docked to the beach and there were people on all of these ships using hammers, saws, and metal cutting torches, tearing away each portion of the ship and selling metal scraps and other useful equipment like kitchen furnaces, lifeboats, etc. found on them. I don't need to highlight their working condition, which is generally common to find in any developing country, but I would like to describe the beach. I'm maybe used to seeing murky sea waters in Bombay, but the water here was beyond murky. It was frothing with white stuff and the beach sand was bright red (rust) in color. Definitely not the water you want to swim in.

So, as crazy as I am for action, I convinced everyone that we should take one of the boats that these people use to get to the ships. It turned out to be a truly crazy idea! We were passing between these two ships and generally watching large chunks of the ships falling into the water, when we heard a huge crackling sound like the sound of thunder ripping through the air. The back section of the ship to our right suddenly tore away and came crashing into the water. It was like watching a piece of an iceberg falling into the water. As the part sank into the water, it created a huge waves that came towards our little boat. Everyone freaked out as our boat got rocked by the waves and could have easily overturned if we were any closer to the ship. Everyone panicked and we asked our boat guy to quickly get us back to shore less any other ship pieces fell on us. True story!! Check out the video to listen to the shocked reaction.



This was truly the wildest part of our summer trip in Bangladesh. And we had our professor along with us to acknowledge how crazy Angie and me were when it came to exploring the country. LOL!

Biomimicry and Social Intrapreneur

While at the recently concluded 2008 Net Impact conference (http://www.netimpact.org/), I attended a session on biomimicry. Off the three speakers, one of them spoke on using biomimicry in business. He explained concepts such as biomes (example deserts and rainforests) as a metaphor to describe various industry sectors and how a business should understand and adapt to its biome. Being pleasantly surprised, I asked the speaker after the session to point me to papers and articles on this new and developing concept. (I'll blog more on this session later)

And as I sit here reading a paper for my class tomorrow I come across an entersectional idea on social intrapreneurs. This picture taken from the report by SustainAbility on "The Social Intrapreneurs: A Field Guide for Corporate Changemakers" is describing the taxonomy of social intrapreneurship. It states that an intrapreneur seamlessly moves through two tactical roles as defined by a donkey and a wolf and two strategical roles as defined by a giraffe and a beaver in order to be successful. For more on what these descriptions mean go to page 30 of the report http://www.sustainability.com/search/results.asp?searchtext=social+intrapreneurship&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0)

Here's a brief description of each animal type:

Donkey - by the very nature of business there are loads to be borne and an intrpreneur reportedly carries out some pretty basic tasks as part of their work.

Wolf - lone wolf, akin to lone voice; intrapreneurs are champion lone voices responding to issues as they arise.

Giraffe - "my head in the clouds to inspire sustainable innovation, but with my feet firmly planted on ground, alongside the elephants."

Beaver - Intrapreneurs have the potential to profoundly reshape their landscapes and to create whole cascades of new opportunity for those around them.

There couldn't be a better way to make a sticky point on an intrapreneurs skills than this!

“Yes, we can!” – A Better World by Design

A first of its kind conference hosted by students of RISD + Brown University, and for students and professionals from industrial design, graphic design, social sectors, international development, architects, entrepreneurs and educators and this is well represented in this slide presented by Steve Daniels.

In true ‘entersectional’ spirit, these students of design, organized a conference for intersectional dialogue on design for social good, where designers asked social entrepreneurs how they could help in their cause and educators from various disciplines discussed the possibility of collaborating on special projects. “I always tell students that if you cannot afford to go to a conference, then organize one and bring the participants to you”, said Denise DeLuca in awe of the conference. In doing so, these students gained goodwill and developed networks with professionals in this industry space. Brilliant!!

In the spirit of this country’s recent political triumph, the Master of Ceremonies opened the event with the “yes, we can” pitch. YES, designers can have a social-good impact; YES, collaborations bring out the best results and change for good and YES, this student collaboration put on a good conference. The conference had a good energy and a high level of passion. It was as if the recent political change had given everyone a new voice. Voices of Cameroon Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity, Bernard Amadei of Engineers without Borders and Clarice Odhiambo of Africa Center for Engineering Social Solutions (ACESS) were loud and passionate.

Personally, this is how I felt about the conference and I’ll borrow Jerry Seinfeld’s sarcasm to express this as clearly as I can. If you are an analytical person like me, either an engineer or a business person, you would feel like you’ve walked through a “design wash” sort of like a car wash. Imagine watching your car going through each cleaning cycle only you’re the car and the cleaning cycles are instead these awesome presentation slides, flashy computer graphics and vivid story-telling, all being controlled by a series of mac books and mac pros. Towards the end of all the brain-cleansing process you feel that “yes, you can” be a designer too or even better you might feel like you’re a designer already. The risk of going through such a design wash is when you attempt to make such cool presentation slides with awesome moving graphics. I tried it in my class yesterday. At the end of it I realized that in the process of delivering nice looking slides, I missed out on making my point! So people, stay away from designers!! (just kidding)

Talk about design having a social impact! Just being among these self-proclaimed creative thinkers where the free space of unconnected neurons in their brain is a commodity more valuable than my combined engineering and business degrees is a freeing experience and can as well be a reason for frustration. How one draws inspiration from this, is their own challenge? For me it was both. It was especially challenging since most of the language of design was alien terminology to me, which I had to quickly learn in order to make meaningful conversations. So, without further adieu, and in anticipation of a report I might be asked to write from one of my professors, here are the conference highlights for me. I feel that the conference can be placed into three buckets or better yet themes: Acupuncture, Design Thinking, and Open-source.

Acupuncture does for you what it does to a society’s social fabric - cures by creating small and accumulative ripple effect through the entire system. The following were the acupuncture points from the event.
• Architecture for Humanity (http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/about)
• African passion, check out Claricie’s vision and voice for change in Africa, an opportunity for GSSE students (http://www.cusgsse.org/) to build on the third leg of her mission i.e. to develop successful enterprises (http://acess.engineeringafrica.org/vision.php)
• “… birth of an idea is a phone call away”, Cameroon Sinclair
• “…. change .. only through … creating business activity”, Paul Polak
• Design Matters, a UN-registered non-profit housed at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena, California that has a program specifically dedicated to social entrepreneurship
• 9/11 graphic novel (http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2006/08/911/911.pdf)

Design Thinking was the buzz word throughout the conference. Every designer I met or that presented talked about the importance of change in the role of designers in the development process of social projects. They talked of moving from being involved at the backend of the project to being involved at the frontend instead.

• Strategic process, a new change in designer’s involvement in any project• IDEO + Bruce Mao, were definitely the big stars of this event and sort of the lead voice in this direction
• World Bike (http://www.worldbike.org/)
• “design process starts once it is handed off”, Emily Pilloton, the director of Project H Design (http://www.projecthdesign.com/)
• “… use children to re-confirm statements made by adults”, Cameroon Sinclair’s pitch for another important strategy when designing
• Humantific, an interesting tool that profiles people for their creative process thinking, I guess a Myers Brigg’s test for designers (http://www.humantific.com/)
• Mushroom wall panels, Greensulate formula (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1637012,00.html)

Open-source – speakers at the conference were proponents for open-source software and ideas as the next revolution in computing in order to affect social change.

• “What happens when you leave”, a comment by Ross Evans
• Design competition from Architecture for Humanity (http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/challenge2009)
• Frontline SMS (http://www.frontlinesms.com/who/) developed by Ken Banks, uses the widespread use of cell phones in the developing world to let NGOs have a two-way interaction with their clients
• Ushahidi, a Kenyan phrase that means “testimony” is a platform created so that people can report news as it happens through the internet portal or even by SMS’ing (http://legacy.ushahidi.com/)
• “Customers, not consumers”, Niti Bhan requesting the change in reference to people at the lower economic bracket


I request the readers who were part of the conference to add their observations to this post.

A Better World by Design (RISD conference)

I'm at the Denver airport waiting to hop on my flight to Providence, Rhode Island for a conference on design for a better world (www.abetterworldbydesign.com).

A lot of good speakers and panelist on the schedule and I expect to learn a lot from this community of folks who want to make better and meaningful products for the poor or not so well-to-do folks.

I have been slow on updating my blog, but so much has been going on since I got back from my trip to Bangladesh. There's more to update from the summer trip and since school got back in session.

The blogger gets back on. Look forward to more posts from the conference and from the summer as well.

Cheers.