Ask a question, get an answer, save your crops

Aaqua

Today I attended Prof Krithi Ramamritham's talk on the making of "AAQUA" - "Almost all questions answered". I was impressed by the intervention as the area is very hard to work. I observed the possibilities, potentials and problems of social networking system and its community service dreams. He showed pictures of his group repairing antennas, using loud speakers to promote, setting up computer systems in rural setup, teaching them, problems of connectivity, their really robust solutions and so on.

The whole project was successful in bringing farmer community to seek information. There are about a 6 lakh page hits and 3800 registered users cutting across half of districts of India.

Farmers can ask questions and they receive answers within a day to their queries. They have also started trading animals on the web! which is a cool unusual use of the system.

Farmer community is seen as a user of crop related information and largely on the interaction of Question and answers style. What struck me was what is the difference between community service website and social networking? How should one conceive this scene? Because... India has a large number of community service websites -
This good for work stage as described in the book- Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.

Enthusiastic stage
Work Stage
Consumer Stage

Well few things are patching up!

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Mumbai Police Website

Violent city

Walking across a crowded market, traveling across city centers, searching for the right shop, buying the right things, meeting the right people, are few things which we cant avoid. It consumes a large amount of energy and puts you in an insane situation as you loose yourself and your sense in just getting these things right. City travelers should be treated like patients of mental disorders. They come back to sanity after an hour of good rest in a peaceful place. The main problem is obviously a matter of space. Crowded physically and mentally, once cannot listen to personal cries and act humanely. It is just not possible to take humanistic decisions and connections in a place which expresses crowd and suffocation. Like a child which cries if it does not get its space, so does a person's behavior largely alters due to context. I know its obvious but how do we take care of oneself in the crowded city?

I was reading an interview column of Antony Giddens a sociologist. He made an interesting remark on two inevitable things of future - Market and state!. He says, both should go hand in hand. A British can think like that in the age of globalization and multiculturalism, as he has fewer people in his country. What about India where there is a problem of "Crowd" and it itself is a a social expression.

People do many interesting things to tackle crowd! to find personal space and balance their energies.

They look out for lonely corners if they are alone
They get involved with a group
They prefer personal transport
They look out for next logical destination
They sleep in public transport
They get a quick grab - A fruit or a juice
They converse over the phone

Social Networking

To be honest....I am excited that I will be working in an area which will influence people with great amount of engagement. People like to use the internet for few following reasons

1- Connecting personally and professionally just like knowing each other sorts
2- Promoting themselves
3- Sharing their views and experiences like some sort of expressing oneself whether it is music, writings, pictures or videos
4- To take suggestions/suggest (forums)
5- To find personal opportunity - like marriage or job or make money which makes his life better
6- to play collectively

Portals of the web have at least enabled these activities to happen by typing and presenting pages! I can call them light enablers because I feel its just the beginning

List of Social Networking sites shows what people want to do with the internet today and what is possible together!

Knowledge forms

From few days, it seems that I have feeling that i am improving my memory! When you remember you seem to have knowledge. You seem to retrieve and somehow use the information of the memory to add to sense. You refer your memory. Remembering is active element of thought. I have been hearing how kids are good in memory driven knowledge and a poor in conceptual understanding or operational knowledge. What I mean here is many kids cannot solve by realizing the conceptual or phenomenological idea behind the problem. Then the only knowledge they can rely upon is the memory based knowledge.

Operational skill/knowledge is important for a successful connection of thought experience. Design makes you solve problems at operational/physical level. What is conceptual knowledge? How does it come? Is it primarily analogical? How does one become good with it?

The Problem of Academic Classification!

I was wondering.....classification will help me to seek information swiftly and often classifications are made because of a convenience to handle huge things and man can do it! Media studies, cultural studies, ethnography, sociology all these were made so that they fit inside an academic institutional setup. Simply a matter of convenience. Core issues of life are not classified. Only presentable informations gets classified and many times juggling classification (including word search) leads you only to the information of ideas,views,experiences, observations. Of course this comes from Science and other rational roots!
Categorization, positioning, classification, framework creation, mapping are such truly rational activities. They divide the feelings and create objective knowledge which the world have believed is superior in solving manly problems! Rational processes - Deducing, inferring, adding, subtracting, dividing etc are what we have whole lottedly studied in our educational en devours. So we naturally apply logic over belief when confounded in a situation. Does these activities help ? to bring in an understanding of people and situations? Spiritual narrations are as much confusing as scientific rationalism's! Both want to make people's life better! imaginative story eh? Making peoples life better?

Where do I see a sense?

Readings influence conceptions - Means it will connect ideas of many people and influence your thinking.
Observing will question peculiar activities and you try to find reasons for that.
Readings will again give experience of variety of conceptions on something of common area which you are currently wanting to know more on - Internet here helps
Documenting will help in presenting
Analysis will give you views
Inferences will sometimes force you on your rigid understanding of yourself and sometimes can be lies and imaginations though useful! Always recheck morally and objectively!
Mixture of all this will give one more view. Helpful for designers! to make new ideas which are of worth and money!
Will I get influenced in making my observations friendly to designers? Is it wrong? Or is it really ok? Good for ideas?
All ideas coming from Research will have some connection with context. They wont be aloof and brilliantly different. Most of the time ideas wont match with context? Do they?
All this work will bring more views and idea sand more pictures good for making books and reports! - Thats the only physical stuff which I can think of will exist! hey...Blogs! :-)
I can only influence designers and no body
If I slog a little more may be an organization
Thats all is my power!

I am bad at exercising my power! I never do!

What will I be when I know few things about society? A significant person!? Or just a guy with job?

A guy doing his job vs Great man! :-) conflict!

Survival vs Preaching (mostly because he is intellectually stimulated)!

What am I thinking about this blog ?

- A shift of views from Design and User to something we have been calling "Communities".
- Involving actively with my observations - Both Design and Research are intensely involved activity where your self is greatly poked!
- What is me when I observe?
- What are my beliefs and faiths about life around ?
- Why is my work important?
- What are truthful insights? How do I get them?
- What are unusual insights? Why are they unusual?
- How will my company use the observations to make profit? What will be the end product coming out of them? How will it affect life?
- How is the life happening? Exactly.... you will know when you are living it yourself. How is this knowing important?
- What will be created when we find things about people?
- Do we free them? Do we inspire them? Do we restrict them? Do we spoil them? Do we address their needs? Do we confuse them? Do we inform them? Are we informers? Do we connect them? What are we doing to them? Their freedom? Their life?
- What is design research? Why?
- Did you like the end of the day?
- Are you happy?
- Did you remember what happened yesterday? All the events?
- Do you love people? Can you give? Can you share love? Do you help people who are in need of help?
- Did you improve as a person because of your work?

Questions continue!........
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