Thesis Direction:

I have been yearning for long to take time off to look at how design can really change peoples lives at the very fundamental level rather than a superficial one, to understand how quality of life can be improved and how economic development can be facilitated in developing economies. I come from an interesting country (India) that has an unique social and economic structure, a country where extremes coexist and everything is possible . This thesis to me personally is an attempt in understanding how future economies and society could develop and how designers can play a role in it. In the present context it also is a process to understand how design and technology can bring about social and economic development in underdeveloped regions.

I would like To investigate the possibility of a correlation between social issues, open source technologies and social entrepreneurship. I envision this being a catalyst of steady change rather than a "do good" project. I hope this would spin off small ideas, big schemes and inspiration for others projects.

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is about developing social innovation through entrepreneurial solution. It essentially has all the characteristics of a proper business with a revenue model, scalablity, sustainability and even a profit motive. But the core difference is in who reaps the benefits. Instead of the profits being funneled into a single owner/corporation it is distributed amongst the contributers. The exact mechanisms of such operations are dependent on the particular local economy, social fabric, political climate and availability of resources. There are varying models in this itself but the primary motive remains to empower the participants. Social entrepreneurs go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, the world.

In some way this can be described as a mid point between a totally capitalistic economy vs a socialistic economy. The basic working of the economy follows the classic demand supply equations but with a twist of distributed revenues and benefits. Historically such ventures have been driven by factors like manufacturing, availability of natural resources or dealing with an urgent economic need. With the emergence of new technologies, ready availability of intellectual capital and new kinds of economics driven by services there is huge potential for design to play a key role. Dealing with accessibility and solving the real needs can not be done with charity or huge government grants. There has to be other means to develop a more sustainable model for support and development. One of the promising direction seems to the active involvement of social entrepreneurs.

Some enlightening examples of such practice are*

1. European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) spearheaded by Jean Monnet (France) - was responsible for the reconstruction and modernization of the French economy following World War II, including the establishment of the . The ECSC and the European Common Market were Monnet's mechanisms to integrate Europe and were direct precursors of the European Union, which have shaped the course of European history and global international affairs

2. The Grameen Bank (Bangladesh) founded by Prof Muhammad Yunus with the objective of providing microcredit. Started In 1976, the Grameen Bank has issued more than $5 billion in loans to some 4 million borrowers. The success of the Grameen model has inspired similar efforts throughout the developing world and even in industrialized nations including the United States.

3. AMUL (india ) was founded by Dr. Verghese Kurien - A rural dairy project which has revolutionized the dairy industry through the production chain of milk, small producers, consumer products and health benefits. Today AMUL is a huge national brand.

* source: Wikipedia

Open source Technologies

Technology being a key driver today has the power to change lives. But the majority of techology is developed with the motive of central profits and not necessarily empowering the society. This could be attributed to the huge cost of R&D and the need for commercializing these technologies to even sustain. Along the way we saw the advent of the open source paradigm and public availability of intellectual property. This suddenly mushroomed many large software initiatives and resulted in some astounding products mainly in the area of software products. The argued advantage of open source is that products are more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, or simply accessible. Though this might hold true for several situations but is not the entire scenario. Free software is often available for zero price, since it often costs nothing to make a copy. There also have been several initiatives in the area of open source hardware and this is equally important to the ready availability of technology. But the fact remains that hardware still cost money even though it might be open and software alone can not do all the work. This is where an entrepreneurial effort is key to the success of any social project.

The open source phenomena has many interesting cross over points with good design processes. Notable of them is "Users should be treated as co-developers - Gregorio Robles". This often referred to as 'participatory design' in the design parlance is a proven and time tested practice which ensures that ideas are analyzed, filtered and iterated several times by the end user.

Open source initiatives have many similarities to social entrepreneurship, especially the collaborative creation of value, multiple points of view and shared benefits. Open source phenomena has bearing to the fact that social entrepreneurship is all about community and collaborative systems. There would be many opinions and changes, arguments and agreements but in the end the outcome is shaped by the need and the ability of the people involved. As Eric S Raymond puts it "a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches." all working towards progression.

The cost of knowledge

Every product or service can be looked as having 3 basic cost components. The Cost of knowledge, process and material. The knowledge part consists of intellectual capital - how to make it, why it is needed, where to sell it etc. The process cost is basically the inputs needed to make it happen , i.e infrastructure, people and time etc. The material cost is simply the cost of physical entities like raw materials , components etc . It would be a interesting approach to see how designers can increase the net value of a product or service by increasing the share of the knowledge part and reducing the material costs. In-fact design strategies in such a process could actually offset the other costs by developing appropriate methodologies to leverage the knowledge aspect. This could be in the form of cleverly utilizing local resources, improvising and adapting processes to suit particular geographic situations, or take advantage of social structure of a place.This calls for slightly different approach in design process and even marketing products.

Research Questions

There are various overlapping issues that can be questioned and researched but some of the important ones that come across my mind at the current point in time are as follows.

1. How can interactive methodologies improve the daily life of invalids?
2. What new forms of user interfaces can be developed to support the lack of certain abilities?
3. How can we bring appropriate technologies to the right platform and Demonstrate unique ideas ?
4. How can services reduce the economic difference and improve the quality of life?
5. How can we design mechanisms for collaborative development in such fields?
6. What are the processes of bringing open source technologies into usable social applications?

Video of initial presentation