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- Goa Heritage Project Workshop
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During the course of a five-day workshop and crash course held at NID with students from the NID Exhibition Design program, Salil and Hugo, two Quicksand design researchers explored new possibilities in storytelling through the creation of unique virtual spaces in Unity using a mix of digital content and items 3D scanned using photogrammetry.
- WDHB’s Learning Expedition
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Quicksand hosted an executive team from Schneider Electric as part of a Learning Expedition program organized by WDHB. The team had the chance to meet local energy and micro-grid experts through a facilitated discussion format on novel best practices in emerging markets:
- Deploying microgrids in rural communities through regional Energy Service Companies (ESCO) with Sidhartha Vermani.
- Providing roof top solar energy services to commercial & industrial entities throughlong term power purchase agreements with Nalin Agarwal.
- Providing lighting solutions to the real estate sector with Sidharth Kumar.
- Providing custom built switchboards and turnkey energy solutions to real estate sector with Meera Kumar Chauhan.
- UX India
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Quicksand Co-Founder and Partner Ayush Chauhan and Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane led a daylong workshop at UX India, India’s largest international user experience conference. The theme of the workshop was Design for Social Impact, and Ayush and Kevin led the participants through several design activities and games using case studies from Quicksand’s decade-long experience in the sector.
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- Channel News Asia’s “Field Guide to Innovation”
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Senior Design Researcher Rikta Krishnaswamy was featured in Channel News Asia’s premiere episode of the series “Field Guide to Innovation”. Along with our partners on the project, Rikta discussed our recent work in Cambodia to reduce the use of plastic bags in the country, whilst also advocating for a human-centered approach to designing new, innovative solutions to longstanding problems and challenges.
- Scotland Design Sprint
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Babitha recently participated in a design Sprint in the beautiful Scottish village of Anstruther on the Fife coast. The sprint was anchored by Mozilla Foundation and Prof. Jon Rogers of University of Dundee, to explore open IoT, especially in the rural context of this Scottish fishing village.
The sprint brought together artists, technologists, makers, designers, researchers and others from all over the world for a week to simultaneously learn from fishermen, farmers and teens in the village and to then think of IoT products and stories that sought to build on this understanding. While most such endeavours tend to be focused around the same-ness of city living, the week in Anstruther yielded rich learnings for the whole group. It also provided an alternate way of thinking about innovation, in a slower, more deliberate, thoughtful manner that is an important counter-point to the pace and approach of hackathons.
The sprint was also the third in a series of events that kicked off with the UnBox Caravan at NID in February 2016.
To read more about some of the projects that emerged from this sprint + other events: https://github.com/openiotstudio
A book that offers a glimpse of the week: https://issuu.com/tommyperman/docs/oiot-digitalbook/1 - Boatcamp 2016: A Social Entrepreneurship Workshop at Sea
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Building on our relationship after working together on our plastic bag project, Excess Baggage, Fondazione ACRA engaged Quicksand to facilitate one of the working groups on Boatcamp - a four-day workshop for budding social entrepreneurs. Boatcamp took place in the context of a cruise between Rome and Barcelona, and addressed the unique problems faced by eight business cases identified internationally from a diverse range of contexts. Fondazione ACRA - in association with OPES Impact Fund and Compagnia Di San Paulo - invited over 300 participants, established mentors and expert speakers in social entrepreneurship to innovate on the development of sustainable high-impact business models.
Quicksand was asked to facilitate the leadership of the groups addressing one of these eight business cases. We worked with social entrepreneur, Biko Evarist, to analyse the unique problems facing his business, Education and Entrepreneurship (E & E) - an educational organisation to support young people in rural Tanzania who had missed opportunities to continue their learning beyond the age of 13. Rishabh and Tom worked with Biko and their 34 allocated participants to study Biko's business case, deconstructing it collectively, identifying high-impact areas for improvement and reconstructing the business case as a compelling story attractive to potential funders.
In addressing the challenges facing E & E, the team were fortunate in being able to make use of the expertise of experts such as Jack Sim from the World Toilet Association and Martin Burt from Fundacion Paraguay. Following E & E's board meeting the day after returning to land, Biko reported that the company has received follow on funding to continue the expansion of their operation.
- Brown Paper Bag Presentation, World Bank: Using Human Centered Design to Address Development Challenges
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With international development facing increasingly complex challenges deeply dependent on a web of inter-connected issues pertaining to behavior change, technology and policy, approaching these problems with the right framework is essential for global development actors. Human Centered-Design is a tool that can help bring the human perspective to the design and planning of holistic, innovative programs focused on basic service delivery such as healthcare, sanitation or waste management. Ayush presented Human Centered Design as a tool to address some of the most pressing development challenges, pulling examples from healthcare, water and sanitation, and waste management. Case studies included rethinking sanitation services in urban slums in India, improving diagnostics for detecting malnutrition in the remote parts of war-torn South Sudan and reducing plastic bag waste in one of the fastest growing economies of the Indochina region, Cambodia. The presentation was followed by a discussion on the existing World Bank projects involving an innovation mandate in a variety of areas.
- Workshop on Speculative Futures, Government and Policy Strategy Conference, Insitute of Design, IIT Chicago
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The need for reform within governments and public institutions across the world has never been more acute. As the relationship between the governing and the governed gets re-balanced, governments are forced to think of new ways of delivering on services that are more responsive to an even more demanding electorate. This is especially true of emerging economies of South and South East Asia, where the scale of developmental challenges that beset nations, is grossly mismatched by the knowledge and capacities that public institutions have to address those. While Governments take stock of this widening gap between expectations and their capacity to deliver, other developments in the field of social innovation, technology and media point to new ways in which these challenges may be overcome.
Ayush hosted a workshop at the Strategy Conference to examine some pertinent challenges of our times whether it pertains to health, environment, financial inclusion, energy or food security. Participants were asked to reflect on a diverse set of issues and challenges from their respective contexts. Through an exercise of design fiction (modeled on Stuart Candy's Reverse Archaeoology and Time Machine), and taking inspiration from the opening session of the conference on trends shaping our societies today, the group arrived at speculative futures that demonstrate how potential solutions reposition and reimagine the role of governments vis-a-vis the general public.