Doors of Perception East : history

In The Bubble by John Thackara March 2000 The phrase "in the bubble" is used by air-traffic controllers to describe their state-of-mind when sitting in the control tower exposed to multiple and constantly changing streams of information
In the (India) bubble The purpose of our memorable week in Ahmedabad (see News India) was to accelerate the exchange of people, knowledge and experiences among Indian and European designers and internet entrepreneurs. We wanted to know: what can western interaction designers learn from Indian design and internet culture? and, what are the prospects for future joint work between the two communities?
	The answers are: a lot, and fantastic. We returned exhilirated, and determined to set up a DoorsEast organisation to build on these first steps. More on that below. >Our India connections can be traced to Doors of Perception conferences between 1993-1998 which featured a variety of Indian speakers such as Kapila Vatsayan (director of the Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts), Ranjit Makkuni (Xerox PARC), Sam Pitroda (WorldTel) and Jogi Panghaal. They exposed the Doors audience to very different perspectives on communications and possible uses of the internet. The idea for a Doors event in India dates back two years when Jogi Panghaal, our man in India, introduced me to a PhD anthropology student in New Delhi. She had just spent five years studying travelling storytellers in Gujarat and Rajastan.These storytellers combine the use of words, mime, and pictures (on sticks) in their performances in rural villages, many of whose inhabitants are illiterate. No performance is ever the same, and the content and interaction levels are very high. "With knowledge like that", I said, "you could get a job in Microsoft tomorrow". "What is Microsoft?" came her reply!
It was at that moment that I understood how rich the un-tapped (by us) knowledge must be in a country with a 4,000 year-old culture, 30 official languages, 1,800 dialects, 700,000 villages, and one billion people. Seventy per cent of the population is engaged in basic agriculture - but India is also one of the world’s most advanced industrial economies: she has the third largest technical force of engineers and scientists in the world after the United States and Russia. India’s cultural complexity is surely invaluable in a knowledge-based economy - even if we do not now yet how to exploit it yet.
Connectivity in India This was the context for our conference in Ahmedabad on design strategies for the internet. Now it is true that India’s internet infrastructure remains badly under-developed: once on this trip it it took me thirty minutes to access Hotmail. But India’s dire internet connectivity may not last very long. A few years ago similar horror stories would be told about the difficulty of making phonecalls in India. But access to telephones has been transformed within the last five years by the Public Call Office (PCO) revolution. This new business model (designed by Sam Pitroda of WorldTel, a speaker at Doors 4 on ‘speed’) gave small shopkeepers throughout India a financial incentive to provide a phone service to customers and passers by. Tens of millions of citizens who could not otherwise have afforded afford a private connection now use the phone frequently at a PCO.
The owner of an Omelette Shop on the main street of Bhuj in Gujarat told me how the business model works for him. He paid 16,000 rupees ($400) for a PCO terminal and 4,000 rupees ($100) to have a line installed. He turns over 900 rupees ($22) of which he keeps 15% ($3.50). On that basis, his PCO operation became profitable for him after 148 days. He found this a pretty good deal, and hopes that a similar business model will enable him to offer internet access in the near future consortium that includes Sam Pitroda’s WorldTel.
While we were there, the Indian government de-regulated the provision of internet connectivity,so bottlenecks of too-small internet gateways to India should soon disappear. In other words, the conditions seem ripe for a rapid connection of significant swathes of urban and rural India to the Internet.
The question we went to India to disscuss was: what happens then? Incense_stick_rollers.com While staying in Ahmedabad we visited three organisations that have the potential to exploit network communications in unexpected ways. One of these organisations, the Self Employed Womens Association (SEWA) , helps improve the economic and social position of women workers in a bewildering array of trades: garment makers, handcart pullers, junksmiths, cottonpod shellers, waste pickers, bidi workers, incense stick rollers, head loaders, and many more. Many of these women earn very modest amounts of money a month - many less than $50, some less than $10 - while still being their family’s main breadwinner if the man’s rural work is seasonal. Sewa’s mission is to help these women hold on to more of the value they create than happens now; enhanced and more direct communications between the women, and the end users of their products or services, is one of Sewa’s key objectives. During our meeting we therefore discussed some of the online tools we knew about that might be useful in this : auctions, Local Economy Trading Schemes (Lets), various forms of job and expertise sites, recommender systems, and so on. Sewa has already started using the internet to connect makers and consumers, and has been offered satellite channels to boost connectivity with rural members; they were very intrigued by the potential to adapt online software tools in a way that would change business relationships and models. The second organisation we visted, Amul, is the national milk distribution cooperative. Amul has developed world-class expertise in the physical distribution of short-life produce. Already advanced in physical logistics, Amul now wants to explore ways to use the internet to enhance this system. The potential range of new services is immense. Eighty million women in India own or look after one or two cows, and often have surplus milk. 90% of India’s milk is never pasteurised and therefore cannot be re-sold - but Amul now reaches about 10% of India’s 700,000 villages, providing it with a rich base of expertise from which to expand - using the internet to expand the milk grid and other distribution systems for foodstuffs and other rural products. And not just materially: Amul’s distribution networks are already used to support health workers and educators working at a local level. Better communications, riding on and with the physical distribution of milk in lorries and trains - can greatly intensify the distribution of knowledge, too.
	Speeding up the distribution and sharing of local knowledge was also the subject of an impressive project at our third stop, the Indian Institute of Management. A research group led by Professor Anil Gupta is re-versioning knowledge management techniques developed for multinational companies for use among farmers and artisans.The objective of their ‘Honeybee Network’ is to capture and share the tacit expertise of farmers, artisans and other pastoral workers.
Virtual cities Taking this kind of network thinking several steps further, P V Indiresan, a noted scientist and innovator of new concepts for rural development, has proposed the idea of so-called ‘virtual cities’ among clusters of India’s 700,000 rural villages.During our trip he proposed as much to the Chief Minister Andra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu, a fast-rising politician who wants to turn Hyderabad into the ‘cyberabad’ of India.Indiresan proposed the establishment of Special Rural development Zones (SRDZs). each zone comprising several villages in a loop, connected by a 60-80kn long circular road and state-of-the art communications (via landlines or wireless). Such a loop becomes a ‘virtual city’. A central market miught be located in one village, a hospital in another, an industry in a third, and so on - to form a circularly distributed economic web combining real and virtual elements. Next steps - DoorsEast Within a single week we discussed scenarios for using all manner of internet tools in different Indian contexts: producer and consumer cooperatives; smart distribution systems; horizontal markets; vertical nets ; enhanced information flows; auctions; reccer systems; desert-based WAP applications; cows with unique IP addresses. Name any internet fad: someone in Gujarat discussed it during our visits. These were not sentimental or fanciful discussions: questions of access, and cost, cropped up repeatedly - but most of our Indian hosts beleived technical solutions were feasible. Barriers were likely to be institutional, not technical. they said. And the best way to break down institutional barriers, we all agreed, was by showing policy makers and bureaucrats working prototypes or persuasive simulations of the services we had in mind.
	This is what we want to do with DoorsEast. For some time until our three weeks in Gujarat last month, we have been discussing with colleagues in India a project to accelerate this kind of exchange of people, knowledge and experiences .Our workshop at NID follows a series of successful joint ventures over recent years between designers in the West and India. Interest on our side is growing amazingly: in January alone, 52 design students from the Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam spent a month in a cluster of rural villages. The time to professionalise and speed-up these exchanges is clearly now.
Our idea for DoorsEast is that it would be a small organisation (in a nice building) that would act interstitially with public and private sector organisations. It would support design schools and universities sending groups to and from India; be a portal for design firms wishing to make alliances, or recruit staff; support collaborative research and design projects; and faciliate researchers in the documentation of resources, tools, methods. DoorsEast would work with other organisations busy with related topics, such as Fair Trade and Design Sans Frontieres.
	Possible Indian partners include The National Institute of Design, our partner in last month’s Doors workshop. NID is the main design school in India; its 250 or so undergraduate and graduate students come from all over the country, are generally very bright, and usually end up in influential positions. NID is also conected to design centres at the celebrated Institutes of Technology in Bombay, Delhi and Guwahati. Other organisations that we expect to connect with include the Fashion Institutes of Technology (NIFT); the Institute of Craft in Jaipur; the Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA)in Delhi.
But we are not intent on creating a large institution, or on travelling aimlessly around issues of design and development. Our focus will be on design scenarios for the internet. The core activity of DoorsEast would be to organise a conference every two years - starting with Doors 7 in 2001. 3 March 2000.