in New York world leaders came together
to adopt 17 different sustainable
development goals that would transform a
world for better the idea was to plan
economic growth more strategically so
that we can include social needs like
health education social protection and
job opportunities these ambitious goals
made me think how we as designers and
engineers can help achieve these aims by
innovating with social conscience my
journey in developing products with
social good started back in India when
my cousin’s daughter was kept in an
incubator when she was born this was
crucial for her survival and we were
lucky enough to be in a developed region
of the country which had these
facilities this started making me think
what would have happen if she was born
in a village a real rural place in India
or a country in Africa what were her
chances of surviving there I started
reading doing my research and I read in
Millennium Development Goal number 4 it
says that 3 million children die every
year just in the first week of their
life and according to World Health
Organization 19 9 % I repeat 99% of the
newborn deaths happen in middle and
lower-income countries Millennium
Development Goal 4 also mentions that
most of these deaths can be saved by
low-tech low-cost care so someone with a
simple idea can make a huge difference
so where do we start well being a good
observer and be able to spot problems
around you is the first step of being a
designer it can be as simple as looking
at a proverb a person struggling to do
his day to day life activity the second
step is ground research leaving no stone
unturned
so that we have a true understanding of
who our user is so we did a feel
research in 15 different villages and
six different cities and we found out
that India’s health care system can deal
with standard birds but it lacks crucial
infrastructure of neonatal care for
premature and underweight kids there
were two major reasons for that one was
huge cost associated with setting of
these infrastructure at every Health
Care Center and second was inconsistency
in electricity to run these equipments
through these findings we came up with
life cradle a low-cost cardboard baby
incubator for developing undeveloped
countries and helps child survive
through its first few critical days of
its life like warmth clean environment
and monitoring when we designed with
social conscience we have to understand
that user plays a very important role
right across the chain so we met each
and every stakeholder mothers parents
doctors and nurses and the other health
care workers in the public health care
system in India to find out what happens
if the child needed intensive care rural
India does not have any neonatal care
facilities so the child is transported
it’s referred to a city or a district
level maternity ward and it was
saddening to visit these words because
when we visit that there we saw mother
and child literally sitting on the floor
waiting for the turn for the doctor to
see them because they were not enough
beds available when you go through such
experiences you understand how important
it is to understand the need what people
need and it also gives you third and the
most important element for social design
thinking empathy being empathetic makes
you understand the problems people face
in real world
we can observe them and most importantly
we engage with them putting ourselves
into their shoes so from there the ideas
flow the idea of life cradle was
inspired from Finnish baby boxes in
Finland path has since passed
Atos government have been providing
cardboard baby boxes as a starter
circuit to each family who has a newborn
the base of life cradle was designed
will was made up of cardboard which goes
with the child to the house for post
neonatal care this was a value addition
to the family because most of these
places did not even have adequate living
conditions and when we talk to the users
what would they do with the cardboard
waste once the incubation period is over
we found amazing responses about how it
can help the child just by acting as a
makeshift cot for next 6 to 8 weeks
8 months it was just a piece of
cardboard so another incident we faced
was when a child was brought to an
Hospital and was declared dead on upon
arrival just because of some simple
error emits all the chaos investigation
found that the nurse had forgot to
switch on the breathing support because
the machine didn’t have any feedback
system of telling it was on or off she
thought it was on I would not blame it
on human error but I would put it on
equipment fault because one small LED
that would have said if the machine was
on or off that an existing manufacturer
could have included in the design if
they would have gone through a proper
user journey could have helped save that
child’s life so every small detail
matters and when we see the stresses
around the world these detail matter now
more than ever especially when we have
to put people and their needs before
profit
my design education was focused on
putting people right at the center of
product development process for social
innovation thinking about how design can
help change the life of a single
individual and keep a leave a lasting
impact socially economically and
environmentally on a broader scale in
past decade have seen the field of
industrial design embracing social and
ethical issues and how design can serve
the planet in fact even mainstream
design education has also changed his
focus from product centric development
to human centric development of
innovation and what excites me is the
companies from emerging countries using
their own different approaches to
research and development that are
leaving tremendous amount of impact
quite a lot of it comes from India where
we call it jugaad innovation jacquard is
a Hindi word that translates into
ingenious improvisation it does not take
more than human ingenuity to put it into
practice the principle on which jacquard
works is basically when a person or a
community comes up with a feasible
solution for the day-to-day life
problems using the resources that are
available at that point and if the
solution works it Mitch it develops into
a mature product over a period of time
through involvement of local community
and sometimes even local NGOs and
universities help scale these products
to show their true potential to the
global community so the frugal way of
approaching a problem and giving a
simple fix to a simple or a complicated
problem is helping countries where
resources and know-how to do these
things in a usual way is not generally
available and the approach is quite cost
effective and resourceful because an
opposed to individual companies putting
it you are putting in huge amount of
profits and capital into developing a
product outside the community
so good the example of jihad was a
project started by an Indian farmer who
made a manual rice transplant Oh in his
workshop just because he could not
afford an automatic one available in the
market his solution was accepted by the
local community and villages around him
just because it was affordable
it was replicable and most importantly
it worked there are jagged ideas
everywhere across developing world the
ideas that started modestly driven with
social intention have ended up giving
basic services as basic as heat
electricity and Internet at grassroots
and it is these ingenious works that’s
inspiring small companies and startups
to come up with solutions for these
community co-creating with the community
jacquard ideas are disruptive they are
fast they are resourceful and
cost-effective and helping countries
developing countries like India to
become one of the world’s fastest
growing economies for me as a product
designer it inspires me to come up with
solutions for people who are concerned
with humanity and planet it’s a
different type of thinking it’s a
non-conventional way of thinking and
these kind of different approaches are
global firm IDEO recently told Fast
Company that future of design is
circular IDEO and other influencers are
challenging the design community to come
up with product and services that that
stays in a closed loop in other words
encouraging business models which are
thinking about waste and recycling right
at the beginning of a product
development process and looking at
service based solutions rather than
ownership based model for driving so for
driving circular economies it is causing
designers as well as consumers hopefully
all of us over your to think about a
bigger picture that encompasses
what happens to a product when it
reaches its natural life and a end of
natural life where does this material go
how can they be recycled how can they be
repurposed for a different use and if we
think in this way designers are stewards
of this planet so we better not mess it
up so the future of design can take
different directions in fact we had
amazing talks today about how latest
technologies are helping us to solve our
problems of day-to-day life so the idea
of Internet of Things is taking hold and
the likelihood that all our equipments
will be connected to a network
collecting data analyzing how we use
them and improving them set a stage for
machine learning and artificial
intelligence to be much more prominent
field in the future which many of us
fear that will take away our jobs
will this affect us as designers being a
designer we need skillsets like empathy
creativity problem-solving and most
importantly being able to identify
people’s need at a fundamental level
villain Am machine will be able to
overtake us in providing a deeper
empathetic value is a very difficult
question to answer right now but humans
and machines will work more together
where machines will in fact are taking
over a repetitive task today and
improving them and us as designers will
be curating the whole process in fact
all of us over your have power to become
designers in their own field the truth
is that all of us have those
capabilities we just have to dare to do
it so for now I’m very optimistic about
the future coming from new crop of
designers from different social
backgrounds from different countries I
think we are connected enough through
common social goals that we will design
to change the world we live in
the organizational structure and support
is your through to help us bring these
social enterprise into being for people
who need it the most we are the
generation that grew up multitasking in
every stage of our lives so let’s not
stop there
let’s keep designing the future we want
to live in thank you so much [Applause]