Bhaskarjyoti Das

Women are an enigma of creation. They combine the dichotomies of existence, with a desire to be liberated as well as a wish to be bound by the chains of love and admiration. Devi: A Journey through Photo-Poetry captures in words and images these dualities that exist within women whom we meet in our everyday lives. The set of forty-five poems and pictures are designed to map the internal landscape from their birth to the twilight years of their lives. This poetic journey is a tribute to the… Show more

Women are an enigma of creation. They combine the dichotomies of existence, with a desire to be liberated as well as a wish to be bound by the chains of love and admiration. Devi: A Journey through Photo-Poetry captures in words and images these dualities that exist within women whom we meet in our everyday lives. The set of forty-five poems and pictures are designed to map the internal landscape from their birth to the twilight years of their lives. This poetic journey is a tribute to the free-spirited dreamer that lives in every woman. From tea gardens to stuffy glass chambers of office cubicles, from dreams of fairy tale lives to domestic violence, from the vivacious professional to the intimate world of the homemaker, from the innocence of a new born to the manipulator and seductress, from the urbane soul to the village girl, these poems and images empathize with struggles, pain, highs and lows of time, and celebrate the joy of freedom as the greatest achievement in a woman's life. Show less

In current times, emerging world issues like climatic aberration, exponential increase in population, heavy product consumption, it’s post-usage waste generation and poor resource management have been gradually leading to chronic problems of sustainability, such that the vision of a plausible tomorrow questions the mere existence of humans and the symbiotic relationships it share with its surroundings. Shifting from the linear process of resource usage, consumption and disposal, circular… Show more

In current times, emerging world issues like climatic aberration, exponential increase in population, heavy product consumption, it’s post-usage waste generation and poor resource management have been gradually leading to chronic problems of sustainability, such that the vision of a plausible tomorrow questions the mere existence of humans and the symbiotic relationships it share with its surroundings. Shifting from the linear process of resource usage, consumption and disposal, circular economy believes in the core principle of re-circling material resource and preserve existing stock for a sustainable and resource abundant tomorrow. Enabling resource effective ecosystems today by ensuring collaborative usage, shift to renewable sources of energy and improved manufacturing processes and logistic cycles, Design-for-Circular-Economy (DfCE) is one of the first stepping stones towards creating future ecosystems of well-being living. As a part of an academic applied design research project, this paper explores design of a circular economic service-system to facilitate community based resilience and enable a well-being ecosystem among the annually flood prone communities of the Brahmaputra Valley in the state of Assam, India. Threatening a sustainable lifestyle and scope for socio-economic development, the villages in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, India, experience massive floods annually, leading to basic need deprivation, impoverishment, weakness and extreme social, physiological and cognitive vulnerability. Approaching through holistic design thinking and system oriented design intervention, this project attempts to collaboratively design a service system to facilitate an ecosystem of self-reliance, effective community interactions, resource effectiveness and participatory local innovations for flood-resilient village development. Show less

Considering the diversity and plurality of different stakeholders involved in the overall service ecosystem, there is a need for engaging in large-scale user research. It is critical that service design projects with a variety of stakeholders are geographically and culturally diverse. Service designers and researchers intend to engage in qualitative research to gain in-depth knowledge of user problems and contexts. However, qualitative research methods such as user interviews are often time and… Show more

Considering the diversity and plurality of different stakeholders involved in the overall service ecosystem, there is a need for engaging in large-scale user research. It is critical that service design projects with a variety of stakeholders are geographically and culturally diverse. Service designers and researchers intend to engage in qualitative research to gain in-depth knowledge of user problems and contexts. However, qualitative research methods such as user interviews are often time and resource intensive and cumulatively add to delay in completion of the service design lifecycle. To meet delivery deadlines, businesses often prefer to engage in quantitative methods for user research; thus, service designers and practitioners are often left with insufficient information from which to build insights. Various challenges such as biases and lack of domain knowledge and insight into on-ground state impact the construction of effective quantitative studies. In this paper, we explore approaches to make quantitative research more effective and efficient with the benefits of qualitative research, to strengthen large-scale user research capabilities in organizations. The dynamic user research approach discussed in this paper helps researchers sequentially mix qualitative and quantitative approaches to conduct the study by feeding findings into subsequent cycles. This approach intends to overcome the limitations of researchers to collect user data for large sample sizes. Show less

We explored an inside-out approach where we wanted the employees of IT organizations to understand, develop and experience the power of a service design-led innovation activity, understand the different complexities involved, and further become empowered to design service experiences for their customer organizations.

Services must scale up to meet the varying contexts and demands of diverse consumer groups, especially for global consumers, citizen services and organisational services. To enable services for scale, the activity of service design must scale up concerned processes, tools, techniques and people. Beyond traditional design approaches, rather than depending on a handful of designers and stakeholders, we can reap benefits of a more significant number of people and designers, across regions, and… Show more

Services must scale up to meet the varying contexts and demands of diverse consumer groups, especially for global consumers, citizen services and organisational services. To enable services for scale, the activity of service design must scale up concerned processes, tools, techniques and people. Beyond traditional design approaches, rather than depending on a handful of designers and stakeholders, we can reap benefits of a more significant number of people and designers, across regions, and considering a wide variety of issues, users and methods to inform the design of the services. In this paper, we deliberate on this conversation of scaling service design by primarily considering the phase of primary research, specifically qualitative user research. Although qualitative user research is accepted as an academic approach, it is often questioned on the grounds of validity and practicality of logistics. When considering service design for scale across very diverse user groups, data saturation may be challenging to achieve with a small number of samples. We argue that it is necessary to tackle more extensive qualitative studies if we want to scale up designing for services, with technology as an enabler. We highlight this need for conducting large-scale qualitative studies while covering theory and critique in literature and propose some of the approaches we have attempted in our service design practice. Show less

Organizations are transitioning from a product mindset to services as their primary customer offering. Service organizations today have complex processes spread across physical and digital spaces involving several stakeholders. IT organizations help these organizations by building products and services and providing advisory to achieve their strategic objectives. IT organizations are hence well-positioned to introduce this shift towards a service mindset and encourage the adoption of service… Show more

Organizations are transitioning from a product mindset to services as their primary customer offering. Service organizations today have complex processes spread across physical and digital spaces involving several stakeholders. IT organizations help these organizations by building products and services and providing advisory to achieve their strategic objectives. IT organizations are hence well-positioned to introduce this shift towards a service mindset and encourage the adoption of service design. IT organizations need to first decide whether they want to proliferate service design. However, there is a predicament about how to approach this - should they start by designing the services for their customers first, or focus on their own organizational internal services? Once they decide it then next dilemma is about whether to follow top-down or bottom-up approach.
We have utilized an ‘Inside-out’ approach for proliferating service design to address these dilemmas. The approach of ‘inside-out’, in essence, is about gradually proliferating a new process by experiencing its benefits within the organization first and then subsequently applying it to their customers outside the organization. In this paper we advocate the mix of top-down or bottom-up approach for the proliferation of service design. Show less

In this paper, we discuss three case studies of organizational services for employees—a referral program, onboarding of experienced professionals, and employee integration within a business unit. Through these, we highlight key challenges and opportunities for adopting service design in the organization, including collaboration and participation challenges, the need for building sensitivity and accessibility to service design, opportunities in the organizational settings that can be leveraged… Show more

In this paper, we discuss three case studies of organizational services for employees—a referral program, onboarding of experienced professionals, and employee integration within a business unit. Through these, we highlight key challenges and opportunities for adopting service design in the organization, including collaboration and participation challenges, the need for building sensitivity and accessibility to service design, opportunities in the organizational settings that can be leveraged, and other learnings. Show less