34 Ways to Save Lives in Rural India seeks to address this amongst exploring more design opportunities, to introduce new technologies and service mechanisms for improving maternal and child health services.The book presents the outcomes of a rural healthcare innovation project, Innovation for Improved Maternal and Child Healthcare (IIMCH). IIMCH focused on developing and detailing out potential design solutions to address key challenges identified through its antecedent, the Vaccine Delivery Innovation Initiative (VDII).

Download the book here

Over the last 7 years, Colour Next has evolved into a journey across India that studies the present scenario and forecasts India’s décor direction.

It engages with design professionals who work extensively with colour, interacts with experts and thought leaders to animate mere pigments into strong personalities that are representative of each Indian.

Download the report here

The purpose of the project was to apply the methodology of ethnographic research to better understand barriers to routine immunization from the unique perspective of users- namely, frontline health workers and recipient families and identify innovative solutions that account for user-preferences and helps them overcome everyday challenges to increase immunization coverage.

Download the report here

Read the full article at http://bit.ly/dPH1v9 on page 13

Also see http://designpublic.in and http://designpublic.in/blog for latest news and updates

We’ve just posted our Design Public book (pdf) online.

Inside, you can find a detailed introduction to the design innovation ideas that we’ll be exploring at our Design Public Conclave, as well as the complete Design Public bibliography, our glossary of design terms, case studies of design innovation being applied to government and bios for the guests that will be attending the conference.

A few days ago, I was gifted a black jacket. I put on and found that it looked quietly chic, the black folds of its space-age fabric coming together in clean contemporary lines. But it was on the inside that this thing turned out to be different from anything I’d ever worn before. The interior of each jacket panel revealed an extraordinary array of interconnected pockets, all designed to accommodate particular kinds of technology, tools, documentation, coins, keys, glasses, maybe a bottle of Gatorade everything you’ve ever interacted with or might want, some day, to carry around.

While on the outside it speaks the language of fashion, perhaps even expressing the craftsman ethic of tailoring, on this inside the jacket bears the impress of a circuit-board, seeking to accommodate different kinds of functional elements in an optimal configuration, all within a limited surface area. This is neither hyperbole nor metaphor, for the jacket claims to offer a Personal Area Network (‘PAN’), which allows you to wire your earbuds through your collar into either breast pocket, where it can connect with your mobile phone, your MP3 player — or both, one for either side

There’s another vertical slide for your sunglasses, which reveals a small clamp on an elastic tug with a little chamois cloth between its jaws, the better for keeping your visors clean. In your right pocket there’s a little key-chain loop attached to a wirecoil, so your keys can jangle within your jacket without being in danger of falling out. And then there are little elastic bands to ensure that your water bottle holds straight, and that your travel documents will fit and then easily be found. The apparatus — I’m not sure I’m doing it any justice by calling it a jacket — is called a ScotteVest (www.scottevest.com), and regardless of how it looks from the outside, it’s basically a form of outer-garment inspired by and designed for your iPhone and iPad, both of which it can easily accommodate within several of its twenty-two pockets.

I played around with the insides of this thing a bit and figured out that you could zip the sleeves off, transforming it into a vest. I could immediately imagine the scenarios, spending a day maybe fishing in the backwaters of Kerala in my vest, then docking and zipping on my sleeves before motorcycling down a narrow hilly road to a beachfront restaurant. There is tremendous pleasure in the fantasies that this jacket offers, for this is a jacket designed for travel, for being outside and abroad, for passing through metal detectors and for passing through X-ray machines. But also for packing light, speaking several different languages at once, continuously enabling the user to do and be more, even while this piece of fashion-technology murmurs quietly in the background. With all these interfaces out into the world, your jacket is more a chasis for your subjectivity and less a statement of style. It makes your body one with all its luggage, its technological extensions, your cameras, your battery packs, your moneybelt, your key chain, your electronic ID and smartcard. It is a technological sheath for the body. It is a superskin which can transform your identity and extend your secret powers.

I think the geeky appeal of this thing was sealed when Barack Obama chose to wear a ScotteVest when he visited the China a couple of years ago, to have his photograph taken at the Great Wall. I think theScotteVest tells us something about the kind of world we live in and the kinds of lives we are all increasingly living –volatile, frenzied, intensely mediated, augmented and seeking protection from the outside world in so many ways. This techno-jacket is a repository of electronic and material resources that can keep you safe as you traverse an uncertain world.

Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in). He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.

Design Public is a conversation about whether and how to bring design thinking to bear upon the challenges of government so as to promote governance innovation.

The problem of governance is perhaps as old as society, as old as the rule of law. But it is only more recently — perhaps the last five hundred years of modernity — that human societies have been able to conceive of different models of government, different modalities of public administration, all having different effects on the configuration of society. The problem of governments, of governmentality, and of governance is always also the problem of how to change the very processes and procedures of government, so as to enhance the ends of the state and to promote the collective good.

Read more http://designpublic.in/blog/

Date and Venue
The date for the event has been decided for Friday, 18th of March, 2011. It will be held at the TajVivanta in Central Delhi.