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GSJ: The bangalore madness

We hosted the Global Service Jam: Bangalore Chapter a couple of months back and we all really had a blast. I think I have worked before in a lot of things, but this one experience for me also has been something that has transformed me. I may never be able to see the design in the way I used to before this particular event.

And I am sure, I am not the only one who felt the transformation.

Some participants felt a critical change in the way the approached life and their daily work. One particular jammer, felt empowered towards her life. For her, the whole experience led her to see that she often would not use her weekends to something productive while on this particular weekend, she worked with a diverse group of people and ended a creating a service ( though still hypothetical)

For a some jammers, it was a kick to see that their ideas which they had developed looking at needs and problems they identified were actually in the market. The feeling that if they could possible create ideas then somewhere they felt they could actually start into becoming an entrepreneur sometime.

You should really check out this blog, written by one of our jammers. Really well written. Click here to see

But for whatever said and done, while we loved doing this. These feedbacks were something that we really relished. It added for us the meaning that we were driven with when we started off with this idea from our small tiny dungeon-like rooms.

What drove us?
For a large part of my motivation towards design and design centric methodologies, had been inspired or at least first triggered when I first encountered one of the case studies by Design Council UK, some years before. I was then only in college doing my internship with a well known design firm in Bangalore, Idiom.

These case studies were very interesting for me cause I had never read anything like that before. I am a avid reader and follow a good amount of design blogs and design journals, in all of my college life I have been inspired to think more creatively. But here I saw design for the first time, not doing its usually business. By its usual business, I mean beautification, to put it more crudely. I saw design take a more broader picture and coming out as a mean to looking at a problem first, more laterally ( meaning before looking at problem and jumping into directly putting a 'template-ized' design solution to it, but actually trying to sort of reframe the whole problem itself) and second, trying to encompass more than just design solution to solve the problems.


In the second lies the whole seed to the problem of design thinking or the confusion of it, but that I might explain sometime later.

So, coming back to the point. When years later, we all bumped into the whole event, we realized that design in India is sort of going in a more 'template-ized' manner and somewhere all the talk on design thinking has only ended in people thinking of themselves as design thinkers, but no one is really creating a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving. And this was out shout into the world ( and in India ) that we are here, thinking and wanting to do something like this.

And I think we made point. By the time we started publicity of the event, through and through four more people in four cities propped up. A couple of months later, some design groups were formed in Bangalore which started seeing the value in 'Doing, not Talking'.

(Added in June 2012)
And some jammers, have already plotted to start the Global Sustainability Jam in India

Well, there is more thoughts to this that still comes across, but I will soon write in the next blog. For now, just browse through our initial presentation that we made while we roamed around looking for sponsors.


View more presentations from Francis Xavier

One more thing...


Now that I have personally tasted the power of design thinking at large and the feeling that something like a GSJ can actually transform if not the society, but some people and inspire them to do something radicle. I am game for something more like this. There is already something that we are cooking up in our small abode for the NEXT design centric epidemic.

Cheers

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