Our business models

We made four business models.

1) door-to-door service. She has a brochure of examples and then people can give orders. She can also enhance already existing products that people have.
* We have to figure out products and materials that can be used.

shirts - 3D paint.
i-pod covers - 3D paints or ceramics
borders.

2) Door-to-door service . She is selling her design which can be used on anything. The customer can ask for a design for their product which they can sell to them.

* borders for clothes
* another aspect can be that she can get the embroidery or work done for them.

3) She can make products and sell them door-to-door.

* like gift bags, mehandi design books, mehandi designs, cards, slippers, envelopes, books, boxes, photo frames, name plates, etc..

4) She can sell her products to shops.

5) She can work for bakeries in her spare time and decorate the cake with her designs.

Change.

Since mine and shubhangi's briefs were similar we decided to work together.
Now we are working to enhance the livelihood of a mehandi artist by using her skill on other objects and products or creating some of her own or customizing other people's objects on order.

IDENTIFY USERS : The Users can be teenagers, college students, Women in their 30's or 40's , artists like musicians , school students.

IDENTIFY RESOURCES :
artisans', painters, art material, time, money, the communication network, the internet and more when the brief gets more specific.

DEFINE CONTEXT : Customization of products.

NARROW DOWN SCOPE : the products that can be used are music instruments, books, covers for gadgets, gadgets themselves, bags, boxes, clothes, accessories, personal items, stationary, etc...

CREATE A SCENARIO AND A PERSONA BASED ON YOUR PREMISE :
1) " I am sick of my converse shoes, I wish I could get something done on them ."

The Brief : Stage two

The Brief : Create a service in which customers give orders for customized enhancements of products they want to get enhanced.

Specifications :

1) Recycling should be incorporated.
2) Utilization of artisans' skills.
3) Enhancements should be thought of in all possible ways and not only in terms of aesthetics.
4) The products that can be enhanced should not be limited.
5) The handicraft should be kept alive and given a more contemporary context.

Brief : Stage one.

My chain of thought :

1) To add value to the products made by the Lambani women by adding broken bangles in their work and ghungross as well.

2) Make more products like wooden boxes or mirrors and embellish already existing products by mirror work.

3) Taking orders from people to embellish their products. "pimping" their things which aren't being used anymore so that they can be used again.

THE BRIEF
Create a service in which the customers give orders for customized embellishments of products that they want enhanced.

the practise brief

I chose the new sim card connection called Docomo as my service.

BACKGROUND
All the Indian mobile phone users have many issues with the services but one in particular is that of the billing system. The user is charged per minute so even if you have only spoken for one 1:00 minutes you will be charged for 2 minutes and this is particularly inconvenient when one calls ISD or STD numbers.

OBJECTIVE
To design a new sim card service which has a different billing system and is more user friendly than all the other already existing services, which would also revolutionize the existing system of cell phone connections.

THE DESIGN
Docomo charges money per second which is what defines Docomo. It shows value for money and a new system which addresses the needs of the user better.

CONSTRAINTS
Even though they charge per second, other companies have offers that actually reduce the call rates of users which would make these companies a threat.


SWOT ANALYSIS
Strength : The billing system.
Weakness : The billing system
Oppurtunities : This brief would put the company in the limelight which would give it a higher ground pretty soon without much of struggle.
Threat : This brief would be a threat to the already existing system of billing that has been established in the Indian community.

The fiction film

TOO MANY IDEAS

Our assignment for the fiction film was to do with creating a story or a sequence of events around any element inspired by our experience with the Lambani people.

We had various ideas - but most of our inspiration seemed to come from the Lambani women's elaborate costumes - since we had mostly involved ourselves with that aspect of their lives while shooting our documentary. These ideas ranged from a young girl taking off her costumes ritualistically to two people parallelly dressing up and waiting for someone - or going to meet someone.

Our other ideas included following the different age-groups - and generations - of Lambani women, and follow how their jewellery changes (and hence symbolize growing up and change in roles).

NARROWING DOWN

We were finally inspired by the history of the Lambani people - how they lead nomadic lifestyles and then changed their old traditions to settle down to a new life.

This lead to an abstract idea of "coming home", which we decided to represent through walking.

STORYBOARD

We formed a storyboard which consisted of following a bare pair of feet which walks through various different kinds of terrain: rocks, grass, mud, shore, etc., gather mud and grime on the feet - "signs" of their travel as well as "signs" of their traditions - and then finally come to a shore - come "home" - where the mud is ritualistically washed off the feet - symbolizing a change in lifestyle and tradition.

LOCATION

We needed a location where we could find different kinds of terrain to show travel - and there was such a place - by a reservoir halfway on the way to Sandur from Bellary. It had big rocks, grass, plants, pebbled shore and red waves of the reservoir.

ADDING AN ELEMENT

We wanted to include only one element to remind ourselves of the inspiration for our film - this was the one single silver anklet. The rest we wanted to not be bound to any particular culture, rather have elements from various, as the film was intended to be about coming home - not about the Lambani tribe - or any other context.

EDITING

We finished our editing in the evening after returning from our shooting. We added a quote to explain the movie right at the beginning to give the viewers a clue as to what it was about - as it was an abstract film and purposefully open to interpretation.

Documentary : The Lambani women.

NARROWING DOWN

After the first days' experience talking to the Lambani people and visiting their homes in the small village of Sushilanagar, we came up with various ways of approaching the documentary.

We could focus on a lot of things - their history, their culture, their work.

We decided to make our film about how the women of the tribe still wear their traditional heavily embroidered costumes and heavy silver jewellery everyday in a ritualistic way, because it was a custom that fascinated us.

RESEARCH

We understood how dressing up in their traditional wear would have a tourism value in the Centre where tourists might collect to see the Lambanis work. However, these women, especially the older ones, accustomed to "wear their wealth", ritualistically dress up for every day as they have been used to doing all their lives.

We found out that the Lambani style of embroidery was used to decorate a girl's dowry wear - and that the Lambani women are used to "wearing their wealth". And although their embroidery is now a livelihood and is used on various kinds of products from clothes to laptop cases and mobile phone holders, many of these women still continue their ritualistic dressing up every day.

LOCATION AND FOOTAGE

We went to the village of Sushilanagar to shoot our documentary - where we would find the older generation (all of whom practise this ritual and some of whom would have time to help us with our film).

And we shot our footage with some of these old ladies on the doorsteps of their houses, many stills and a few panoramic videos of the village and countryside. We were very interested in the way they tied their hair with silver ornaments and then braided it, looping it back over the shoulder.

A BIT OF PRE-PLANNING

Some photographs we had shot in the Centre on the 25th were of paintings on the red outer wall of the centre, painted by a local artist. These traditional paintings showed the Lambani dress and jewellery to perfection and we were reminded of the same while we were taking our videos and photographs and took parallel ones at the Centre and at the village to use as an introduction.

I was invited by these ladies to wear their costumes for a photoshoot and we had a good time while the Lambani women lovingly took off their own jewellery and brought out spare costumes to dress in and then posed with me for us. They were so welcoming and helpful that we were made to feel very much at home.

EDITING

We completed our editing and final post-production work on our short documentary that night when we returned from shooting. We worked on Movie Maker because we felt that the footage we had did not require too much of post-production work because we had shot it keeping in mind exactly how we wanted the sequences and the introduction and conclusion.

Research tools : Channapatna

A big number of us worked together in a group and came up with a lot of different tools each of which would extract different kind of information. We went to the village of Neelsandra in Channapatna where wooden beads are made for toys.
The tool that I created was Font based. I took the letter 'ka' and wrote it in five different fonts and asked the people to choose one out of the 5 fonts. I hoped to get an idea of the mindset of the society, to see how much they're progressing by seeing the choices they make. Whether they stick to the traditional way of writing it or go for something different.
The first person I asked turned out to speak english and hindi so he helped me to ask other people and slowly everybody got the hang of what was going on so the language wasn't an issue.

Narayanpura : baseline survey.

We conducted the baseline survey in the little village of Battahalasur Narayanpura in the Bangalore District. The village is mainly a potters' village.

I interviewed two families that were both kannada speaking and in which the man of the house was the sole earner and worker of the house. The wives were literate but did not work towards the earning of the house. They did work like firing of the clay pots and adding enhancements on pots. I used the help of Mr. Ramkrishnappa's son, our pottery teacher, to get the forms filled and he was of great help and if h did not understand what I was saying I would just hand him the kannada form and then he would understand and get my questions answered.
These forms were designed by the goverment specifically to study handicraft centres and asked questions like economic status, loans, sources of income, education, assets, living conditions, craft related information, family related information and demographic information as well.
The form had a lot of questions about agricultural activities which were left blank in my form as the families did nothing related to agriculture or cattle rearing. Their only source of income was the pottery.
The forms made the conversation formal but it was easier to ask these questions by reading them out of a form.