One of the two electronic billboards used in the project. Image: Duarte Carrilho da Graça

Context:
Type ‘London’ ‘Social’ ‘Policy’ into a news search these days and you are likely to find articles on the rising cost of living, increasing multimillion-pound apartments continuing to sell to the mega-rich, and the bedroom tax which has increased taxation of some of the poorest of London’s residents. It is not uncommon to read headlines such as “ The reconfiguration of London is akin to social cleansing”. At the same time people continue to relocate to the city, more infact than those leaving. London is Changing is one project which explores the role design can play in understanding this context.

The project brought together two aspects of Rebecca Ross’ practice; firstly an opportunity she was afforded to access 2 digital billboards in central London, compensation for work Rebecca completed for the billboard company. And secondly her separate involvement in public consultation on urban planning in London, a process she reflected was frustratingly “un-public facing”. She explains, “…I was pursuing the possibilities of this medium at the same time that I was exploring existing forms of public conversation about the future London and then two and two came together.”

One of the two electronic billboards used in the project. Image: Duarte Carrilho da Graça

The intention of the project was to use design to engage with the public on changes that were taking place in London, and in the rhetoric that surrounds these changes. Rebecca explains:

Recent changes to the welfare state here are (deliberately) pouring fuel on the fire of a class war. Unjust policies are being authored and implemented by a wealthy elite conservative government. These policies have a more severe impact on the poorest members of society… but they also impact the middle class… It gets especially divisive when bones are tossed to those of us who are more middle class, such as through policies such as help to buy… to keep the chattering class as allies and from being too outspoken. It is difficult for most people to see the aggregate picture of what is going on. Our fates are all connected though and this is all too often under-emphasised or even hidden. I am not an expert on economics or policy but what I pay close attention to is how easy it is in the contemporary climate for policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many to be either packaged as something else or buried in over-complicated rhetoric. I think design has a large part to play in engaging with this condition.

Main page londonischanging.org

Process:
The project consisted of a web platform through which contributors who were either relocating from, or to London, wrote why they moved and how they felt about it. Messages were then selected by the team whose aim was to gather a range of opinions. In late February and March of 2015 two electronic billboards in Central London began featuring the selected quotes.

Web form: londonischanging.org

The billboards and the web platform were paired down and functional to the point where there was little else but the voice of the writer. This aesthetic meant that each voice was presented equally, as opposed to the ‘loudest’ being heard. The billboards we electronic, meaning they scrolled through multiple messages in space of a minute and could be changed from one day to the next. As different opinions went up they appeared to answer on another — a public dialogue of sorts.

The medium:
The billboard medium is not neutral. It is at the same time ‘public’ — its success depending largely on its visibility in the public domain — and yet monopolised by, and largely synonymous with, commercial interests. Their monumental presence on public space is unmatched by posters or traditional print media communication and these new electronic billboards are more dynamic than ever before, scrolling through multiple messages over time. In the case of London is Changing this meant the texts were seen for about 15 seconds of every minute, placed between conventional advertising campaigns from corporations like Cadbury’s and Facebook. The minimalism of the LIC billboards cut through the slick noise of the conventional corporate advertising, meaning that as well as the being part of the project dialogue they might also viewed in the context of public advertising itself. Imagine, for example, a text like, “What creativity can there be when only money can buy your next opportunity?” followed by a Britain is Good for Business campaign.

One of the two electronic billboards used in the project. Image: Duarte Carrilho da Graça

Participation:
5000 people contributed towards LIC, the greatest number of which were people leaving the city, feeling ‘priced out’ and unable to live with increasing living costs. However, as Rebecca has pointed out, London’s population is actually increasing, not decreasing. One aspect of this is the way in which the project relied on local networks to gather contributors. People leaving a city are more likely to be accessing these networks than new movers or lower paid economic migrants. Reflecting on the context of the projects and the role design plays in engaging with this complexity, Rebecca suggested that another time she would reconsider the medium, for example by ‘situating something in bus shelters next as this could be more heterogeneously accessible in a city such as London.’

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Neither complexity nor over simplification alone moves people towards informed understanding multifaceted issues. What design can do is to engage us and show us a way in, helping us to navigate through an issue, presented from different angles, in order to form become more informed. London is Changing stands as an example of how design can engage with and begin to communicate the conflicts and contradictions that form a fuller picture of what is going on.

The World Comics Network (India), started by political cartoonist Sharad Sharma in mid nineties, looks at introducing Grassroots Comics as a tool for communication and social design. Working with different communities, they emphasise on the value of visual art, self-expression and awareness in creating social change. Through their practice they have truly embraced the idea of design for the people and by the people, acting as a catalyst for change in the social sector.

Grassroots Comics as a medium stands out distinctly from mainstream comics since it is not created by professional artists. As the World Comics Network(WCN) puts it,
‘these comics are created by ‘You and Me’, common masses themselves. Comics have given a new direction to representation of silences thereby creating a revolution in itself. These comics are easy to-make, reproduced by simple photocopier and distributed in a limited demarcated area, which invites local debates among people from different socio-economic stratum of the society.’

WCN answers some of the most frequently asked questions in a comic format.

How Grassroots Comics operate
Primarily through the medium of a workshop which travels to several rural and remote areas in India and other countries, the workshop leaders gather community members to visualise topics of importance to them. With the help of a manual, which teaches them basics of expressions and postures, the participants then start storyboarding and visually representing their stories, in a simple four panelled A4 comic poster format. It is then inked in black, and photocopied to make several wall posters which are pasted at prime locations within the community like the village panchayats, shops, electric poles etc.

WCN has discovered the potential in the visual storytelling form of comics to connect with people of varying levels of literacy and in the process targeting a much larger audience. It is also this visual and easy to comprehend nature of comics which they have tapped into to build it as a medium to address issues that otherwise become sensitive topics and are not discussed out in the open.
Like in the case of the comic below which questions the veiling tradition in Rajasthan but in a simple, light hearted way, by basing the comic on a humorous yet practical problem.

“Veil System”, a lady is unable to inform her father-in-law about the theft of their luggage because of the veil system. Both regret the incident and the old tradition of veil system.

In case of these grassroots comics, the content is based on memories and stories of the community, represented in regional languages and aided by a strong sense of the visual culture and local perception of that space. Shifting focus from aesthetics, the idea behind the comics is to create something which is more contextual. Through the past fifteen years, these regional comics have covered a plethora of social issues as well as instances of development and accomplishments in these conflict ridden areas. With the use of minimum resources they capture underlying issues and people of a community and portray them in a thought provoking manner.

Designer as facilitator
While going through the project, what struck me the most was the change in the role of a designer in the field. From being the outsider who orchestrates such conversations, there is a now a need for the designer to assume the role of a facilitator to build a participatory and more inclusive process, which looks not just at locating challenges but also collectively – designer along with community – finding solutions for them. Besides bringing in our skills,the role we play in mobilising the thoughts and voices of the community becomes pivotal to the project. As Andrew Shea, in his book Designing for Social Change says, “sometimes you may need to fade into the background and observe, while at other times you might need to work side by side with the members of the community.”

Design for the community, with the community.
The challenge for an urban designer working in the rural context can be understanding who the target audience should be. The World Comics Network base their primary audience and context in the same space that they work in, thus pushing forward boundaries of designing with the community in order to design for the community.

It is only when these stories are distributed that they call for action. Exhibiting the photocopied comics of the participants in easily accessible areas of the community, builds a platform to not just showcase stories and talent, but also open up local debates and discussions within the community on topics which are otherwise neglected. The close proximity and the direct communication between the makers and the readers in the space provide a setup which initiates conversations and drives change.

In a Grassroots Comics Campaign, Apni Dikri Ro Haq ( Girl child right) initiated in Barmer District of Western Rajasthan,India in 2005, more than 300 wall poster comics were created by children and youth on topics of girl child rights, female foeticide, child marriage etc. A selection of which were circulated in several villages by the help of a motorbike rally, which paved way to serious debates and several local people committing themselves in bringing about change in the situation.

Left: Apni Dikri Ro Haq campaign, Barmer, Rajasthan.
Right: World Comics network in another village in Rajasthan, India.
Image Courtsey: World Comics Finland.

“During various discussions and brainstorming sessions, one thing emerged very clear – if we want this campaign to succeed, it has to first start ticking like a clock in peoples’ mind. We remembered what Mahatma Gandhi had said years ago; something which we thought was very much relevant to what we were planning. He had talked about a movement being launched by not working along the periphery of the society, but after penetrating deep into it. He had also reflected upon the fact that villages were the true image of real India.We decided to make these two observations of the Mahatma the pivot of our campaign” – Sharad Sharma

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
WCN has successfully created a system of sustained engagement, which doesn’t stop at one project, but gives its participants the required skill sets to continue such efforts within the community, without any outside help. The merit of the network also lies in the simple structure of the workshop, which not just makes well informed participants, but also empowers them to make change. While the focus is not on skills, the WCN has created many participants, who find their calling in the medium, and with time and under guidance of the WCN master the art, to build similar workshops within their own community. Like in the case of the Apni Dikri Ro Haq campaign in Barmer,the Barmer Comics Manch, a local initiative, now continues the campaign.

A basic manual , introducing grassroots comics, is also available on free to download basis on the website in English and Hindi. Other languages for the manual can also be requested.

The easy to understand and cost effective nature of the workshop has found popularity in the development sector, which has led to the same method now being followed by several NGO’s and other individuals in countries like Pakistan,Nepal, Sri Lanka, Brazil, UK and Tanzania to name a few. The Indian network has also collaborated with World Comics Finland to introduce grassroots comics in many areas, along with setting up a separate network for Pakistan as well as Nepal.

Left: Comic from Nepal – On girl child and the importance of a daughter.
Right: Comic from Africa - On Female Genital Mutilation.

You can also look at these comics on their website, as well as purchase some compiled publications.

The phrase ‘Design for democracy’ is now thoroughly part of the design rhetoric, with eponymous courses at design schools and AIGA programmes. What does this mean? In the context of the Field Guides, design for democracy is design which supports the democratic process. Design which tries to ensure that people vote the way they want to. This also translates as design which understands the audience, understands the problem and designs for both. The unique thing about Field Guides is that they use design to facilitate better design. Here’s why:

In the 2000 presidential election in the USA the design of one ballot paper in Florida was so problematic that it resulted in not only hundreds of unintended votes, but ultimately lawsuits and harsh critique aimed at the election official that designed the ballot paper. In the context of design part of what’s troubling about this incident is that the official has gone on record to say that the confusing design was actually the result of her attempt to make ballots easier to read. Her good intentions however resulted in the punch hole for Al Gore becoming confused with that of the Reform party candidate on the opposite page.

Image from American History..

This incident, it’s been said, stimulated ernest discourse around improving ballot design but after two more elections a dramatic shift had not taken place. In mid-2007 design guidelines were put in place, with contributions from AIGA’s Design for Democracy project and published in a thorough U.S. Election Assistance Commission report.

It is from this context that the Field Guides emerged as a considered effort to further improve the situation.

The guides acknowledge the reality of who is often designing communication materials around election — non designers, not necessarily well versed in design theory. It also recognised that communication with voters is one part of a much larger, busier and complex schedule around election time and that anything which would move election officials to act would have to compete with a number of other concerns for their attention.

With this in mind the guides are based on in depth and informed research but have distilled this into a manageable format that would feel relevant and feasible to the people who would ultimately put the guidelines into practice.

The guides practice what they preach, with a functional, not overly designed aesthetic. The structure is clear — examples on the left, guideline on the right, things to avoid in grey, things to do in black and illustrations where needed used to illustrate a point.

The small, compact format with detailing like the round corners helps the guides feel unintimidating and manageable. While the confident, authoritative voice and straightforward language belies the research that is the foundation of these humble looking booklets.

Ultimately the greatest value of these guides is the advice they give and the better design they inspire. The best way to get a sense of this is to read them. All eight guides can be found on their website and through the links below:

Vol. 01. Designing usable ballots (PDF) (original research)
Vol. 02. Writing instructions voters understand (PDF) (original NIST report)
Vol. 03. Testing ballots for usability (PDF) (link to LEO kit at UPA)
Vol. 04. Effective poll worker materials (PDF) (original NIST report)
Vol. 05. Choosing how to communicate with voters (PDF)
Vol. 06. Designing voter education booklets and flyers (PDF)
Vol. 07. Designing election department websites (PDF)
Vol. 08. Guiding voters through the polling place (PDF)

All images, except original ballot card, courtesy Oxide Design Co..

Supporters’ Scarves is a recent project by Common Office. In their words, the project “appropriates the football scarf for supporters of six political causes; equality; affordable housing; the welfare state; the national health service; public transport; and new towns.”
This projects has stayed with me, I suspect, because of its powerful simplicity and considered execution. What makes it interesting to me, in the context of Rising, is the aspect of ‘appropriation’, not a difficult thing to do but difficult to do well.

Appropriation can be an effective device. The process of consciously lifting something out out of its typical context and using it in another, can create new meaning and ways of looking at something. However there’s also a fine line between appropriation, pastiche (imitation of style), or worse, plain stealing (claiming an idea as your own). Creating something which has longevity and deeper resonance requires an understanding of the thing being appropriated.

1.Image source: 1 & 2. Eric Kilby, Football at Fenway.

So what is a football scarf?

The football supporters’ scarf has been around for over a century in the UK — a mark of pride and a statement of where the wearer’s allegiance lies. You still see people wearing the original two colour striped scarves but increasingly the humble scarf has become an important commercial outlet for teams, sold as expensive official merchandise, with their crest and name knitted in.

Outside the stadium the scarves become a walking advertisement of a supporters’ team, whilst inside they are can be held up like a banner. They have to be seen and read at a distance and they have to make a strong visual statement when seen as a mass. As a result football scarves typically use only two prominent colours with bold typography.

But what has all this got to do with visual communication for social impact?

The football scarf is such a simple, but potent symbol of support for something, whether you’re a football supporter or not, that it lends itself to the act of getting behind any cause. The desire to be part of something collectively, and own it as part of our visual identity, is not unique to football supporters. We want to show we believe in something, perhaps encourage others to consider these causes too. We’ve seen this in the rubber wristbands of social causes like Livestrong and in Facebook profiles changed to equal signs in support of HRC equal marriage campaign. But rarely do we see such causes using a medium quite as loaded and constructed as the supporters’ scarf, lending the project a longevity and freshness which also transcends age and class strata.

An important part of the project is the typography of Supporters’ Scarves. With the key piece of information being text-based, a typeface was needed which was practical — something that could accommodate the varied lengths of texts, as well as appropriate to the context and meaning of the different messages. Common Office commissioned Åbäke to create a custom font for the project, British Rail Ultra-Condensed, an ultra-condensed sans which comfortably accommodates varied messages; much longer than the usual team names on football scarves. The font is based on Rail Alphabet, designed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir around 1965 for the National Rail Service signage (now privatised) and once used in the state healthcare service. In essence a typeface that once belonged to the public and public space, making it apt for the public issues on the scarves, whilst also addressing their practical requirements with the clarity and impact of a typeface designed for signage.

This project stands out for me because it is made to last, in design aesthetic and production, and uses a visual language that is understood and familiar, whilst still developing it in a way which makes it meaningful to the message and refreshing in its new context. A result of mindful consideration for the visual language and medium being used.

Except where mentioned all images by Erika Wall.

#missingtype was created for this year’s National Blood Week in the UK, in collaboration with Engine and Twenty Six Digital. The campaign was a response to the dramatic reduction the in the number of new blood donors coming forward in the UK. Jon Latham at NHS Blood and Transplant, speculates,

…people’s lives have got busier over the last decade. People are working longer hours, commuting further, spending more time online and have less time of their own, despite more options of how to use it. Good causes are also competing increasingly for people’s attention and time.

And yet the campaign saw everyone from big brands to small family businesses, individuals, as well as groups of employees, dropping the As, Os and Bs from their names to raise awareness of the need for new blood donors. They photoshopped their logos and physically altered their sign boards, changed twitter handles and facebook profiles, and took snaps of themselves holding up hangman-esque signs and altered name tags.

Source

My personal favourite came from Deborah Champion, an artist who did a limited-edition print-run of one of her existing prints, Help will Come, and gave it away free to people who shared her poignant post.

1.Image credit and work: Deborah Champion & 2. Image source

The campaign reached an overall social media audience of 147 million across the week, with 30,000 new donors registering during the week and a three-fold increase in registrations compared to last year, breaking previous Blood Week Records.

Source

Source

So how do you create a campaign that everyone from an individual artist to a large corporate — even the prime minister’s residence — can and wants to be a part of? A campaign that some of the world’s largest brands are willing to modify their own logos for? And a campaign that can have impact on its cause beyond the publicity surge?

Source 1 & 2

The campaign’s call to action was very simple and used the most basic output of social media — text — as a starting point. On an individual level this could be applied to anything from a status update to the twitter post, to a profile name or handle. But on a larger scale it could be a logo or masthead, still easy to share on social media but also intriguing and bold enough to create media interest. And so as Odeon Cinemas pulled the plug on their signage and Downing Street (the Prime Minister’s street) lost an O on its sign, the press began to jump on board too.

Source 1 & 2

The fact that the simple call to action had no strict parameters made it both easy to get involved and appealing to those who wanted to do something a little different with it.

Source

The campaign rather than unifying a single message (change your profile picture to an = sign for example) actually individualised it, creating a message that was customised by each individual, but which still lead to a tangible united action (sign up to donor list).

Thoughtshop Foundation is a Social Communication Organisation. It is dedicated to creating new and effective ways of dealing with social issues, with the aim to educate, motivate and initiate change. Thoughtshop Foundation is headed by Himalini Varma and Satayan Sengupta.

Children discuss cards from a Thoughtshop Toolkit.

How does one ‘teach’ a nine year old who has already survived some of life’s harshest lessons?
How does one take sessions on sex education in a village community with young girls who have never been to school?
How does one train non-literate women in business management skills, or talk about ending domestic violence with groups of men and women who believe it’s a normal way of life?

These are just some of the questions we have had to ask ourselves, and our journey to find answers have spanned two decades of work with grass-root communities, across different corners of India and several other developing countries. The discoveries along the way have helped us build a philosophy and understand the nature of communications in a context where the written word is not recognised, and the issues to be raised are often considered taboo.

At its simplest, Communication Design for the social sector can be intended to provide information, or raise awareness. Sometimes, it aims to create behavioural change. But the real magic happens when communication design sparks off a dialogue that leads to a process of self reflection, empowerment and transformation, for an individual and a society.

Communicating rice cultivation, from seed to crop, in Jharkhand.

Lessons from Street Kids
One of our first experiences with working children on the streets of Delhi taught us that the communication process had to be learner centred – a ‘partnership’ – we had as much to learn from the children as we had to offer them. For these children (shoe shine boys, coolies and rag pickers), the street was their classroom, and life on the street was their living school; teaching them harsh, new lessons everyday. At the age of nine and ten years, they led independent adult lives and had already seen a great deal. They would not attend a mainstream school and they were not interested in alphabet books talking of apples and balls. Sessions would take place on the pavements, and children would rush off the moment they saw a potential customer who needed his shoes polished.

Life on the street had made them hide away their vulnerabilities and we needed ways to build trust and get beneath the hardened exterior, find the little child inside. We needed to find a way to excite and connect with the children; help them share their personal stories, learn from them and move ahead. The idea was to appear like a magician before the kids with a bag full of tricks to capture their hearts and minds. After spending many weeks with the children, we developed a kit of games for them. One of the tools, for example, was a set of 36 brightly coloured picture cards; a series of images that captured different moments, emotions, choices and milestones in the children’s’ life.

When asked direct questions about their life, children would withdraw. Yet when playing with the picture cards they would open up. They would pick out cards with situations that they had experienced, and the stories they wove around them were real experiences. This would form an important foundation for further interactions with them. The cards would also serve as a tool to help the children express their feelings, and aspirations. Many cards were open – ended and could be interpreted in different ways.

One card for example had a picture of a boy sitting, looking thoughtful, and a little sad. ‘This boy is sad because he has just lost his shoeshine box and he is wondering what to do now. Since someone stole his box, should he steal someone else’s?’ Asked one. Another kid pulled out a card of a policeman hauling up a child: ‘If he steals a shoe box, then this is what will happen, and he will still be unhappy’. Another child pitched in: ‘I think the boy is sad because he is new and has no friends’, to which the other children agreed and shared how vulnerable a child feels when he is new and alone in the big city. And so, cards helped us learn about what was going on in the children’s minds. Actions and their consequences, social problems relevant to the children’s lives could now be addressed.

During the weeks we spent with the children we discovered that many of them were crazy about Bollywood films. They collected and traded pictures of famous stars. Inspired by this we developed a set of playing cards teaching the alphabet using film stars and famous personalities. So instead of learning A for Apple the children would learn A is for Amitabh (Bachhan)…

Family Spacing Board Game. Part of the Shankar Kit which addresses adolescent boys and young men.

Taboo!
It was 1996. We were travelling to a village group in South 24 Paragnas, West Bengal accompanied by Banidi, an elderly health worker with 21 years experience of working with communities. She complained to us about her latest predicament. She had been instructed to take sessions on reproductive health with girls – adolescents – young enough to be her granddaughters. She fished out a crumpled sheet of paper from a tin trunk, on which was typed a list of topics that she was expected to educate the girls on: Puberty, Menstruation, Conception, Sex Determination, Family Planning. She admitted to us that she had somehow never got around to discussing these issues with girls; it never felt like the right time she said. When we nodded in empathy, she confided how she felt this new requirement was quite unnecessary. She had always gone beyond the call of duty, but said she also had her self respect to consider. ‘What would the village elders think? Talking about sex to teenaged girls in a village’!!

Soon the young girls poured into the room, some looked as young as 12 years old, others may have been as old as 16. Most of these girls cannot read. They have never been to school or have dropped out so long ago that they remembered nothing. ‘How will they ever understand all this technical reproductive health stuff’! Banidi muttered to us under her breath. Later, when we asked the girls if they knew about how their body worked – about body systems – they looked completely blank. One of the girls mentioned that periodically a doctor visited their village and would give a lecture on such things. But they never really understood what she said and were too scared to ask. Marriage, children and motherhood, however, were round the corner; a reality that most of these girls would face most likely before their 18th birthday.

The Champa kit, a teaching aid for health workers disseminating information on reproductive health to rural adolescent girls.

The year long interactive development process resulted in the creation of a graded 5 module educational package of stories, games and models to discuss reproductive health with adolescent girls. Through the story of 12 year old Champa and her friends, different issues around reproductive health were raised. These stories were illustrated using lucid water colour paintings that were widely understood, and allowed the girls to let their imaginations flow. To break the ice and bridge the facilitator-learner divide, a card game showing social situations was introduced where the girls played as teams and challenged, argued and convinced each other on how different social situations influenced their lives. Games and models were developed to reduce the inhibitions around biological concepts of menstruation, conception, sex determination and the use of contraceptives. Games and activities were also devised to build life skills like assertiveness and negotiation.

Illustration from Champa’s discovery, Why does menstruation happen?, a flipchart from the Champa Kit.

Over the last 19 years the kit has been adapted in various languages and used by peer educators across the country to discuss reproductive health in a way that was non-threatening and fun! The interactive process enabled barefoot facilitators or peer educators (marginalised girls from the community) to replace resource persons as they started conducting free and open sessions to discuss sensitive issues. Young girls could freely share their questions with these didis who were most often just like them.

Now multiply that by a Million!
In 2006 we were lucky to be involved in a South Asia wide campaign to end violence against women. It was an ambitious campaign reaching out to 5 million individuals over 6 years and across 6 countries inspiring them to become change makers. Our role involved creating campaign communication, and youth change-makers in West Bengal.

The audience was diverse in every way. In India alone there were 13 states using over 8 languages. The campaign communication was driven by a set of guiding principles: Communication would be positive and inspiring, encourage personal change, be non- judgmental and challenge stereotypes, enable dialogue and be rights- based. And of course they would have to be pictorial and interactive. Through an intense process that covered several years, many participatory workshops and lots of help from partner organisations, we worked to develop a common pictorial language around the issue of gender and violence against women. This new language would have to cut across region, class, age and language barriers, not only within India, but across the campaign countries.

Character illustrations from the Understanding Gender and Violence against Women Toolkit.

One of the thumb rules of creating an image was this – the viewer must be able to imagine himself or herself as being the character in the image. This simple but very effective technique helped us maintain the dignity of characters, and therefore connect with men and women. It was interesting to hear people point out to images and say ‘I feel I am that man. I used to abuse my wife. I never thought it hurt her. I feel it now, I need to make a change’. The focus was on change – encouraging every individual to commit to even a small change; to believe that small efforts lead to big changes. There was also a continuous effort to find techniques that would challenge people’s beliefs, make them rethink attitudes that had been accepted without question for generations.

Here’s an example of an activity that elicited an interesting and familiar pattern of responses:
We would first show an image, of a woman doing the cooking and managing kids and her husband relaxing in the background, smoking a cigarette. People would respond casually saying that this is normal, this is how it is, how it has always been. Then we would show the same picture with the man doing the cooking and managing kids, while the wife is shown relaxing in the background smoking. At this, people would get startled. They would laugh nervously. “There must be some mistake. This is absurd…What a selfish woman!” And thus a raging discussion would begin.

New images and new scenarios were created to help people envision new realities where men shared housework, where women participated in decision- making. Many years later when an intensive impact assessment process was conducted and people were asked what they recalled, they would share powerful personal changes they have made in their life. They would often refer to the workshops as a series of images, which brought home to us the power of images to infuse into people’s consciousness.

One woman recalled the images of a woman eating less, being married early – ‘Those felt like pictures from my life…I wondered how the facilitators knew…Till then it never occurred to me this could change’!
At another interview, a father regretted that he had made a terrible mistake by forcing his under-age daughter to marry against her will. He would not repeat the same mistake with his younger girl. She would have the same freedom as Meenu, one of the characters in the communications.

The We Can Campaign to End Violence Against Women, with its focus on personal change and positive approach has now spread to 15 countries across the world, though the guiding principles remain the same. We have been privileged to work with teams from these other regions, to help them adapt the campaign strategy to their contexts.

Take-home picture and activity booklet for the participants of the My Childhood My Rights workshops.

Communication is Community Building
In our journey over these last two decades, our work has expanded to cover a wide range of issues: from self-exploration, exploring multiple identities, to child rights, water and sanitation, to poor women’s economic leadership and strategies for emergency relief. The solutions range from games and models to films, audio tools and multimedia. Training of trainers, especially grass-root facilitators or peer educators are integral processes. More recently our work could be better described as programme design: Creating sustainable, replicable models for development. Over the last few years, on our own initiative we have been creating community based youth leaders who do a journey from self to society, build youth groups and initiate positive social change within their communities.

It has been an amazing ride, as we have discovered the synergy between development communications and community building. Effective communication improves the quality of life and relationships between people. It increases empathy, reduces judgment and the barriers of misunderstanding that separate us from each other.

More information and materials for use are available at Thoughtshop Foundation’s website, facebook page and on twitter.

All images courtesy Thoughtshop Foundation

Lakshmi Murthy, founder of Vikalp Design, has been working with the rural population in Rajasthan & Gujarat for over 20 years as a communication designer, to develop an effective framework for communication. And in doing so, she has uncovered a way of seeing, and consequently a new way of conversing with her audiences. Below is a short excerpt from an interview with her in Dekho—Conversations on Design in India.

“In distinguishing between the urban and the rural audience, the latter is wrongfully regarded as visually illiterate. The rural audience has a sharper perception of their environment and are keener to infer from indexical traces that the urban individual would neglect. In fact it is the city-bred individual who may be ‘illiterate’ in the rural environment, lacking their visual knowledge. While an urban designer will draw in proportion and orientation of what they see as ‘known’, a villager would rely on vernacular knowledge to draw, displaying a keen unlettered intelligence.

Urban designers need to re-examine their role in communication when working with non-literate and rural groups. They need to assume the role of a facilitator and act as a catalyst in encouraging people’s own visual expression, finding a common visual language and producing visuals that are responsive to the needs of the audience.

A participatory process of self-expression holds one answer. Encouraging people to draw has been looked upon as an empowering process that leads to inclusion of notions otherwise difficult to express.”

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery. Drawn by people in rural areas of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and collected by Vikalp since 1992.

In the above excerpt, Lakshmi puts forth a new role of the communication designer when working in a new social and cultural environment. She proposes a shift, from creator to a facilitator—wherein the process of design seeks to leverage existing knowledge and language—gently questioning and guiding and eventually co-creating a solution. The process brings one of the key principles of design—empathy into action, and goes beyond merely sensitising a designer to enabling him/her with the building blocks of a design intervention. The other key benefit of this process can be the emergence of a natural ownership. World-over, well meaning design interventions often break down with users/communities not being able to sustain a connection with it (design intervention). But this new way of building together, breaks down barriers and roots the foundation of an idea in the user community.

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery.

Learn more about Vikalp and their work, here.

Dekho image, courtesy Codesign.  Illustrations courtesy Vikalp.

One of the critical areas of reform in the legal system, is the awareness of rights and laws by the general populace. While there are laws and systems in place, the average citizen is often unaware of their presence, their relevance and when/how to access them. Recognising this as a key failing, lawyers Kanan and Kelly Dhru from Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI), embarked on their idea of creating a graphic story format to educate children about laws in India. Lawtoons is a comic book series on laws in India, and following a successful crowd-funding campaign the first book in the series is now out.

“The useful information about citizenship, democracy, laws and rights that children learn in their schools through the civics curriculum is often passed off as ‘dull and boring’. Even upon growing up, an individual is likely to be intimidated by the bulky law books full of legal jargons. This unfortunately, results in a society where most people find it difficult to relate to the idea of laws and legal systems, and feel disconnected.”
—From the Lawtoons website

The first Lawtoons prototype book was designed and tested with children in two public and three private schools in Ahmedabad. Apart from Kanan and Kelly Dhru, creative inputs on the project have been so far provided by designer & illustrator Anish Daolagupu and mentors like Margie Sastry (writer and former associate editor at Amar Chitra Katha) and Sekhar Mukherjee (head of animation film design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad). With their recent funding, Lawtoons hopes to engage more designers and create subsequent books under the series.

You can buy the first Lawtoons book, called ‘A Song for Everyone’ on Right to Equality & Freedom of Speech, here.

Images courtesy, Lawtoons.

Left: The poster, made by Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Manch, West Bengal, speaks out against acid attacks on women. It focuses on a read incident of an attack on a 14-year old.
Right: A general poster on violence against women. Drawn by Golak and designed by Bindia Thapar, the poster was created by the Lawyers Collective, Delhi with support from UNIFEM.

Recognising the value of a poster as a tool for communication and mobilisation, and challenged with a lack of documentation of ephemera and grey literature created by these activist groups, Zubaan sought to research, locate and publicly archive as many of these posters, brochures, leaflets as possible. According to them, “the idea was to look at how the women’s movement and its concerns could be mapped visually, to ask what the history of the movement would look like through its posters and visual images.”

Left: An anti-dowry poster by the National Commission for Women, Government of India.
Right: A collage of posters against violence, created by Natya Chetana, Orissa. Each of the posters is a separate poster, covering issues from rape, police brutality, sati etc.

The initial phase of the project culminated in a travelling exhibition and a catalogue, with the original posters housed by Sound and Picture Archives for Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai, and their digital scans accessible online. Our Pictures, Our Words—a book pictorially charting the diverse and complex course of the women’s movement was produced. The posters in the book are organised according to pertinent categories such as violence and health-related issues, and as much information as available about the poster is provided, pieced together with short essays, introductions and historical backdrops.

Images from Zubaan’s Poster Women project.

Before I Die is a community art project on a global scale, initiated by Candy Chang, a Taiwanese American artist, with a background in architecture, urban planning and graphic design. After the loss of a loved one in 2011, Candy, was looking for a way to capture life’s bigger picture and meaning, and began work on Before I Die as an experimental project.

She painted a side of a decrepit house in post-Katrina New Orleans in chalkboard paint and stencilled a grid of incomplete sentences, “Before I die I want to_____”, on the wall. The incomplete sentence prompted passers-by to reflect on their lives and complete the statement in chalk that was left there. By the next day, not only were the eighty sentences filled in with anonymous aspirations, the responses spilled over into the margins of the wall.

After uploading some of the photos of the wall, Candy received hundreds of messages from people who wanted to make a similar wall within their community. What started as an experiment with one wall, began to grow across borders, cultures and languages. Candy created a website with resources on how to create and maintain the wall and currently there are over 500 Before I Die walls in over 35 languages and over 75 countries.

Before I Die is a simple, thought-provoking way of revealing personal aspirations of people in a community space, and enabling greater connect and empathy between neighbours. It encourages reflection on life’s bigger picture and acts a reminder to not sweat the small stuff. The project has been documented as a book, which presents “an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life’s ultimate question with the people around us.” Publishers Weekly calls it, “a powerful and valuable reminder that life is for the living, and it’s never too late, or too early, to join the party.”

Watch Candy Chang talk about Before I Die:

You can visit the website for more walls, tools, and resources and follow the project on Facebook or Twitter.

Images from Before I Die.