SMART PHONE APP created during acculturation workshop at TU Delft

This is a video of the app we (as a group) had designed during the acculturation week in August. We want to find people who may be interested in developing it as it can present a whole new way of  ho especially international students come to engage with the University, other students and the city at large

quick staircase/ storage project ....

Palm leaf lamp

I noticed that the palm trees in front of my borivali place in Mumbai shed these enormous leaves/branches. They always looked so intriguing because these green leaves turn orange, (the nice happy orange) when they dry up and fall off the tree. But then in a few days they crumple and loose their colour. Also their inside is orange but exterior has a strange white crayon effect. It does look like lamp shade at first look itself. My obsession with lamps continues.. so I picked it up. and put a bulb in it. its roughly fixed for obvious reasons, but a support can be perfected. the great thing is (as seen in fig 4) the stem has a groove in which the wire can be concealed. and the overall shape allows for a effortless cantilever. The final result is seen below. I also want to mention that the bulb's heat, dried up the soft lampshade part, and got rid of the white too. All the moisture gone, it stands in the house, firm, stiff, without any problem or decomposition. Offf..course its a fire hazard, so need to find a fire resistant resin.. anyone???

p.s. You can make uplighter or downlighter, works both ways.

                                       Note: the stem's shape automatically conceals the wire within.

          Normally one would not see that wire hanging out like that... it gets totally concealed.

This prototype has not met with perfection, and nor was the initial intent. It just happened. I am sure when taken forward, it can be worked out all clean and neat.

Geo-mapping our associative city - pt 1

I don’t own a smart phone yet so you can understand my surprise when my friend naveen showed me his smart phone pointing out that it could show a route to any destination by car, train or walking. Now Mumbai is not a grid layout, it’s organic and has many very narrow confusing lanes at several places. When we were at the station, and we checked for the next train, it actually showed us the next train timing down to minute of arrival and even the walking route before that.

I understand doing this in the US where all this data has been assembled and has more or less been in the digital format (and online) for a while now, (including so many live cameras working overtime everywhere). But here in Mumbai, well…. I know that there are fixed timings for trains, which do not fluctuate at all unless there is some problem. But what this got me thinking whether the data showed on the phone was live data or pre-established data. The question is roads, walking routes! how does that work, is it an algorithm fed into the computer?

Such large amount of information! How is google doing this? How does it get this kind of man-power or even resources? Having said that, what I want to really know is why they are doing it. I know there are innumerable applications but why precisely did they start this. It can’t be only because its cool. Because so much of this information is free.

It seems one can view the whole Manhattan in 3D, This baffles me. Of course the most direct application is gaming, esp with the VBOX already in the market, but I don’t know if people have begun to use it or not.

The movie on facebook was definitely something that inspired me to jot this thought down thinking it may have potential. So facebook, as said in the movie was created to take the social experience of college life onto the virtual world. However think now in terms of the city and the way we live it, experience it and share with the people around us. Don’t we always ask each other, which restaurant is good in such and such place, or which is the best ice-cream joint in the city or places to hang out? I understand numerous websites offer comments and rating by users on places visited or restaurants eaten in etc such as BURP.com… but coming from strangers, it has very little credibility, compared to a suggestion by a person you know. What about special places, which people cherish, their happy places, where you take your lover and so on.

So what if we construct a map, assembled through inputs by individual users? Lets say person X, so one day you decide to visit his/her city and of course you want to know from her/him whats worth visiting/ best eating joints etc. So this platform will allow you to view her profile just like FB and perhaps through FB and then route you to ‘her city map’.

Each person can develop their own city, defining within it which information is public and which is private. Thus, while at one level, it will go on to develop ones own personal archive of the city spaces and the users continual experiences. At the same time it will also contribute to a larger map of the city with this shared data.

Now, this information can be used in various ways –

So I take again the same example of restaurants. If you are in a certain place and want to find restaurants nearby, you can go on this platform which will not only show you restaurants that your friends have visited earlier but also what they may have rated them. Now if you extend that idea – if the receipt you get is printed with a code that you feed onto ur profile through ur phone.

While on one hand you will be able to instantly rate the dishes you have just had for further ref. (like a diary), or see ratings of a particular dish before you order it. See what your friends think of it or Mumbai thinks of it, or say Shahrukh thinks of it? Or Tarla Dalal thinks of it (provided they visit that restaurant ofcourse). Perhaps, the internal programme can swoop the internet to scoop up photographs of it and attach it automatically to it. As mentioned earlier, the public and private rule still applies.

            A restaurant owner may know which dish is getting the boos and which the woohooo.

Or what is working for his competition and not for him or the socio-economic profiles of people visiting the restaurant etc.

Another very useful application is for cities like Mumbai and Bangalore that have a constant inflow of migrants/visitors. The one thing everybody faces is the problem to find a cheap and convenient place to live in. They have to hire brokers who eat up 1-2 months of rent, and even then you can never know if that’s the best bet. Each broker only knows about certain houses and the process is forever tiresome and irritating.

            Creation of this map will allow anyone who wants to put a space up for rent, to be able to first tag it as rentable and then mark it on the map, put snaps up, or a plan, details anything. Looking at it from a larger view, on viewing the public map, anyone will be able to see all possible rentable spaces in the city and their rates etc. When combined with the info made available of nearby amenities around such as railway stations, auto stands, main roads etc, (already marked or marked by the owner to highlight sellable aspects of the flat) anyone will know exactly how good/bad a space is for renting. This will not only make it easy for ppl to find places to rent but may be even bring changes in the rent structure, presently in place. House ignored, missed or over priced will receive as much attention as anyone else. No brokers, no middlemen.
             
             I understand that on wikimapia/ google earth there are hotels already get listed when click on the hotel icon, which further gives you details of the hotel, along with reviews and photos. My point is, in this age of plentiful information, unless we can trust it, associate with its source, it won’t make sense. That is also how branding probably works, when you rope in big stars to add the touch.

           

             Now, websites like – makemytrip.com give you price ranges/ locations/ distance filters to choose the best flight option. This platform can have a side menu doing the same, all the time, refreshing you options on the map as well.

             

increasing literacy in rural areas through mobile phones

The percentage of illiterate rural is close to 40% and urban being about 20%. While more people each year in both rural and urban areas are getting literate, this is one of key concerns. However, this the rural india, for one has taken a great leap and jumped with full force into mobile phone usage with absolute ease. India has a total of 846.32 Million Telecom subscribers. The link - http://trak.in/tags/business/2011/04/30/mobile-telecom-subscriber-addition-march-2011/ states that in urban areas there are 3 mobile phones for every 2, while there is 1 phone for every 3 individuals in rural areas. This ratio for the rural areas is very promising nevertheless because of the amazing reach that mobile phones have achieved even to the most isolated areas.

The question that comes to me right now is whether we can use mobile phones as a means to increase literacy. I had seen this toy in the market while trying to buy something for a friend’s 6 month child. It was shaped like a giant phone, with all the works, big keys, an led display and speaker. So, the kid is meant to press a key, which shows the display of it on the led screen and croaks the sound of the alphabet. Its meant to make the child connect sound of the alphabet to the visual display.

Now if we connect this thought to the real mobile phone now. Most people in rural areas stop at using the green and the red button, that’s the ‘call’ and ‘cut call’ buttons. I understand that people have been successfully using the VAC (value added services) to get all sorts of information about prices of commodities to the weather etc. but most as I read get limited to fwding msgs. Creation of msgs or even adding numbers to the address book (input in general) lags behind possibly they are not literate.

What if we create software based on the existing voice recognition system, sensitive to each dialect which recognizes what the person is saying, then highlights for each word, every single letter in order one after the other, reproducing the sound of the alphabet being used. This can be particularly accurate for Hindi since it’s a phonetic language. So then the phone repeats the sound and completes the word then follows it for the sentence. Through repetitive action, the person using the phone will be able to identify the words visually as a collection of sounds, which are represented on the keypad.

Slowly, in time, the user will quickly learn at least the most basic words as written text as well.

As a next step, it can be taken on as a game. That the user will be given certain amount of chances to guess how to spell the word, each time the users gets it wrong, like in a game, it will buzz, and blink red. Like that, there may be levels with increasing difficulty as well. Further on a point system can be attached etc for further encouragement. 

grandmother's recipes and remedies

Well I have been thinking about all the grandmother wisdom that is going to be lost because most of us don't have the time to learn it anymore. I for one love pickles. So, as a pilot project, within the family, I am going to try and gather all recipes that the many Nanis have collected and perfected over time and see how it can be made into some sort of a book to archive it before its lost.

so, the boats off the shore

So, the blogpost has finally taken off because they are always these million ideas humming and nobody to keep track of them. 'Tutti' in italian means - 'all' or 'everybody.' The title basically means design for everybody. The attempt here is going to be make an collaborative platform of some nature where all these random ideas can find some outlet and maybe somebody out there can make sense of it...