A Place for Her - Preliminary Workshop Report

On 20th December, Do Din 2014 hosted a workshop called A Place for Her in collaboration with the Architecture and Design Foundation of India. Here is a preliminary report of the outcomes of the workshop put together by the ancors!
Thanks to Srinivas Murthy and Tauqeer Ahmed for anchoring this workshop and thanks to all the participants!

Workshops at Do Din 2014

We have 3 workshops lined up for Do Din!

Discovering Khairatabad – Walkabout & Workshop

December 20th – 7.30 am onwards – Starting point at Vidyaranya School

RSVP for the walkabout here: https://www.facebook.com/events/749244731818217/

Discovering a city neighbourhood: Most of the times people only know the typical “touristic” information about a particular city or the locality they live in. Information and knowledge about one’s own neighbourhood is one of the first steps towards developing that sense of belongingness and pride for it.

Does this translate into better planning and upkeep? Does it result in better civic amenities, social bonding and security for the locality? This workshop is an attempt to discover, understand and document some key miles stones in the growth of a Khairtabad as one of the central and important constituent of this vast city fabric.

Join us in discovering a new Khairtabad! Please RSVP on the facebook event, click here.

This workshop is open to all! School and college students are especially invited!

20th December 2014. The Walkabout is scheduled from 7.30 am to 9.30 am, starting at Vidyaranya School, i.e. the Do Din venue.
The Workshop will follow on returning the Do Din venue!

Discovering Khairatabad is anchored by Architecture and Design Foundation of India.

Toilet Republic – Design Workshop

December 20th – 1st Session from 10 am to 12 pm – 2nd Session from 1.30 pm to 3.30 pm.

December 21st – 3rd Session from 1.30 pm to 2.30 pm

Intake for this workshop is limited! Please register here – http://goo.gl/forms/ZzZJbKwNCj – now!

In light of the Swacch Bharat Mission, talk of open defecation, clean cities and public toilet infrastructures has seemingly entered the mainstream discourse. But public toilets have been constructed for several years now and a variety of models have been tried to attain optimal results. The issue remains salient, though, due to a conjunction of inadequate (leave aside non-optimal) infrastructures and certain engrained attitudes towards sanitation.

Not only are public toilets sparsely distributed, they are poorly distributed. Not only are they badly designed, they are unjustly designed. Not only are they poorly governed & regulated, they evidently are not at all regulated. Not only do they not attract users, they deter them. This makes one wonder what kind of thought is put into designing/constructing/operating public toilets?

Toilet Republic, a workshop at Do Din 2014, seeks to bring together citizens and provoke them to think about public toilets. Why are they important? How have they been built and operated so far and what have been the problems? What would it take to come up with a feasible design? What will have to be the considerations and what resources will be needed?

The workshop will focus on public toilets from 4 different lenses:

• Community & Location
• Economics & Viability
• Governance & Operational Management
• Design & User Experience

Rajib Ghosh of D-Labs and Arvind Lodaya will be the anchors for this workshop. Both of them are  accomplished designers who are passionate about finding innovative solutions for tough problems and to improve quality of life.

A Place for Her – Design Workshop

December 20th – 10 am to 12 pm

Most women in the city confess that they do not have the time for any kind of leisure, or recreation, or self-enrichment!

There will be a host of factors, along with gender, such as class and geographical location that create this condition. This made us wonder, however, whether an additional problem might be the fact that there are very few spaces in the city where women can seek leisure or self-enrichment. We are all well aware of the proscriptions imposed on women (of all classes) in public places, besides, even community spaces (for the poor), or commercial spaces like malls and cafes, present peculiar obstacles to women pursuing their self-enrichment. Can we think of a different space for women?

Do Din 2014 will be hosting a workshop in collaboration with Architecture and Design Foundation of India. The aim of this workshop is to engage with women from different parts of the city and from different social situations, to think through the obstacles presented by their particular situations and locations and to think about possible designs for institutions or infrastructures that will present avenues for women to seek recreation. A place for them.

Discovering Khairatabad - Walkabout & Workshop

Hello world!

Toilet Republic - A Workshop at Do Din 2014

In light of the Swacch Bharat Mission, talk of open defecation, clean cities and public toilet infrastructures has seemingly entered the mainstream discourse. But public toilets have been constructed for several years now and a variety of models have been tried to attain optimal results. The issue remains salient, though, due to a conjunction of inadequate (leave aside non-optimal) infrastructures and certain engrained attitudes towards sanitation.

Not only are public toilets sparsely distributed, they are poorly distributed. Not only are they badly designed, they are unjustly designed. Not only are they poorly governed & regulated, they evidently are not at all regulated site fiable viagra. Not only do they not attract users, they deter them. This makes one wonder what kind of thought is put into designing/constructing/operating public toilets?

Toilet Republic, a workshop at Do Din 2014, seeks to bring together citizens and provoke them to think about public toilets. Why are they important? How have they been built and operated so far and what have been the problems? What would it take to come up with a feasible design? What will have to be the considerations and what resources will be needed?

Arvind Lodaya and Rajib Ghosh will be the anchors for this workshop. Both of them are  accomplished designers who are passionate about finding innovative solutions for tough problems and to improve quality of life.

The workshop will focus on public toilets from 4 different lenses:

• Community & Location
• Economics & Viability
• Governance & Operational Management
• Design & User Experience

This workshop is for those who are concerned about sanitation in our cities, for those who work with communities and understand the meaning of lack of access to sanitation facilities, for those who are interested in public health and better planning and above all for those who are willing to accept the challenges of the city and willing to take the next step towards innovation and transformative action.

The workshop will run over both days of Do Din.

There will be limited seats in this workshop, so we will have separate registrations. If you wish to attend this workshop please fill the following form:

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Cover image designed by the newest member of our team Hui Ying Ng from Singapore.

Hyderabad's New Free Urinals: A Toilet Review

One thing about the new toilets which we absolutely support is that they’re free of cost!

But let’s look at them a little more carefully. We thought of dividing the review on the basis of Design and Maintenance.

Although most people in Hyderabad will have seen these toilets, here are some photos. (click to enlarge)

Design

1. One thing that troubles us is that we are still seeing only men’s urinals coming up across the city.

2. The good thing about the design is that it’s compact and can be easily installed. It does not take up too much space on the footpath. However, the drawback is that the interior space is quite cramped and the door is quite narrow.

3. They have good signage, using both symbolic representation and instructions in English and Telugu (some of them also have Urdu).

4. The urinals will be water-free. This is interesting. Hopefully, the no spitting signs will be enough to dissuade people from spitting pan, chewing gum or tobacco into the urinal and clogging them.

5. The drawback of being water-free is that there is no wash basin either. Maybe a dispenser of hand-sanitizer can be included?

6. The toilets are also aesthetically designed, so we need not worry that the closest RWA will complain and have them (re)moved.

Maintenance

We have more questions than comments on the maintenance front.

1. The water-free toilet means that the toilet is only cleaned by hand. Who are these workers? (Are we repeating India’s ugly history with dry toilets?) Are they provided with gloves, face-masks or other protective gear?

2. Where is the discharge from the toilet released? There is no septic tank, so is it flowing directly into the drains or other water bodies?

3. They are open for only 14 hours in a day, although they do not require full-time maintainers. Why so? We speculate that there could be good reasons for this, but we would like to know the actual specific reasons.

Besides the comments on design and maintenance, one troubling aspect is the lack of transparency in the process. The location and design of the toilets have been determined through private consultations and it is difficult to find any trace of “Ultimate Concepts” (the company/organization responsible for building these new toilets) anywhere online. The location of toilets is a problem that Hyderabad Urban Lab has specifically been indicating and once again we find one of these free urinals emerging across the road from an existing public toilet complex.

At Do Din 2014, we are hosting a Designthinking workshop dedicated to the question of public toilets. The objective of this workshop is to firstly review existing models of public toilet design, construction and maintenance from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. With a clear understanding of this existing situation, the workshop further seeks to give a sense of what are the kinds of resources that would be required to design implementable solutions.

Arvind Lodaya and Rajib Ghosh will be the anchors for this workshop. Both of them are  accomplished designers who are passionate about finding innovative solutions for tough problems and to improve quality of life.

There will be limited seats in this workshop, so we will have separate registrations. If you wish to attend this workshop, write in to us at indivarj@gmail.com

Cover photo from The Hindu.

A Place for Her - Design Workshop

Most women in the city confess that they do not have the time for any kind of leisure, or recreation, or self-enrichment!

There will be a host of factors, along with gender, such as class and geographical location that create this condition. This made us wonder, however, whether an additional problem might be the fact that there are very few spaces in the city where women can seek leisure or self-enrichment. We are all well aware of the proscriptions imposed on women (of all classes) in public places, besides, even community spaces (for the poor), or commercial spaces like malls and cafes, present peculiar obstacles to women pursuing their self-enrichment. Can we think of a different space for women?

Do Din 2014 will be hosting a workshop in collaboration with Architecture and Design Foundation of India. The aim of this workshop is to engage with women from different parts of the city and from different social situations, to think through the obstacles presented by their particular situations and locations and to think about possible designs for institutions or infrastructures that will present avenues for women to seek recreation. A place for them.

Join the workshop on 20th December, 10 am to 12 pm!

Data Expedition - a Pre Do Din Event, 19th December 2014.

On 19th December 2014, as a Pre Do Din event, HUL will be running a day long Data Expedition in collaboration with The School of Data, Bangalore.

Data Expedition is a practice developed by the School of Data based on their two core philosophies of learning by doing and working with real data. The aim is to “explore unchartered territory”, and work in areas where quality data is hard to find, or not even produced. Contrary to general perception data analysis is not all or only about hardcore number crunching nor does it always require “data savvy” people to understand data or work with it.

For the proposed workshop HUL is looking for people who are or wish to be:

Storytellers – People who can find new perspectives for looking at problems based on insights from the field and can articulate the problems at hand, also define projects suitable to deal with these problems.

Scouts – People who can literally scout the internet and other offline resources to find new data and data-sources.

Analysts – People who can collaborate on reading the data. This can mean finding patterns in the numbers and figures, it could also mean interpreting social situations, qualitatively.

Engineers – People with a sense of the resources required to address a problem and how various resources can be combined for optimum effect.

Designers – People who can come up with innovative solutions, or innovative methods to seek solutions.

This list of roles is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. One person can play more than one of these roles. A dynamic group can come up with several interesting analyses and solutions. Most importantly, it is an opportunity to learn from each other, learn to look at things differently and learn new skills. Data Expeditions are open-ended without pre-determined outcomes, so as to facilitate creativity and a plurality of approaches.

Read more about Data Expeditions.

Nisha Thompson, our data Guide for the workshop has worked extensively with data on water supply in India vente de viagra sur internet. Water supply data produced by the GOI is highly fragmented and does not provide a comprehensive picture of the problem. Her challenge has been to enhance the existing water data through field observations and augmenting it with schematic maps and other visuals.

Do mark your calendars if you are excited by the prospect of working with real data and learning new skills, or even getting a deeper understanding of urban realities.
Friday, 19th December from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m at Hyderabad Institute of Liberal Arts, 403, B block, Delta Seacon, Road 11, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad – 500034.