Idiom design helps businesses tap into what Indians long for
Chris Nolan’s 2010 blockbuster Inception had Leonardo di Caprio in the role of a spy who decodes dreams. Over the past two days in Bangalore, 101 students from 20 well known management, design, communications and technology schools have been undergoing similar training in decoding the dreams and aspirations of Indians. Starting tomorrow, they will be travelling by train, in second-class compartments, talking to the people they meet and asking them about their dreams and aspirations related to family, work, recreation and products, and capturing these on video.
They are part of a unique project, Dream:IN, dreamt up by Sonia Manchanda, co-founder of city-based Idiom Design, one of the largest design consultancies in India. The aim of the project is to create a database of dreams of Indians across demographies in order to be able to distill concrete, do-able plans from these, plans that entrepreneurs can build a business on.
“It is time to unlock the dreams of every common man, woman and child,” says Manchanda, echoing former president APJ Abdul Kalam. “All innovations start with dreams. So to find a more sustainable way to keep dreams alive, we dreamed up this project,” she adds.
When these 101 dreamcatchers come back to Bangalore, after having covered around 25,000 km, and captured some 10,000 dreams of citizens from every strata of society across the length and breadth of India, their inputs will be categorised, analysed for use by business leaders, educators, social entrepreneurs, policymakers and designers to devise “transformative and inclusive” products and services.
The project might sound very futuristic but it has managed an impressive list of partners and associates.
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For instance, among those who trained the students at Bangalore this week were Carlos Teixeira, faculty at the department of design and management, Parsons The New School for Design (he is also the project’s co-director); Meena Kadri from New Zealand, an anthropologist with a masters in design; and Prakash Unakal, head of industrial design at Bangalore’s MSR School of Advanced Studies.
Besides several executives from Nokia and Ogilvy & Mather’s offices globally, who are self-financing their trips to Bangalore to be part of Dream:IN, are two Brazilians — Tomás Cunzolo Junior and Claudia Meirelles Davis. The former runs Artlife, an international trade and distribution company representing North-American and European housewares brands such as Cuisipro, Kahla Porcelain and Rosti Mepal in Brazil; while the latter has extensive experience in supply-chain management.
Dream:IN’s has bagged an equally eminent band of funders: Kishore Biyani of the Future group (his company is also an investor in Idiom Design) as mentor, Ranjan Pai and Manipal University; IBM, which will be funding the portal; and Panasonic, which will be giving the laptops that the students will be taking with them.
Back in Bangalore, a panel of experts will be working on the raw “dreams” that the 101 dreamcatchers will send back, tagging, collating and categorising them in time for the mega ‘Dream:IN conclave’ to be held from February 16 to 19. Here these dreams will be shared and processed with eminent leaders of industry, policymakers, teachers, social workers and such like. They can make use of the “raw dreams” for free, but will have to pay for the analysed data.
There are also plans to build Dream:In Centres in several cities across India, studios where “future scenarios can be developed”. The first will come up in Manipal University and there are talks to have one in Sri Lanka.
Among other plans are a portal where dreams can be shared and future scenarios based on them discussed; Dream:IN Society, comprising people who will monitor the realisation of the dreams; and Dream:IN Method, a design thinking method, by Spread, Idiom Design’s design education initiative and Parsons.
Now that’s what they call a dream business.