Open IDEO Challenge Workshop: How might communities lead the rapid transition to renewable energy?

December 08, 2014

We are a group of Cornell Design Thinkers that conducted a workshop for our peers to introduce them to the concepts of Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a way of critical thinking and problem solving that stresses empathy, rapid prototyping, and a human-centered approach to design. The methodology can be used to solve some of the world’s most critical problems, including designing for new and innovative approaches to incorporate sustainable energy into our communities here at Cornell University and the town of Ithaca, NY. As Cornellians we are no strangers to spending a lot of time thinking about the environment; but now we do not just think, we innovate.

For our Design Thinking workshop, we met with 12 participants from different walks of life. We had three different teams composed of engineers, business students, agricultural scientists, planners, and Cornell staff, all excited about renewable energy. After a brief intro to the challenge, we unleashed the teams on their first brainstorm session and then followed it up with prototyping, or developing the actual product or service

Brainstorming:

Prototyping:

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After the teams worked on their prototypes, they developed skits to demonstrate their new innovations.

The three ideas:

1. A urinal that that creates energy through hydro power by using a system of turbines and centripetal force, while also letting the user know exactly how much energy they generated with each flush.
2. A new roof design that allows snow to melt and flow off of rooftops at an accelerated pace which then goes through a pipe and mini power turbine that generates electricity.
3. Two compost pits, solar panels, and water from the gorge generate energy through heat, solar, and water power to provide renewable energy for greenhouses in order to help small farmers grow during the winter season.

We are still in the process of voting for our favorite, but we will let you know soon!

From the CEO’s Desk

Good explanation of cost fluctuations in Delhi’s organic produce market.

The New Angry Young Man

When Amitabh Bachchan launched to fame in the 80’s he brought with him a new character type, the angry young man. To my experience, the angry young man wears bell-bottoms, was possibly wronged in some way/ experienced some deep childhood tragedy, and spends his young adult life being angry and wanting vengeance. But the angry man can also have a sea change, learn the errors of his ways, or channel his anger towards something beautiful and productive (like trying to save his dying friend). I thought about this stereotype this morning, after I had a night’s sleep to digest Kai Po Che.

I thought a lot about the main character, Ishaan. He shares the spotlight with the other two guys, but I think he stood out as the most accurate embodiment the new Indian leading male. 12 pack abs, chiseled good looks, and a lot of rage. He is markedly different from the other two, and I think is shown to be more ideal. Govind is just the sweet nerdy business guy, and Omi is easily influenced by… everything. But again Ishaan stands out for his passion and yes, his anger. Ultimately Ishaan is portrayed as a good guy, but I think I look at him through a very different lens. For the first half of the film, and some of the second half, Ishaan is not really that nice. He breaks people’s cars (to be fair it took about 15 minutes for my Hindi skills to kick in so maybe he had a good reason to break this guy’s car, I’ll never know), pushes little kids, and physically abuses his sister when she tried to have a heart to heart with him. But all of this seems to be justified because he is training the next Indian cricket star.

I think I found the way he treated his sister to be the most disturbing. In the movie no one really stands up for the way he pulls her hair, and even worse, she forgives him when he barely apologizes. This is the new archetype of the angry young man. The new angry young doesn’t seem to have some traumatic past and has no problem using a lot of violence to achieve his ends. I thought about the new slew of movies which glorify violence, as long as the person’s heart is more or less in the right place. Movies like Rowdy Rathore, Dabangg, and every movie Ajay Devgan has been in recently highlight this violent Indian male who are justified by their cheesy one liners and good intentions.

I’m struggling to understand why these men are the new heroes. Why is this the male we all want? I remember a time when Bollywood leading men were not really like this. I mean way back, back to the nineties (ok, not that far back). While there was still a lot of fighting in the cinemas, the leads were somehow a lot kinder. Think Salman Khan as Prem in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, or the Sharukh from DDLJ. Neither of these guys were angry fighters.¹

Maybe I’m biased. I think of this character in light of the violence I see around me, and in light of the ongoing violence towards Indian women. The perpetuation of male violence justified as “oh, well boys are going to be boys” or “boys just have too much passion” is a dangerous thing. So maybe Ishaan would have gotten married and treated his wife right, but that seems so so doubtful. My point is we forgive the fact that he’s a huge jerk because of his more or less good intentions. It’s that forgiveness that really bothers me. Just like we forgive Chulbul Pandey or Rowdy. And also in light of the expose on violence against women in Delhi, it makes me question why this is the new pinnacle of masculinity.

To clarify, I did really like this movie. And I cried at the end. And maybe you can’t compare the character of Ishaan to Rowdy as they are in completely different genres. But that angry male image seems to stick to both. In a way maybe Ishaan comes around. After all, he is the ultimate hero of the film. Because even though this guy has major anger management issues, he is passionate and selfless. So why can’t we have a movie where the lead is passionate, selfless, and is not an angry super-jacked young man?²

1. Well, on second thought maybe the men of the nineties will still prone to rage, but they also had much more sweeter sensitive side as well which I don’t really see anymore. Exceptions, SRK in RNBDJ. Except we still don’t admire the engineer, we admire that weird guy he transforms into, who wears stunner shades at night.
2. Ok, obviously there are exceptions. Like Madhuvan could probably never play a jerk no matter how hard he tried, or the more obvious 3 Idiots Aamir.

Thinking More About Vows, Habits, and Water

A few hours ago a few of my friend’s and I returned from watching Kai Po Che (which was pretty great) at Select City Walk, Saket. Select City Walk is one of the biggest malls in the city, and personally I’m not the biggest fan. I’m not discriminating, I don’t really like malls in any place. But I guess it irks me more in Delhi because it is a space of exclusion. There are literally entire classes of people who can not enter there. But anyway, this is not about malls. After the movie, my friends I had leftover chips. None of us really knew what to do with them. One of my friends mentioned taking the food with us and just giving it to someone. I don’t really know what happened after that, but we ended up just leaving the chips there. Maybe we were too caught up in the move (two of us were in tears), but it seems like way too careless of an oversight to me.

Anyway, I found myself thinking about those chips on the drive home, but really more so because I could tell my friend was really bothered by it. The thing is, I don’t what stopped us. I don’t know why we didn’t just keep the chips and hand them to somebody, because there were many people on our drive home who could have maybe benefited. It would have taken such little effort on our parts, that I’m really just struggling to understand our actions. Were we being afraid? Did we all take a second to second guess ourselves and just missed a chance to do something a little kinder? I kept seeing those chips in a landfill somewhere, which is really sinful and honestly so stereotypical of an ultra-posh Delhiite (as a point of reference for the Americans, think the more shallow characters on The Hills or any of the Kardashians). I wonder if I’ve just been here long enough to become inured to surroundings and get caught up in the Delhi rat-race, but think it’s got more to do with habits. (Also I’d like to add there are a lot of really awesome people in Delhi too.)

I thought about my efforts over the past year to understand Gandhian Vows. Some of them seem so self-explanatory, but I realized why they are vows. This is why I really really admire Gandhi. It’s because these vows are so difficult to practice, and require serious commitment to internalize. Even the really self-explanatory you-were-taught-this-in-preschool vows, like integrity. Now I’m not a compulsive liar or cheat, but I know there are things I’ve done that have lacked integrity. Maybe we all have. I think I’m starting to realize that many of the traits I really admire about human beings like compassion and empathy are not innate. I don’t think we were born with the ability to feel for others. I think it’s something developed, and something that needs to be practiced consciously. We are taught compassion, we learn kindness, we learn honesty. I guess in this case I am more for the tabula rasa theory, which is the idea that people are born as blank slates and different learnings are ascribed to them as they grow older. Anyway, I guess my point is that good habits and good choices are not necessarily intrinsic. We have to actively try to learn them.

So I guess with the chips, I know it was a mistake and hopefully this will prevent me from making the same bad choice twice. What I remembered was this story I read in the beginning of both the Indicorps Fellowship and the Piramal Fellowship. It’s a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace a year or two before he died. Anyway, he starts off the speech with a story about some fishes that are swimming, and one fish asks the other fish how the water is. And the other fish says, what’s water? Or something like that. (find the full speech here, I’m clearly not doing it justice) Anyway the point is the fish are so so used to their surroundings that they don’t even know what water is (or at least I think that was the point, David Foster Wallace is sometimes hard to understand). Going off of my interpretation, it’s just so easy for me to to put in my headphones and just not think sometimes. How often to I ask myself, “What am I swimming in?” And I don’t want it to become to easy to not do the right thing, or to stop question whatever internal or external world I exist in. I guess I’m realizing that it will take practice. But this should not be a scary of daunting thing, nor should I have a little self-pity party on how I am not a better person. It is just a matter of practicing how to be more conscious with a serious effort. And I wonder what would happen if all of us decided to become more conscious.

More on Multinationals: Seeds

Perhaps surprising no one, I failed to write blogsposts about my thoughts on not buying from multinational corporations. I started a few, but didn’t complete them because I couldn’t figure out my stance. For example, in my last post I started writing about some of my favorite Indian products, Uncle Chips and Thums Up had been bought out by Frito-Lays and Pepsi respectively. But besides ruining the nostalgia I have about the India of my childhood (when I largely survived on Uncle Chips and Thums Up), I didn’t feel like I had much to say. Even though I feel the quality of my favorite junk foods has significantly decreased, at least these factories were built on Indian soil and Indian citizens were receiving some benefit (also receiving harm¹). This weekend however I had the opportunity to visit Navdanya, and I am shocked that as an organic sabjiwalli I haven’t brought up agriculture as the space most largely influenced by multinational corporations.

The truth is, even if I didn’t buy multinational products, there was nothing protecting me from not eating fruits and vegetables from multinational seeds, unless all of my produce came from either I Say Organic (my company: all of our seeds are the local variety) or some other organic company. Since the Green Revolution very few of India’s seeds are actually the local variety with the exception of individuals and organizations like Navdanya who fight to save local seeds. For the most part, seeds are imports and hybrids, developed in labs belonging to the likes of Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, and Syngenta. As of now, 95% of all cotton grown in India is Bt cotton, now notorious for the the link to cotton farmer suicides². Monsanto India’s current stock price is at Rs 610 and they made a net profit of 48 crores as of June 2012. Much of the worlds soy beans are also genetically modified and owned by just a handful of companies (mostly Monsanto- 93% of all US grown soy bean is genetically modified). The monopoly on seeds is particularly insidious to me because it is so subtle. Almost all Indian seed companies are either owned or in partnerships with multinational companies. There is no such thing as an Indian seed company anymore, because they have profited from selling out. These multinational corporations have a particular agenda, and I have very little reason to believe that the real heart of their work is to uplift the poor Indian farmer.

When agricultural corporations came flooding in after the Green Revolution, they also brought the idea that Indian seeds were inherently inferior. Which sounds like much of justification that has been used for colonialism. It did not just stop there. Indian farming methods were inferior, Indian farming implements were inferior. We were made to believe that so many centuries of agricultural knowledge was useless and could never feed the nation. The fields are now homogenous spaces filled with monoculture crops that have strangled out the local varieties. These hybrid seeds by and large are not adapted to all Indian climates, failure rates are quite high, and they kill biodiversity. In the market we find maybe 5-6 varieties of rice, which are grown from seeds sold by one of a handful of companies.

In India there were over 600 hundred varieties of rice. Maybe even more. Some of these grains were drought resistant, high protein, high- yielding, naturally pest repellant, the color purple, and many other characteristics that made them unique and useful. Over the centuries these seeds have adapted to produce plants well adapted to given environments. In the market a farmer has just a few varieties to choose from, and many of these seeds must be bought in conjunction with chemicals. These chemicals degrade the soil and worse, poison both farmers and consumers³. And of course there are the incidences of companies like Monsanto suing small farmers because their seeds have cross- pollinated with Monsanto seeds due to birds or wind, so therefore they are “stealing” Monsanto products.

The grip on seeds is terrifying to me. Why should the entire world live off of monoculture? Why should all tomatoes be the same? As Monsanto works to patent and own all the genomes of all the plants in the world, I am proud to be a part of a community that believes saving local seeds and using them for the betterment of our planet is important. It makes me sad that it is now that most farmers have very little choice but to buy hybrids, but hopefully things can change.  I’m happy that there are a few organizations like Navdanya and the farmers we partner with that have developed local seed banks to preserve all of these varieties. Just the other day when my friend I visited Navdanya’s farm we asked about a variety of wheat that could grow well in the cold climate of New Hampshire and would do well in clay. Within minutes the staff sifted through their mental catalog of 185 wheat varieties and made a recommendation. This is how it should be for all farmers. They have the right to buy seeds that will actually benefit them. And as consumers, we have the right to eat seeds that one are not covered in poisons and two actually support local farmers. Maybe in any other circumstance I could represent a less biased viewpoint, but I do feel there is something inherently wrong with 5 companies owning all of the seeds planted in the world.

1. Coca Coca’s factories in India have depleted ground water tables and have dumped thousands of gallons of toxic sludge from production into local farm lands by selling the sludge as “fertilizer.”
2. Since 1995 270,000 farmers have committed suicide in India due to agricultural debt. It’s an incredibly vicious cycle, they take loans or mortgage their lands to buy seeds and chemicals from seed companies, and are unable to repay the loan at the end of a growing season.
3. Chemicals used in agrculture are linked to cancer, gastrisis, birth defects, and mental ill-ness.