Browsing by Author "Agarwal, Anuja"

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    A Framework to Explore “the Grass Roots” in Rural Villages By Design Innovation Thinking
    (2012-05-21) Salunkhe, Uday; Agarwal, Anuja; Ekman, A; Ekman, S
    In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world´s population lives in towns and cities. By 2030 United Nations estimate this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentreated in Africa and Asia [UNFPA, 2011]. While mega-cities like Mexico City, Mumbai and Shanghai have captured much attention, most of the new growth will be in smaller towns and cities. But these have fewer resources to respond to the magnitude of change. Poverty is however now growing faster in urban than in rural areas especially in less-developed regions. A challenge is to find new opportunities, new ideas and building new mindsets for developing the rural areas and their infrastructure with new enterprises, innovation, entrepreneurship, industrial locations, ICT, and much more. The village life can also become models for a more sustainable way of living than in many of the overcrowded cities with their growing slum areas. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss an approach and theoretical framework for an on-going long term project for ideas and new perspectives in design innovation for education and research which probably can change mindsets; and how to provide methods and processes for rural village development.
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    Software Tool for Supporting Ethnographic Research in Design and Innovation Projects in Management Education
    (IEEE, 2010-07-01) Agrawal, Minakshi; Agarwal, Anuja; Krishnamoorthy, Aparna; Pendse, Pradeep
    Increasing interest in Design/Ethnographic research in various domains including management education creates opportunities and challenges. One of them is the qualitative data of various types such as observations on sticky notes, photos, observation diaries, video clips etc. Where the volume of such qualitative data is small a designer can use simple visual clustering techniques to discover insights. However for large design research projects it could become unmanageable to say the least. The question arises if a software tool could be created which could support this process of mining insights. This paper aims at introducing such a software tool for supporting design/ethnographic research in management education. Such a software was developed and deployed for capturing observations about the lifestyle of the people living in villages with a view to understand their energy needs. The software helped capture qualitative and quantitative data from nearly 80 field researchers engaged in this research. Encouraged by this success, the software is being enhanced to become a generic tool for design/ethnographic research. The paper describes the challenges in managing design/ethnographic research data using the energy project as a case in point and the utility of the software for that project as well as the visualization of a more generic solution for design/ethnographic research.