Big Idea - Green Livelihoods

It's been a hectic fortnight. Looking for a flat/ house in Gurgaon. Sometimes you can be spoilt for choice:-)

At the airport, leafing through the latest Outlook Money with the cover story on 30 businesses under Rs. 5 lacs, stumbled upon this innovative 'green company' Bamboo House India!

Bamboo House India, a social enterprise, started by two First Generation Entrepreneurs, Aruna Kappagantula & Prashant Lingam in 2008 aims to use Bamboo as an economic driver for providing sustainable livelihood opportunities to rural & tribal artisans in the Bamboo sector through market linkages.

BHI is striving to create a chain of bamboo showrooms across the country which shall promote & market all bamboo based products under one roof starting from Bamboo pens to Bamboo Housing Structures!
Do check out their products here!

Their vision is to create a long term sustainable non-migratory business model for rural and tribal artisans in the Bamboo sector by using locally available raw material i.e. bamboo and develop contemporary life style products to suit the market tastes and demand rather than being consigned to age old basketry items.

I am trying to get in touch with Aruna and Prashant. Starting this month, I plan to devote 10-15% of my time to support, help market and evangelise such efforts. In case you know of any social-enterprise that is in need of marketing, strategy, branding, design support, please direct them to me. I would be happy to help them!

Wish BHI best of luck in their innovative and sincere effort to create green livelihoods!

Jonathan iVe - design sutras

Read this piece on the world's 100 most creative people on fastcompay.com on my feed-reader! Perhaps predictably the fabled Apple design head Jonathan iVe tops this list.

This week as I slip into a new job and a project on the Millenials, for some strange reason, I am pulled towards design and design related thots.

Few design sutras from the article gleaned from Jon's profile.

1. Design According to Ive - "There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is." (Wired)

2. Referring to the Apple design team - "The memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work." (Interview for Design Museum,2003)

3. "Very often design is the most immediate and explicit way of defining what products become in people's minds." (Interview for BBC, 2002)

This is such a profound revelation. Often in most agencies, planners(me-in-the-immediate-past included) waste a lot many hours unlocking the meaning of the brand only to discover that the design maybe at variance with the meaning. More frightfully, the design and the brand communication happen in separate silos. Brand communicators and the design guys are frequently not in sync with each other.

4. "With technology, the function is much more abstract to users, so the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer."

And it's so strange and sad that product design in many companies is totally delinked from marketing's hunt for meaning.

5. "Something like the iPod is a melding of design and user experience and marketing and pop culture, and you don't achieve that without coordination throughout the company. And for that you need a CEO who gets it."

Mental note - Must catch more of iVe's interviews on the www.