Revival

I’m quite sure no one on earth reads my blog but I’ve decided to revive it anyway. Here’s a link to an interesting article I read. This may be a copyright violation but here’s the text of the article because I know the yahoo url won’t last long:

Not Just Physical

Anil K. Gupta

<!–Not just physical–>

Mon, Mar 16 03:21 AM

Providing employment guarantee in regions where the market fails to meet the demand for work at reasonable wages is a state responsibility. However, the present programme doesn’t distinguish between regions where market wage rates are higher than the minimum wage rate and where lower. Obviously, its effectiveness will be limited. Moreover, the programme considers poor people as having only limbs and mouth but no head. If such was not the assumption, the programme would not focus only on physical labour. More than a century ago, after the Deccan riots, the British realised the need for food for work. Conceptually, we haven’t moved much since then. Ironically, India aspires to be a knowledge society, and rightly so. Yet, more than 250 million people are provided 100 days of employment in activities that don’t draw upon resources poor people are rich in – their knowledge, values and location-specific skills. There has never been a bigger effort to deskill society. Recently, there was news about diamond workers returning to their native villages, to dig earth under the employment guarantee programme.

There are a large number of schools that need vocational education, workshops that need skills upgrade and local resources that need value addition. This could be converted into a unique opportunity for transforming rural India. That will require faith in the knowledge and wisdom of people, although that’s not easy these days.

I suggest that the employment guarantee programme be recast totally to generate an entrepreneurial revolution. Then we can dream of a day when the state will not have to provide menial employment since local enterprises will absorb labour. There are several levels at which changes are required to make this programme an unprecedented experiment to transform India. Millions of minds can be mapped besides mapping the physical, biological and other natural resources. At least for five days, 250 million people will document various plants, minerals, soils, water and other resources and with their unique uses, wherever applicable. Village women know from which well they should fetch water if they have to cook dal, which takes longer otherwise. Mapping of biological resources is envisaged under People’s Biodiversity Register, under the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA). The Register of other resources, including traditional knowledge about soil, mineral, climate change, etc, has been maintained by the National Innovation Foundation (NIF). Together, NBA and NIF can map the whole country in a few years’ time and then

periodically update this knowledge base through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. This knowledge will become available for value addition and entrepreneurial exploration.

Outstanding knowledge so documented can be pooled to develop new products and services for which social venture funds can be set up in each district to promote new enterprises. Even if most of the enterprises fail, people would learn to explore, experiment and innovate.

In different parts of India, people have myriad interpretations of Ramayan, Mahabharat and other epics. Numerous other tales exist among people of different faiths. Imagine a portal where recorded tales, songs, etc can be downloaded from in local languages. Not only will the Web get populated with local language content (very scarce today) but also a lot of latent talent will surface. Rendering these stories, recording and uploading them would be purposeful employment. One can make the site e-commerce enabled.

Crops, particularly minor millets grown in dry regions, are naturally rich in minerals found in such soil. Once nutriceutical qualities of such crops are characterised, these can command premium in the market. Using compost to grow such crops would be an added advantage. A whole range of activities is required for managing watersheds and manure development in dry regions. Such employment can require manual work, coupled with important technical knowledge.

Thousands of local varieties preserved in the National Gene Bank are supposed to have descriptive information about local uses of such varieties. However, the relevant column either doesn’t exist in the descriptors of the gene bank or are blank. The employment guarantee programme can be used to generate such data from different households and put it in the gene bank. The food processing industry will get a fillip in the process.

The opportunity for recasting the employment programme

requires moving away from a colonial legacy of treating people as worthy of only menial labour. India deserves better. Indian labour deserves even better because it has such an intimate knowledge of resources, environment, climate change and other factors

of survival.

The writer is at IIM, Ahmedabad, and is executive vice-chair of the National Innovation Foundation express@expressindia.com

Fab Tree Hab

The futurecraft final was yesterday and I found all the projects great. Unfortunately I got stuck in a meeting and couldn’t make it for drinks in the evening. This morning, however, I discovered two websites by two people that I felt were extremely relevant to what I had been doing in class. The first is about arbosculpture – the shaping of living trees, and the second is the Fab Tree Hab. An old media lab project that used arbosculpture to build a house. I need to now think about the implications of these two projects on my work – especially the reverse engineered bookend.

Memories in Metal

Here’s a link to an imitation school desk, with all its markings, graffitti, and dried chewing gum – in metal.

Hand Shaping & Digital Fitting

After making the bookend using a branch from a tree that is a product of nature, I did a simlar exercise with a hand carved dove-tail joint. The first picture above is the original hand carved dove-tail (my first ever . Below that is the reverse engineered joint where I made the tails with laser cut layers of 1/8″ masonite using the flat bed scan of the pins (the CNC router had too many small technical problems that were not worth solving at the moment). The reverse engineered tails fit more snugly than the hand carved ones while preserving the advantages of the hand carved pins (i.e. creative, subjective responses to the contingencies of wood such as the direction of the grain, knots etc.).

Gnarled Root Furniture

Here’s a link to some images of custom furniture made from the complex and irregularly twisted roots of teak and other hard woods. This site has more images and also explains the manifacturing process.

More Reverse Engineering

I’m in the process of making a reverse engineered dove-tail joint. A dove-tail joint is a perpendicular joint between two pieces of wood – one piece has pins and the other has the tails. Based on the grain of the wood, one has to first cut the pins on one piece and then cut the tails on the other piece using the pins as a template. Like with the reverse engineered book end, I want to see if I can make the cutting of the tails more accurate and fast by scanning the pins on a flat-bed scanner (the image above) and cutting out tails that fit them exactly.

Unfortunately the CNC router bit was not long enough for the thickness of the wood, so I’ll have to make another dove-tail with thinner lumber.

Cyborg Artisan

The following extract from an article written in 1881(http://www.telephonecollecting.org/feeling.htm) about electricity examines the question of the outside and inside of the body to the boundary between body and mind itself:

Ritter discovered that a feeble current transmitted through the eyeball produces a sensation as of a bright flash of light by its sudden stimulation of the optic nerve. Dr. Hunter³ saw flashes of light when a piece of metal placed under the tongue was touched against another which touched the moist tissues of the eye. Volta and Ritter heard musical sounds when a current was passed through the ears. Humboldt⁴ found a sensation to be produced in the organs of smell when a current was passed from the nostril to the soft palate.

These early experiments give rise to the idea of the part human part electrical cyborg. If the electrical currents from everyday appliances of the contemporary world were to interface with the boundary between inside and outside, body and mind, what effect will it have on the relationship between an artisan and her/his tool?

The pictures below show this idea applied to a paper cutter and an aluminium cutting surface that produces a sensation of taste when the blade passes through the object being cut:

This is an attempt to bring more of the body – both the inside and the outside – into contact with the tool and therefore bring the tool also closer to the mind.

Importance of De-technologizing: Computer Problems – Again!

For the third time this semester my laptop decided to stop working. All I could “produce” this week were better pictures of the reverse engineered book end I made last week. But not having the computer to distract me I managed to read two books that have set me thinking a lot more…

Material Testing & CNC

Here’s a book end I designed and fabricated as a part of a workshop titled Creative Machining taught by Rab Gordon, Peter Schhmit and Prof. Bill Mitchell last week. I combined 3D laser scanning and CNC routing to create a template to friction fit a small branch into a piece of wood.

De-technologized Non-destructive Testing

Here’s a de-technologized device for the non-destructive testing of the Young’s modulus of a material. The device works by hitting the material to be tested with a screw swinging on a thread. The energy from the collision of the screw and the material is transfered to another screw on the opposite side of the material. The difference in the swing angles of the two screws can give you the coefficient of restitution of the material with respect to the screws. The coefficient of restitution is a function of the Young’s modulus of the two materials.