Earn LearnManav Sadhna15.6.2012

I took this photo in the Gandhi Ashram, that’s Gandhi’s house on the left. Walk past the house, keep going straight and you’ll find Manav Sadhna.

The first time I walked into Manav Sadhna, I was just in time for morning prayer. I can remember being struck by an overwhelming sense of kindness.

During prayer, Manav Sadhna celebrate all of the world religions. This is what Gandhi used to practice too — tolerance.

Manav Sadhna translates roughly as ‘service to mankind’. It was started by three people Viren Bhai, Jayesh Bhai and Anar Didi.

Viren Bhai, Jayesh Bhai and Anar Didi began by helping children in the local community. There was no big expectation, they just started doing it.

…and it began growing. Today Manav Sadhna cares for over 5,000 children with programmes like education, health and nutrition. This was all started using one simple tool…

A basic set of nail clippers is what Manav Sadhna used to engage with children, cutting their nails and teaching them about basic hygiene. This is the Manav Sadhna way — Complex problem; simple solution.

This kind of approach was inspired by Jayesh Bhai’s father Ishwar Dada. He devoted his entire life to breaking the caste system by designing toilets — Again, a complex problem; simple solution.

When I first learned this, I realised that these guys were already designing by distilling problems into neat solutions. I had a lot to learn. So I decided to sit back for a while, observe and ask questions.

I learned how Manav Sadhna had engaged with the community to help build a community centre, involving them at the planning stage.

I met The loving community, former Leprosy sufferers that Manav Sadhna had been helping by cleaning up their neighbourhood and trying to find them alternative livelihoods to begging.

And I saw how The loving community produced Rangoli patterns and learned that Rangoli’s were specific to each region in India.

I spent a night at the blind school in Gandhinigar and played cricket with the kids. I learned how Manav Sadhna were looking after their spiritual wellbeing with classes in laughing yoga.

And I visited the music class at the blind school and learned how important music was to them.

Very soon it was Christmas. I was totally immersed in the culture of Manav Sadhna. Now I felt it was time get going with the work.

The name of the kid on the left of this photo is Michael. He works for the guy on the right, helping him with his Chai stall. He doesn’t go to school, he is a child labourer. Right now, his future is making Chai.

The guy on the left in this photo is Yogesh Bhai. The guy on the right is Jagat Bhai. Together they work on the Earn Learn programme, which tries to help kids like Michael stay in school and earn a living.

Each day, Earn Learn kids come to work at Manav Sadhna. They make paper products such as cards, bags and notebooks. They earn money, get fed and receive extra ‘tution’ classes.

In fact Yogesh Bhai used to be an Earn Learn kid himself. Now he supervises the work being done and looks after the orders.

Jagat Bhai has been working with Earn Learn for over 15 years. When I first met him I asked him to teach me like an Earn Learn kid. ‘Don’t worry’ he told me ‘we all are learning together’.

Sadly, not all kids can be helped. Jagat Bhai has spoken with Michael a few times about joining but he shows no interest. He’s happy with the freedom street life gives him. This has to be respected.

The kid in the photo is named after Bollywood star Bobby Deol. He’s the first Earn Learn kid I hung out with. Bobby and I didn’t share the same language but we quickly developed a way of communicating.

When I met Bobby and his friends, I needed to find a way of remembering their names so I started doing caricatures of their faces. Bobby and his crew liked this a lot — I soon got requests.

To pick up some language, I would draw certain objects, point at them and gesture until I was given its name. One day I drew a hammer ‘Hathodi’ they told me ‘HATHODI!’ I yelled — I soon got requests.

One thing I learned during my fellowship is that as a commercial designer, you’re generally working as part of a community of other design friendly people.

As an embedded designer, you are embedded in a community that is not design based. So you need to build your own community that can support you.

I soon discovered that Jagat Bhai and Yogesh Bhai didn’t have a lot of time to give me. So I needed to find other people to work with.

I began with Jignesh, a former Earn Learn kid now working as a graphic designer. He wanted to learn more about design. I wanted to help.

Then I met Rahul, a photographer volunteering at Manav Sadhna. Rahul was good with people and took great photographs. He agreed to help me.

Meanwhile I met a few people from the Indian design community. I wanted to understand more about design in India. I met with Prof. Ranjan. He linked Indian design back to craft.

I wasn’t really convinced until Gaurav, a Bangalore based designer, gave me an example…

Calico, he explained, is India’s oldest example of communication design. For centuries it has been used as a way of telling stories — I was convinced.

The same day that I met Prof. Ranjan and Gaurav, I met with one of the finest block makers in Gujarat. A light went off in my head and I drew a connection…

I remembered how, the day before, Jagat Bhai had talked about giving newspaper bags away for free. The bags would have an environmental message stamped on them — could the block maker help?

I approached Jignesh and invited him to work with me. I hoped that in return I might be able to teach him some new design skills.

We began the work by surfing the web, looking for as many images of trees as we could find. We did this until we were absolutely sick of looking at them…

But let me just pause that story there for a moment while I explain something else to you…

When I first met with Earn Learn I was told that they needed a new website. So I studied the existing site and discovered something interesting…

There was no visible connection between the kids and the products the kids were making.

I began to think about how I might be able to tackle this problem. I got in touch with Rahul and asked him for some help.

I asked Rahul if we could experiment with a few different ways of photographing the products and the kids. I wanted to take the products…

…and put them straight back into the hands of the kids who had made them. Now the story was loud and clear — ‘I made this!’.

Rahul and I also spent a day with Ranjana, filming her at her home, in her school and Earn Learn.

Spending time with Ranjana, I saw how the kids daily lives consisted of a triangle that involved home, school and Earn Learn.

School

Community

Earn Learn

Occasionally Earn Learn would be taken somewhere like Seva Café (another Manav Sadhna related project) but for the most part, their daily lives were small. I wondered if I could help with this…

OK, so let’s pick up on the story with Jignesh again…

Jignesh and I drew around 30 - 40 different trees. But now we had to work out what drawings were good and what drawings were bad. I had an idea…

I knew very early on that working at Manav Sadhna would involve some improvisation. I needed some props so I bought some rope and some clothes pegs.

I took the rope and clothes pegs into the Earn Learn space and used them to hang up the drawings. We then invited each kid to vote on the 5 drawings they liked best by marking each drawing with a pencil.

We’d taken a significant step. The children had never been involved in designing the products before. Could an approach like this give them the opportunity?

It was now mid January, the eve of the Kite festival (Utran) in Ahmedabad. I was expecting visitors and I needed to prepare for them.

For one week I would be joined in the Ashram by four NID graduates: Anish, Manasi, Shardha & Teesta as part of the UnBox fellowship

To prepare for it, I had the help of another volunteer, Siddarth. Together, we worked out a plan of activities that would expose the fellows to the culture of MS.

I took the fellows to see Kalum Kush, the paper making factory across the road from the Ashram that supplies the paper used by Earn Learn.

We spent a night with some of the kids and got a deeper understanding of what their lives were like.

We slowly built up a rich picture of what the kids world was like and began mapping it out.

We shared some of our findings at the UnBox festival in Delhi. It was an inspiring event and it gave me a few more ideas about where the work needed to go next.

At a workshop at UnBox, host Indi Johar made a challenging statement: Industrialised design processes threatened to destroy India; Instead, India needed to preserve its craft based heritage.

Johar then alluded to another brave statement made earlier that day by Indian designer Amardeep Behl. India, Behl had said, could build the Taj Mahal again.

What I took this to mean was that industrial processes tend to be isolated from society. That factories and other mechanisms for industrial manufacturing are abstracted from the community.

Craft production tends to be more socially ingrained. The building of the Taj Mahal for instance would have involved many artisans, gardeners, woodsmen, sailors, masons from the community.

Johar’s statement made me question my own role as a designer working in India. I was reminded of what Prof. Ranjan and Gaurav had said about Indian design and craft. Could I adapt my way of working?

After the Unbox conference, with Amardeep Behl’s words still ringing in my ears, I visited the Taj Mahal. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

And on my way back from the Taj Mahal, I paid a visit to the National Gallery of Modern Art. It was a great opportunity to become familiar with some of India’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

Remembering the pattern of the Earn Learn kid’s daily lives made me think: would it be possible for the kids to be given the same opportunity as me?

School

Community

Earn Learn

On the train back to Ahmedabad, I discovered I hadn’t reserved my seat properly. It was a long night…Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Indi Johar had said. I was inspired to build my own Taj Mahal.

Back in Ahmedabad, I began thinking about the website again. I was uncomfortable about imposing a western aesthetic on the site. I began thinking about what Gaurav had said about Calico…

I thought about the different components needed for the site and began researching 4 groups of images: photograph of people working/making, Indian artists, typography/caligraphy, Indian textiles/patterns.

I printed these out and, with Yogesh’s help, laid them out on the floor. The kids would help choose the aesthetic for me. I had brough the art gallery to them.

Soon it was March. There was a lot to get done. Staying late one evening, Yogesh Bhai, Jagat Bhai and began work on an important piece…

…the heart of Earn Learn. If we would figure out the Earn Learn identity, then we could communicate it to others. Together we established how Earn Learn thinks, behaves, acts and speaks.

This was important work. It helped us focus and engage with what we were doing. Now that we held the heart of Earn Learn, it was time to test it out…

Jagat Bhai came to me one day. He needed some help. He wanted to send a thank you email to an Earn Learn supporter. OK, I said, let’s see if we can get one of the kids to help us.

So we called Ranjana over, the girl Rahul and I had filmed, and explained what we needed help with. We showed her the existing Earn Learn website.

Then we showed her a map of the world (Ranjana had never seen a map of the world before). This is where you are now, we explained, and here (pointing at Chicago) is where the Earn Learn supporter lives.

Then we used Google Street View to show Ranjana the street where the supporter lives. We explained to her that we wanted to send her a thank you note by post and that she would be the one writing it.

We asked Ranjana what she felt about Earn Learn — It’s like a family, she said. What do you want to ask the supporter? we asked. ‘I would like to know if she likes our cards’ she told us.

So Ranjana wrote the note, she wrote the address on the envelope and posted her first letter.

Children Manav Sadhna

Earn n Learn

Audience

This was the Earn Learn heart in action. The kids voice would communicate the project and they would speak to their supporters directly.

Children

Manav Sadhna

Earn n Learn

Audience

By moving Manav Sadhna and Earn Learn out of the way, the kids now had ownership of their programme. It belonged to them.

Meanwhile, the kids had made a selection of the material I showed them. I studied the it carefully and built another four groups: Animals, Flowers, Colour and Lettering

I split the kids into groups again, this time I gave them some brushes and some paint and invited them to draw flowers, animals, colourful objects and letters.

The results were quite random. Perhaps I’d been a bit naive? It turned out the kids had never used paint before so the results were a bit messy.

But a few of the drawings caught my eye. I cleaned them up and dropped them into a dummy web page. I liked the results. They had charm.

This prompted me to document more visual motifs inside the Earn Learn space. I wanted to develop a visual language that was honest. I spent time taking photos of small details…

I wanted to turn the Earn Learn space inside out so that people got a virtual sense of what it was like to visit the programme.

Summer began. Ahmedabad hit temperatures of 42º (104 Fahrenheit), making work difficult.

Forced in doors by the heat, I started working up a structure of the website, how it might look and how it might function.

Once I had figured out a structure, I began building an interactive prototype. This allowed me to a) test the functionality and b) involve more people. (Here you can see Earn Learn kid Utsav testing it out.)

With the structure underway, I now started thinking about content. I approached Nilam, a teacher at Manav Sadhna and invited her to help me. Could she get the kids to write the content?

Nilam spoke with some of the children. She asked them to think about three topics: The Community, Manav Sadhna, Earn Learn. She asked them to write a paragraph each.

The kids wrote a few paragraphs for me. But it left me with a problem — I needed to translate them.

That’s when volunteers Asheesh and Adeshwar stepped in to help. They very quickly took the written pieces and translated them into English for me!

Then I began working with Earn Learn kid Utsav. Utsav was interested in improving his English skills. Perhaps we could help each other out?

Utsav and I took all the written content, printed it out and began cutting up the sentences, ordering them into the three themes:Community, Manav Sadhna, Earn Learn

Once the sentences were prepared, Utsav and I began to stick them onto three separate sheets. The sentences could be played around with easily. The results were quite pleasing.

With all this focus on the website, it would be easy to forget about the bag project I had begun with Jignesh. It was important to get this work finished.

Together, we made prototypes of the paper bags. and invited the kids to vote by putting a piece of paper into their favourite bag.

Once the kids had made their selection, I spoke to Jagat Bhai. It was time to meet with the block maker.

We met with the block maker who agreed to make the block. He told us it would take him about a week…

While the block was being made, I asked Vinod Bhai, the sign writer for the Gandhi Ashram, if he could help me out with some lettering…

…and I asked Sanam, a fellow volunteer if he could help me interview some of the kids.

Together, Sanam and I interviewed the kids. We asked the kids to share their experience of Earn Learn with us. Some of their stories were very moving.

A few days later, the block arrived…

Jagat Bhai gave the kids a demonstration and showed them how to use it.

Each of the Earn Learn kid’s were given a turn to use the block. And by the end of the day…

…they had printed almost 300 paper bags.

Using a process like this helped generate a product that involved the kids. It also generated a story that could be embedded in the product.

Together, Jignesh and I had found a way of involving the kids in the design of the products. From now on Earn Learn would try and include the kids more in the design process — this was promised to me.

Time was running out but I still continued to test and tweak the prototype for the website. It was important that everything functioned properly.

But once I had shown it to the kids, and they’d given it the thumbs up, I knew that it was time to start making it.

Living and working at Manav Sadhna taught me the value of simplicity. It taught me that basic needs often require basic solutions…

I also learned how to think about design as a way of connecting people, building community and identity.

My own community had begun small but quickly expanded to include many more people. Now that I was leaving, this community belonged to Earn Learn.

My time was up. Yogesh Bhai and some of the Earn Learn kids joined me at the airport and I waved goodbye…for now.

Perhaps one day, I could come back and we could all go and visit the Taj Mahal together.