Team preparation for research

It started off by understanding what does 'Smart' mean. We sat in groups to brainstorm about Smart Living, Smart Cities, Urban Living, our understanding of it as well as our future perspective about these topics.

We also brainstormed on the kind of inequalities are globally present.

We, students of LAD'2017, divided ourselves into 4 teams and started interviewing people from in and around the city. We visited public parks, eating joints, nurseries, schools, colleges, residential places, government offices, temples, government departments, bus stops, private offices, and much more; just to get an understanding of the city, its working, its culture, and its people.

Meanwhile, we also attended the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2019, to get a hang of what is the vision of the higher authorities for the development of the state and our country.

Methodology Adopted

We had different approaches to take interviews. In cases of retail stores and small businesses, we would go in as a customer and casually strike a conversation.

In cases of government officials, lawyers, polices officers, etc., we would first introduce ourselves and then get required information about the city.

Synthesis

Later we realized that instead of scattering ourselves randomly, each group can target certain areas to understand the city and its people better and in depth. We worked on the above individual sections of the city to interlink it as a whole later.

So we divided the city in terms of major categories:

• People

• Culture

• Lifestyle & food habits

• Government offices and Secretariat

• Transportation systems

• Informal sector/Underprivileged

• Schools and colleges

• Religion

• Infrastructure

• Economic backbone

We studied about the planning of the city and how the people and culture were mainly responsible in it. We needed to understand the point of friction among the city and its residents, so as to derive opportunities for design intervention.

Being a planned city it was quite difficult to find these, because the city is well thought out and very well maintained by the people. We found a good number of opportunity areas in the city.

The various characteristics and unique features of the city of Gandhinagar were identified. They were then mapped out to explain their interrelations.

For example, being a ‘Dry State’ makes it a safe and secure city, ideal for families and a good place to study. But at the same time it might have lead to an increase in pan parlors. It is also a good place to study and hence, there are a lot of educational institutes here. It also leads to the city have no night life (when compared to other metro cities).

Since there are a lot of educational institutes, a lot of students find it difficult to live on rent, because residents do not prefer to rent their spaces to bachelors. This is because there is a preconceived notion of millennials behaving in a certain manner and being irresponsible. Hence, there is a friction amongst the residents of Gandhinagar and the migrated population from other cities or states.

There is a majority of Hindus which are 95% of the total population of the city, hence there a cultural friction with migrants of other cities/states.

Final outcome : GIGA MAP

• Government

• People

• Infrastructure

• Environment

• Economy

• Mobility

These are the key domains of the city around which other aspects revolve.

The mapping of the system in Gandhinagar enabled us to understand the social, economic and cultural ecosystem of Gandhinagar city. The representation of the working of the entire city is done in the form of a giga map. GIGA-mapping is a super extensive mapping across multiple layers and scales, investigating relations between seemingly separated categories. It helped us in visualization of complexity in the systems and in development of organised strategies which would facilitate development of Gandhinagar in context of smart city which we as design student visioned. Thereby, each team identified a particular problem area through GIGA map and converted into an opportunity for service design for social change.