Codesign Field Visit
As part of the communications team, my field visit brief was to get an initial understanding of the environment for the sanitation facility as well as of the visual culture of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
In my short, three-day visit, I covered two slums in Bhubaneswar and another in Cuttack. This was my first visit so it was also important to interact with the on-field teams working in Odisha as much as possible.
On my first day at Bhubaneswar I met Mahinder from CFAR. He has been working with these slum communities for the last thirty years so it was important to get his perspective on the people given his extensive experience. After a brief introduction session, he showed me materials created by different development sector NGOs, such as WaterAID, for Odisha.
I observed that the collaterals were made for two specific audiences:
1. For the development workers – Designed in Hindi as the material was to be distributed to development workers across India. The illustrations were laid out in a step-by-step, easy-to-explain method.
2. For the end-user – The text was written in the regional language with very simplified illustrations.
The numbers in most collaterals were in English.
Mahinder also gave me a few insights into the language distribution of the community slums across Bhubaneswar. This insight will help us assess the languages to be used for communications in different sectors. The breakup was as follows:
– 70% Oriya
– 30% Bengali, Bangladesh, Bihar, Telegu
One interesting note Mahinder told me was that 30% people who were not Oriya by origin knew the language as they had been living in the state for generations.
The meeting with Mahinder was followed by a field visit accompanied by the CFAR team in Bhubaneswar.
My first site was Rahmat Nagar in Bhubaneswar. While most people resorted to open-defecating, one family did have a toilet that they had built themselves. The members of this family are responsible for maintaining the toilet.
The occupants of the slum were scrap dealers, which meant the overall facade of the slum had a lot of various mechanical parts. The colors were defined by doors and walls made up of billboards and black tarpaulins. We were taken around the slum by the a community leader named Chacha. He showed us around the slum and introduced us to a few families. The communication in the slum happened mostly through a few key words like Tatti (“Shit”), but I quickly ascertained that Hindi was not very pervasive.
Chacha took us to a place where the government had painted public welfare messages. The common response I received from people about the messaging was that only the visuals could be understood. Also people who did not know how to read and write, could understand latin numbers comfortably up to 10.
The second site was Kargil Colony in Bhubaneswar, named after the Kargil War. We were again guided by a community leader, this one named Vishwanath. All the houses had built bathrooms and toilets. The community had a Patachitra (Oriya Art) artist, who told me about the increasing popularity of the color Parrot Green.
The slum was well organized and consisted of mainly artisans. Oriya was not not a problem in the community, they could speak, write and understand the language. The local temples were decorated and painted by the community artist. They were also aware of the government plans and policies that were running in their locality.
The next day I visited Cuttack along with Akshay from the Quicksand Team. Our contact person for Cuttack is Geeta Didi from CFAR; she took us to a community slum there. The slum had one community toilet and all of its 1,500 residents used it.
The toilet was well planned. It had separate toilet and bathing sections for males and females. There was a separate section for children with brighter colors and illustrations. The signage inside the toilet was in English and Oriya, although only Oriya was understood by the masses.
A sense of art and culture was embedded into the community, as the housewives had decorated their houses, and its surroundings, by painting intricate patterns and motifs specific to the region. Speaking to few residents, I understood that the visual motifs played an important role in their associations with spaces. Government messages were painted in Oriya at the night shelter office at the entrance of the community, thereby ensuring that people from the community could see it. In general, the state government spends lots of time and money reviving the art and culture of across Odisha.
Post visit, and also having concluded an intensive workshop with the internal Quicksand-Samman team, we are now working on directions to test visual and communication ideas with the user group.