 Welcome back to Understanding Design. Hope you managed to do your assignment because today we are going to discuss a new aspect of design. In the last module, we spoke about users and context and their importance for design. Today we will discuss design for society with Professor Vinita Desai. Professor Desai is a graphic designer, animation filmmaker and a design teacher. Welcome, Vinita. Please tell us how design and society are related. Thanks, Nina. Design, as we know, strives to improve the quality of life. It is well known that designed objects and environments influence human behavior. They may even help to establish patterns of working and living that may help people with everyday concerns. Design for society concerns itself with the invention and refinement of ideas, objects and systems while being sensitive to what nature can teach us. Ideas, objects and systems are made by humans and are all related to one another. Ideas, objects and systems, that's huge. So can we see how an idea could lead to an object being designed which may evolve into a system? Yes, sure. Let's consider the idea of transport. Throughout history, people have needed to move from place to place to transport materials for trade and manufacture. For millennia, hula carts, criss-crossed India on mud roads and then over centuries, people developed a network or system of roads. Later came the railways, beginning with a small trial run from Bori Ballar in Mumbai to Thane to the complex system that we know today covering thousands of kilometers. Ideas, objects and systems, they have complex histories, not just in the recent past like the railways, but often across centuries, right? It's good to learn from the past and even from contemporary societies which continue with certain old practices from pre-industrial times. Take the root bridges in the northeast. If you're in that area, you may come across amazing bridges made by villagers from living trees and their roots. These feats of engineering are built by the people from their own resources, they're made from local materials, maintained by the community and have lasted for generations. Now let's pause here and go to the next tab to see a short video on one such bridge near Chhera Punjain Meghalaya. That's right.