 I'm Nina Sabnani, Professor at the Industrial Design Center, IIT Bombay. I work primarily in the discipline of animation and communication design. I teach, I research, make animated films and books. Welcome to our course, Understanding Design. We shall be talking about this discipline called design through illustrated lectures and projects that you will do on your own. The way this course is designed, you will have an opportunity to learn from a range of academics and experts. The Dabbawala is a great example where sustainability can be applied. What they do is they give all the office goers who subscribe to the scheme, pink stickers. Whenever food is left over, they place a pink sticker on the Dabbawala and the Dabbawala gives that leftover food to the needy. So we have a large opening and you can easily pick up all the letters and put them back at one go. People don't realize what a fantastic chair this is. So it consists of one S bent metal pipe which is a single continuous piece and that provides comfort while sitting but also it gives you springiness while you sit. In our film, we work together with Sher Singh, a Bheel artist from Madhya Pradesh. Sher Singh and other artists from the Bheel community were quite shy to begin with. But as we began to appreciate each other's expertise, they shared many stories from their folklore which enriched the film in so many ways. Collaboration really means that as a group we are creating something better, something greater than it would be possible for us to create as individuals on our own. Technology has also facilitated the speed and scale at which these products are produced. There are many issues, pollution, depletion of resources, power consumption and products becoming obsolete. So the designer who designs for society must also think carefully about long-term consequences. That's right but you know sometimes even accidents can produce creative designs. Cain is a plant that grows a lot in northeast. However if you make cane furniture in northeast and transport to other cities, the cost really goes up due to transportation. Our innovation was to make it most stackable like this. So like this we can put 100 chairs in a container whereas earlier they could only put 20 chairs. Which means they'll be learning by listening and learning by doing. As a part of the cost you will also undertake regular assignments and those of you working towards a credit you'll also do a final project with a mentor assigned to you. You will have access to a variety of curated content which will be available as resources in different forms like links to articles, podcasts and videos. These resources will be available on the cost platform and you will in fact need to refer to them time and again for a deeper understanding of all that we are going to be talking about. You may ask who is this cost for? What is it about? Well this cost is really meant for anyone who is curious to understand what design is and why is it important? You may be a person interested in studying design formally and this cost will give you a basic introduction. Some of you may need to collaborate with designers in your work or hire them in the future for professional or even personal reasons. More on that later. By the end of the course you should have developed critical skills needed to be able to tell good design from bad. You will appreciate how design shapes and influences our environment and society. You will also have learned something about the various domains and disciplines of design. Aim is to make you familiar with the main concepts and vocabulary needed to pursue your interest in design. Why is this important? Because there are so many notions about what design is and trust me there is a lot of confusion too. Let us listen to our storyteller friend Ankit Chanda who in his unique andas will present us the many notions of design.