Bangalore: Silicon Valley of India

Project managers Gijs and Loes will be visiting Bangalore in India to meet our partners from Fields of View, collaborators on the Design Across Cultures project we will be doing with Cisco, starting this fall. The research objective of this project is to investigate women’s safety in public space. We will be doing this in Amsterdam as well in Bangalore, with two project teams on location. Bangalore is the biggest ICT hub in India and the obvious place to be for us.

Fields of View will be coaching the Bangalore side of the project. They are a research organisation and design studio that aim to enhance learning and education, decision making and participatory processes, using games, visualisations and simulations. Their main areas of focus are urban systems and public safety and security. A perfect match for a project partner!

On a meta-level, we aim to generate more insights about design processes across cultures. An international team (including some students from India) will conduct research about the topic here in Amsterdam, and vice versa in Bangalore. Their processes run in parallel and they will share their knowledge and findings regularly using Cisco’s impressive teleconferencing rooms. We expect to learn from their approach to design processes and research results and hope we can inspire them as well.

But we start off by getting to know each other a bit better by spending some face to face time. We will be visiting Cisco’s Bangalore office, Fields of View of course, and we plan to see some universities and design labs such as Shrishti Labs and CEMA. There’s plenty on the program but we’re hoping to make our way out of Electronics City too (Silicon Valley of India, just outside Bangalore) and get a whiff of all the spices and Indian culture.