“The fishermen don't report where they lost the net, our job isn't to retrieve the nets it's just something we do for the ocean, and these trips aren't funded by anyone either. It's a big mess and lack of communication.”
On the brisk morning of January (surprisingly on my birthday), I received a mail from a studio I visited in Goa, called Maker’s Asylum. It is a maker space, where one visits to build things. They hold workshops, events, classes and programs around making culture and topics like woodworking. One of these programs is called SDG school. We’ll get into that later.
I had presented my systems project to them and they had written back to me regarding an ongoing project of theirs called the Royal Enfield Impact Challenge. As a part of the CSR for Eicher Foundation, Royal Enfield was sponsoring a design challenge and a acceleration program for selected ideas through Maker’s Asylum. This meant I was to be the Lead Researcher of this project and as I wasn’t doing anything at the time other than reading, I packed my bags and departed for the coastal region of Goa.
The project involved me firsthand visiting the primary stakeholders and collecting information about ‘Ghost Nets’. This is the famous name given to abandoned fishing nets at sea, that entangle with megafauna (famous name for dolphins, turtles, anything large enough to suffer) and coral reefs, making up about 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is a huge sustainability challenge accounting for one of the most overlooked sustainable development goals: SDG14, Life under water.
As a design researcher I visited up to 14 fishermen, ranging from local to commercial, including hobbyists and trawlers too. Funny thing was they all suffered from this challenge too, as losing a fishnets put a lot of pressure on their wallets. To top it all off, the fishermen went on to blame each other for casting the nets poorly without testing the sites or waters during tides. Either the local fishermen are too lazy, the old ones are stubborn, the new fishermen were inexperienced. the commercial fishermen cast nets too often, the illegal fishermen were the worst of all. So what was the problem again? Ghost nets and why do they exist at all. The ocean currents and rock formations were initially what was assumed as the problem, but these are natural occurrences, which led to me wondering:
The threat was the challenge posed by these ghost nets: the permanence of the material, the ease of entanglement, the responsibility of collection, the end of life of the net, this lest could be endless. Why was it overlooked? The inaccessibility posed by the ocean. This meant that the sole collectors of these nets were the divers.
We approached the diving headquarters of dive organizations around Goa, We even held a brainstorming session with the diving community on how do we tackle this challenge. We learnt more than we informed. The divers organize trips ‘now and then’ dedicated to ocean cleanup. As nobody pays them for these trips (equipment for diving and its maintenance are quite expensive) they rarely happen and only do happen of their own agenda and accord. Consistency is lacking but above all else, the divers are too few and their goal is leisure or exploration, not to be taking responsibility for a natural crisis. We finally did come to an agreement that the divers and the fishermen are far too disconnected in terms of where the net was lost and how can we collect it. The community in general was also unaware of this problem to deal with it appropriately.
After performing our due diligence of spreading posters and collecting testimonies, came the step of collecting submissions from participants all over the country for the challenge. After choosing 8 ideas and inviting them to the facility, was the acceleration period. I had a thought then.
With this in mind I decided to prototype a workshop to explain all of my research in the past two months in the most unbiased, clear fashion, where the participants discover what the real problem is on their own, given that none of them had ever spoken to a fisherman before this.
By dividing them into three groups, representing fishermen, divers and the community, and having them discuss what their individual concerns are. By doing this part they find out what they collectively understand about the problem, and perform perspective sharing. After which I call them all together to announce the MUN (Maker United Nations) to address the concerns of the parties involved. Now, the fishermen republic and diver union stand against each other to prove they have challenges, while the community realizes they are being left out of the conversation. This sparks curiosity and hope when the committee is dissolved shortly after showing that the problem at it’s core is the disconnect of the stakeholders before any of the challenges listed above. If a simple exercise was able to point this out for the attendees, what impact can worldbuilding have on a much larger scale, or can these mechanics that clicked be fleshed out and listed to create more nodes and exercises to explain problems without convincing?
The future of the project as a whole is yet to be figured out, but my personal takeaway is the social impact a designer can have, even from the stance of a researcher.