Induced Eureka moments

By - Anoop Jha

Using knowledge to validate the creativity

If you are one of those creative souls like writers, director, fashion or product designers, architects, interior designers or planners, you must have, at random times experienced those intentional or uninvited eureka moments of creativity when you think you have cracked the code. In that moment you are absolutely sure what you are up to and sure about where you are going.  One might think it’s just a matter of chance, a coincident. Think again, it might be subconscious mind working unconsciously on the project you got last fortnight but couldn’t get time to sit and draft a blueprint. It might be your active eyes looking for inspiration into the hidden recesses of surrounding or on the bright facades’ of city streets, without you noticing it and it suddenly manifests itself in form of idea or solution which you were looking for.

Apparently it’s possible to increase the frequency of occurrence of those creative eureka moments by remaining consciously vigilant to surrounding environment while identifying existing problems and possible solutions and getting inspired by the dynamics of environment at the same time.

One can increase the probability of finding right solution by conscious and frequent encounter with ever increasing and freely available creative resources like online data repository. The more you explore more you become confident about what you are aiming for and at the same time you open the door for creativity surge. You got to find out and see every existing or proposed green skyscraper and sustainable development project first, if you are set to create a green architectural or planning masterpiece for example.  

Need for Dining Masterplan of city: most of us will agree!

By - Anoop Jha

From Hmmm to Ymmm 

When you feel hungry, when you don’t want to have homemade food, when you are tiered of cooking, when you are looking forward to a wonderful weekend break or planning for a New Year party or simply want to hangout out with your friends and family, you immediately do either one or more of the following things –

·  You turn to your location based smart phone to find nearest restaurant

·    You google a happening restaurant in your city, resulting lots of confusing results with too much of hassle to filter information

·   You open an online map with innumerous popped up restaurant locations

·    You go to food critic site and find too much about taste and too little about route, location, public transport connection and parking facilities.  

·     You turn to visitors reviews only to find out there are two distinct groups one “for” and other “against” the restaurant sharing their biased opinions, leaving you without any clue what to do.

And in the course of exploring the dining possibilities you are really getting late and getting frustrated while your wife or girlfriend is getting disappointed. What’s the solution?

Structured & Informative dining masterplan

Leaving taste and ambiance reviews to food critics and users, someone has to take the responsibility to create a comprehensive dining map of the city to avoid all this confusion providing relevant details for resident of the city and tourists as well, since intracity leisure trips comprises of a major chunk or travel numbers. Responsibility of providing timely and accurate information related to city amenities whether dining, leisure or other should technically lie with city for providing a hassle free transport and living experience for city population and urban planners can definitely contribute in consolidating and presenting a comprehensive “Dining Masterplan of city”.

Social media and its ignored role in planning process

By- Anoop Jha

Utilising Background noise of social media for better planning

There is always a resistance and hesitance to change, resistance to adapt to new technology, new methods, new thoughts. Same is the case of age old planning procedure. Take for example surveys and participatory planning. Surveys both primary and secondary play a very important role in any Urban and regional planning endeavor and project of any scale and nature, implemented through any agency whether private or Govt. or PPP. Also due to rigidity and shortsightedness of planning process we forgot to include the recently emerged but powerful segment of social structure called Social Media whose feedback and opinion matters a lot. Tech savvy active segment of population who emerged in recent past feel responsible as a citizen to express their feeling towards variety of issues including any particular development and planning issues and projects, some of these collective thoughts out of the massive online “junk opinions” can prove to be a very valuable asset if filtered, tracked, interpreted and incorporated in the project being discussed or for any planning issue in general.  

Social Media feedbacks for planning process and projects are either underestimated due to pre-determined age old procedural guidelines for planning process including, surveys, community participation and feedback, or are untapped due to shear abundance of it. Current situation is that a substantial number of people give their opinion and feedback and willing to share more on some ongoing project as well as project under pipeline, but planners and responsible authorities do not feel responsible even to listen to these valuable inputs coming from background noise of the social media. All these efforts of individuals and groups go into the vain in most of the cases.    

Enabling and channelizing the online focused planning communities like dedicated discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites and online professional communities in the positive direction to get a feedback on a particular project can radically alter the way projects being planned and implemented.