SUBJECT: ETHNOGRAPHY AND APPLICATIONS RESEARCH METHODOLGIES CO-ORDINATING PROFESSOR: PROF.

. VISHVAJIT PANDYA PROJECT OVERVIEW What the project wanted to cover and do By the sequence of events along which this project took shape: Using the example of Mawlynnong and the Living Root Bridge, the brief of this project was to find out how and why the people of Meghalaya use different types of sustainable design and traditional knowledge in spite of modernity and how does it define their cultural identity. Being a part of a communication design course, it made sense to come up with some form of communication for a certain focus group (in this case, school children) for which this research would be conducted. Also, it was necessary to find out what were the points that THEY (the focus group) wanted to see as a part of the final communication product. Moreover, through this project, one was hoping to add on to the classroom interaction by actually showing the students places through live streaming so that the questions they posed could be answered from the field, thus making the learning process more practical and dynamic. Lastly, the project hopes to capture the entire process of ethnography on Mawlynnong being done for the school children and the to and fro exchange of information and reactions which shaped each step of the research. Thus, the final outcome of this project is supposed to be ethnography of ethnography or an exploration of reflexive ethnography.

What is to be communicated to the students and why? The project hopes to explore new ways of class room teaching by designing a communication system that integrates emerging ethnographic methods with readily available information technologies. Inside the classroom, a variety of challenges are faced on a day-to-day basis by students and teachers alike. Often, as the teacher is trying to convey ideas and concepts which are alien to the class environment, where ideally the students would have needed to move to these contexts to engage, the teacher is forced to make do with charts and other static visual references. Our motivation is to bring these interactions to the classrooms themselves through multimedia presentations and live footages. For the same purpose, we as a team have come to an agreement that the students could be introduced to an environment which is in vivid contrast to their own. Through this, they will be encouraged to explore a new place and subjectively come to various conclusions which will add on to whatever they have learnt from their text books.

How will a multimedia presentation and film footage (live) from the field help in this? The project aims to help school children and teachers to make the classroom experience more interactive and add on to the knowledge gained from the text books by answering their curiosity about various issues. The knowledge from the text books, in this case, about environmental awareness and cleanliness, falls short of its purpose if it is not practically implemented. The project will make an effort to show the students actual places and communities which follow such principles which they read about through multimedia presentations. Based on the assumption that the visual impact of information makes learning not only more interesting but also more immersive, this gives the students a chance to see the subject matter of study for themselves; in other words the power of place of the ethnographer.

Why Mawlynnong and Living Bridges? The travel magazine Discover India declared Mawlynnong in Meghalaya as the cleanest village in Asia in 2003 and the cleanest village in India in 2005. But that is not its only claim to fame. Mawlynnong is also the site of the extraordinary Living Root Bridges. And lastly, but by no means the least, Meghalaya and especially the provinces of Mawsynram and Cherrapunji are best known for being (perhaps) the wettest place on Earth. Incessant rainfall and turbulent river streams make it a difficult place to live indeed. And it is this violent and unforgiving face of Nature that the Living Root Bridges help to tame. These bridges are constructed out of the inter-tangling of roots from trees planted adjacently on opposite banks of a stream; taking several generations, sometimes up to 500 years to build. Ever since the article was released, the village has achieved a unique position in the map of Meghalaya tourism or more appropriately, eco-tourism. Various terms like eco friendly, sustainable architecture, and so on, have been associated with the people and the village. It is basically the USP of the village and something they have started to go by themselves. Through this project, we will try to decipher the local people's idea of sustainable design. We are assuming that sustainability is an imposed idea. For the locals, it is just the way things have been for a long time. Now in the face of modernity, when we see some part of the country still following traditional methods which do not harm the environment, we tag the practices as 'sustainable'. Thus, the brief we come down to is: How and why the people of Meghalaya use different types of sustainable design and traditional knowledge in spite of modernity and how does it define their cultural identity.

Process The entire project is following 3 phases: Phase 1 It had 3 processes going on simultaneously. Field work at school: To find out the focus groups notion of environment, going green and their queries about it. Also, their approach towards new cultures and understanding of the importance of the same. Background research on Meghalaya: the people, their history, their beliefs, their lifestyle and so on, with relevance to the project. Maintaining an online forum: The forum will host all the information that we gather as a team through the course of the project. It will have all the links, discussions, documents and so on. Phase 2 On the basis of the information gathered, in Phase 1, an initial content for the final communication product is to be designed. This phase will require a number of activities going on simultaneously with utmost stress in coordination and working within time frames. However, there must be some space left to allow flexibility of ideas. A part of the team will go to Meghalaya, to the site of interest with the assumptions made on the basis of background research and the questions posed by the focus group. Documentation of all the information collected from Meghalaya will be received by the group staying back and will be sorted and collated. Coordination with the school so that the entire point of multimedia presentation for educational purposes be tried and tested. Phase 3 Collating data from phase 1 and phase 2 and editing footage of overall phases to create the final communication product.