just having chai

A black-tie event to document the undocumented parts of our everyday

Today, visual design is one of the most rapidly expanding professions in India, growing at an annual rate of 25%.

This surge has been a result of increased demand for digital services, especially since the pandemic, which forced businesses, both big and small, corporate and home-rud, to go digital and begin catering to an audience base of over 900 million internet users.

One-third of this base is also highly active on social media platforms such as Instagram | Since access to the internet has moved beyond the urban nucleus, so has the content on these platforms. Today, Instagram offers an endless directory of everyday lives and cultures across the breadth of the country.

Two women playing a childhood game with tamarind seeds

An auto rickshaw covered in snow on a winter morning in Kashmir

Tiny bananas being sold in a Manipuri vegetable market

A lonely chabutra in the middle of thar dessert

This evidence is irresistible, especially when such visual narratives are missing from mainstream media and are continually being erased.

I decided to participate in this new enfranchisement of documenting the undocumented with an everyday activity that takes up to 90 per cent of my parents’ day, just having chai.

As friends and I spent one evening having multiple rounds of chai and capturing every ordinary moment on precious Polaroids, they observed slowing down to document an everyday activity also leads to conversations that otherwise wouldn’t take in the absence of this evidence.

Vividh

A hyper-localized online marketplace for designers with curated everyday India

As I shared these images from the experience, just having chai on Instagram, it became clearer why many designers in India use the platform as a visual research tool.

Instagram is a visually-forward medium that allows for instant sharing. it provides a storyteller with the agency to tell their own story. This makes for a much richer image bank than popular stock platforms such as Unsplash, which offers limited and unidimensional content from the Indian subcontinent. It made sense why many designers even use Instagram to directly source images from creators.

But this is a Jugaad, a makeshift hack in place of a precise solution.

Instagram is not an easily searchable platform. It is ruled by an ever-changing, often unresponsive, algorithm that makes it easy to drown in a sea of content. You need to know the right people to reach the right image.

Vividh is a hyper-localized online marketplace for designers, with curated images that capture both everyday and extraordinary life in India, clicked by ordinary users from the country.

The platform allows designers to search by location, Save and purchase images sourced from Instagram through its wide base of regional content partners.

Location-based search is a critical intervention. Especially in a country where the same image can be interpreted differently, and the result can greatly vary based on your search term. So localisation can not be an afterthought.

Instead of a centralized headquarters, Vividh operates through 6 different regional teams that interpret each entry and help pluralise search term results.

This is done to ensure that when searching for an image of a athanu, a type of pickle, you will also see results for achaar and pachadi, regional variations of the same dish.

But this is a monumental undertaking, and there are still lots of gaps in representation. Sometimes, despite this localised, responsive, and collaborative model, Vividh might not have the image you need.

To bridge that gap, Vividh would take your failed search term results and turn them into incentivised prompts for the growing community of content creators.

It operates through a co-op model that is designed for sharing profits with the creators. Along with the fixed percentage of profits, creators would also receive bonuses for addressing the visual gaps.

Localize Captcha Diversify Data

A speculative partnership with Google’s reCAPTCHA to train bots better reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites and tell bots and humans apart. It’s also used to train the same bots.

You might be wondering, why talk about collecting images in the age of generating images?

AI is our latest design tool. Platforms, such as Dall-E, Adobe Firefly and Midjourney are extremely powerful tools, that are drastically changing how we approach image-making. But just like all the other tools before them, it doesn’t work for me as well for me as it does for you.

The speed at which AI is being integrated into our lives makes it tougher for communities with a limited digital footprint to seek authentic and diverse representation.

This lack of representation also results in AI-generated images that propel the same harmful stereotypes.

This risks the danger of a single story.

The problem isn’t in the image generators, but rather in the data set fed into these systems. So I looked at how data was collected to train AI, and the answer was right in front of me.

To use these AI tools, I had to prove I was a human. So I did that, by picking out every lighthouse, every fire hydrant, and every crosswalk in every single frame.

Instead of making everyone around the world identify that same lighthouse, localize captcha, and diversify data. This is how we train the tools of the future, for the future.

Imagine if we could train AI to recognise an Activa on the streets of Jaipur, everyone’s favourite ice-cream tricycle or hand-drawn kolam on the footpath?

What if we could train AI to look at India, the way India looks at itself?