Richard Eisermann will be a leading speaker and workshop leader at the UnBox Festival held in Delhi, India on 25 and 26 February, 2011.

The UnBox Festival is designed to build momentum around design thinking and interdisciplinary collaborations to drive sustainable innovation for businesses, society and culture in India. The festival blends work and play across contexts and mediums, bringing attendees together for workshops, debates, brainstorms, picnics, literary readings and travel. UnBox creates a space for practitioners to learn from one another and spark new forms of innovation.

Richard will speak about the role of design as a business tool. He will demonstrate how design has moved from a tactical tool to a strategic one – beyond things to ideas – and needs to be people-centred, embracing empathy and humility. Using two case studies, he will look at how design is applied in business, revealing how people-centred design can become part of corporate culture, and how design can help imagine the future in a people-centred way. He will also consider how this approach can help address challenges within India and help designers in India move further into global markets. In conclusion, he will reflect on whether this approach is really delivering innovation and whether there is any basis in charges of 'design colonialism'.

Richard and Nico Macdonald will then jointly run a workshop that seeks to understand how transferable (and relevant) are the tools, methods and processes of Western models of service design when applied to the Indian context. They will answer this question by engaging and challenging workshop participants to re-imagine their least favourite Indian services.  Participants will be asked to identify a service in India that they would like to see improved and then, in smaller working groups, begin to do so. They will look at issues such as co-creation, cross-cultural understanding and post-disciplinary teamwork with the aim of collectively deepening the entire Festival’s understanding of how India can be better served.