Social Design Collaborative is a community driven architectural and art practice based in Delhi. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, our team engages with under-represented communities who are typically left out of urban planning processes and scope of architectural services.

Design has the potential to address and solve many of our society’s current challenges but it cannot do that through design alone. The processes of community engagement, listening and learning-by-doing form a major part of our design approach, over finished design products or architectural artefacts. Our building projects grow and change with the people who build, use or maintain them, instead of becoming static or rigid entities. We strongly believe in the strength of collectives and work with community based organisations, social workers, activists, academics, lawyers and government organisations.

Working with farmers, street vendors, waste pickers, home based workers and domestic workers, we use the medium of design to help make public policy accessible. Our team has also been supporting self-organized communities in informal settlements through collective building of schools, anganwadis and community spaces.

The project involved developing manuals and posters for street vendors in Indian cities to provide critical information on their rights, along with health and design guidelines for social distancing in response to Covid-19.

COVID-19 has brought unprecedented adverse effects on the lives and livelihoods of informal workers across the world. Natural and weekly markets have had to shut down due to lockdown restrictions in many cities. This manual was developed in collaboration with Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) to help street vendors in Indian cities practice social distancing and take necessary precautions for their own as well their customers’ safety during the pandemic. It also includes a 'Know Your Rights' section providing critical information on rights of street vendors with India's Street Vendors Act 2014 explained simply - using storytelling tools and narrated by our home grown mascots Lina and Bindu. More info here: https://www.socialdesigncollab.org/modskool/Street-Vending-in-times-of-COVID-19

Available in Hindi and English, it is intended for use by individual vendors as well as market associations and organizations working to promote vendors’ rights, to aid further in the dissemination of this information to the vendors. Posters were also designed for easier dissemination of the information.

The research was informed by case studies from across the world as well as pilots conducted in Delhi as part of the civic campaign "Main Bhi Dilli" (Hindi for "I am Delhi too"). More info here: https://www.mainbhidilli.com/

The manuals and posters were developed through a process of iterative design developed based on user feedback from street vendors and social workers at SEWA. It was important to continually test the different graphics and icons developed to make sure the manual could be understood by street vendors.

Next, we want to focus on the 'Know Your Rights' section to place critical information related to India's Street Vendor Act 2014 in the hands of street vendors across Indian cities. We look forward to collaborating with organisations working with street vendors to help provide this information in regional languages across India using easy to understand visualisations.

We also look forward to collaborating with designers across the world who would like to support street vendors in their cities.

If you have been working with street vendors in your city, do connect with us! Let us create networks of information and collaboration to support vendors across the globe.

The manual is based on the team's research on post-Covid public spaces and tactical urbanism across the world - from Indonesia to Ghana to Myanmar. It also drew from our on-ground learnings from the team's collaborative initiative in Delhi with organisations working on street vendor rights, as part of a civic society campaign called Main Bhi Dilli campaign (Hindi for "I am Delhi too"). The project involved piloting effective social distancing strategies to help weekly markets reopen in Delhi using simple and low cost materials, during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. More info here: https://www.socialdesigncollab.org/modskool/Social-Distancing-strategies-for-weekly-markets

Another useful source of inspiration has been Vendor Power by Centre for Urban Pedagogy: http://welcometocup.org/Projects/MakingPolicyPublic/VendorPower