Sketchnotes: UnBox Festival 2014
For four years now the UnBox Festival has been a torchbearer for cross-disciplinary pollination of ideas. A combination of design, technology, craft, art, activism, systems thinking, city-planning and social change action, the festival has constantly challenged the presumptions of a way of life taken for granted. By bringing together makers, thinkers and doers from a...
5 Reasons Why We Need Design Histories in India
We write history to understand how things were and what makes them the way they are today. To write history is to explain the cause and effect relationship of events, to script the roles of its protagonists and their part in the story of things. All histories – any histories – account for the agencies...
New Indian Designscape
The emergence of design as a major point on the global agenda for sustainability and responsible growth has brought attention to contemporary design practice in India. The output of the country’s creative minds is keenly watched by a global audience, eager to know their responses to an ever-changing power balance between West and East. The...
Sketchnotes: Design Public 4
The Design Public Conclave is a platform to enable conversations between thinkers, opinion makers and doers that looks to transform India into an innovation society. Initiated by the Centre for Knowledge Studies the fourth edition concluded in Mumbai last week. These are my sketchnotes from the 30th of November, 2012. In summing up, I...
Interview: Sandeep Sangaru
At a time when design is being examined as a force for social change, Sandeep Sangaru is a name that often comes to mind. He is best known for his innovations in bamboo and this multi-disciplinary designer has been closely associated with initiatives to provide training and skills to people in norther-eastern India since 2004....
The Rise of the Design Event
Designers are a social breed: we like to mingle, exchange ideas, bounce concepts off one another’s heads, poke our noses into other people’s business and get involved in long discussions about little things. We find it re-affirming to look, see, hear, experience, taste and sample other people’s work because it gives us the...
Amul’s India
Growing up in Mumbai, the one thing I looked forward to on the morning bus trip was the unmissable Amul hoarding at Mahim Causeway. Every week, once a week for all my school going years, that one hoarding would bring a smile to the day. Sometimes it would be a giggle at a piece of...
Pink Is The Navy Blue of India
These days one doesn’t think twice when looking at a magazine spread of a fashionable femme fatale striking a pose in an exotic locale, or a candid shot of a model in the streets, but the genre of fashion photography owes a great deal to one of its original pioneers in the form of...
Building Books
In a virtual galaxy of book publishers hawking their wares in bookstores these days, Tara Books editions illuminate India’s rich and vibrant visual culture. An impressive catalogue that straddles fantasy, fiction, poetry, folklore, visual arts and design, each publication is created through the effort of academics, anthropologists, writers, artists and designers working together. Founded by...
A Bag Full of Colour
A recent assignment on packaging design gave me the chance to explore an intriguing yet often overlooked segment of retail in the country: the wholesale market. I say ‘overlooked’ because most packaging designers work on products sold directly to consumers through supermarkets, corner shops and home delivery networks. But there is a thriving, incredibly colourful...
Design Without a Track
When the Railways Minister announced a contribution of Rs. 10 crore for the establishment of a dedicated railways design wing at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, there was a great sense of vindication among the design community. For the first time, the 2012-13 Rail Budget includes a nod towards the role that design can...
Doshi: Architecture without Adjectives
At one point in the documentary Doshi, Balkrishna Doshi explains his influences saying, “ it’s like I’m eating the food by the best chefs, but I am digesting it. How you digest your food and make it part of your blood and body is up to you.” As one of the few Indian architects known...
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