Making a Mark
“Make a curve like this, and let go of the line like this. You don’t have to complete the letter. Let it look alive, like it is moving,” said Mr. Shah as he sat at the edge of my parents’ sofa. The good man with the gruff voice was demonstrating the drawing of a letter...
The Look of Language
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the printed word has brought revolution in this world more swiftly, more often than war. Since Johannes Gutenberg first invented the movable type printing press in 1439, printed matter has given voice to dissent over dogma and freedom over ignorance. In the six centuries since, his...
Review: This Side That Side
The stories of This Side That Side: Restorying Partition spill into the mind like immigrants from across the border – seeking refuge from the oblivion of forgetfulness, bereft yet proud, anxious to be heard, taken seriously, desperately in need of a telling, of finding a home on paper. To read this book is to hear...
What We Talk About When We Talk About Design
So you’ve heard about the Creating Change book and all the great work that Kyoorius and British Council have done to get new design writers together. Though the book is now out-of-print (!) we can still share the work we’ve each done for it. Here it is at last, my long-form comic for the book,...
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...
Why Go To A Design Conference?
In 2002 a quiet revolution occurred in Indian design: the ‘Design in India’ Yahoo e-group was born. It was the original online community for Indian designers and academicians and the first time that people across generations and geography could interact in a single space. A decade later and email seems old-fashioned when the options to...
That Great Divide
“What is your superpower?” Karl Heiselman was on stage at the Kyoorius Designyatra in Goa. Speaking about how he became the CEO of Wolff Olins, he echoed the experiences of many speakers and delegates present there, he talked about a unique quality that helps designers find solutions to the problems they are presented with everyday....
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...
The Ant and The Grasshoper
A Parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper by Arjun Jassal ‘I don’t do HTML. If you want, I can give you a few images.’ ‘Sorry. I can draw the images. Content isn’t my thing.’ ‘CS5? Naah. I never liked it, I can only give you stuff from CS3.’ And it goes on. The...
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...
Good Design is Good Business
Earlier this year I had a chance to visit the Design Museum London’s excellent retrospective, The Way We Live Now on Sir Terence Conran–designer, entrepreneur and a huge inspiration to creative business. Now this could have been just another parade of designer objects arranged neatly in a gallery setting, but what made The Way We...
The UnBox Festival 2012
The UnBox Festival in Delhi presents itself as a celebration of “interdisciplinary processes and experiences that shape contemporary thought and action”. Organised by the Box Collective – formed by design studios Quicksand and Codesign, photo-commune Blind Boys and music collective B.L.O.T. – the month long series of events culminated in a 3 day conference held...
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