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...
Sketchnotes: TEDxGateway 2014
A continuing source of inspiration, TEDxGateway is an invaluable forum that highlights important issues and relevant solutions to the problems facing the world today. Held on November 2nd, 2014 at the NCPA in Mumbai, the theme for the day was #BetterIndia. Here’s a roundup of some of the ideas to take home from this edition....
The Design of Ordinary Things: Pressure Cooker
Earlier in 2014, I was selected as one of the new artists for The Small Picture – a weekly comics column run by the team at Manta Ray. Following from the comic from the Creating Change book I contributed to for Kyoorius, I decided to make a series of one-page comics tracing the design history...
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: India Design Forum 2013
This past March, Mumbai hosted the second India Design Forum. A gathering of the who’s who of the design world, the two-day event was a packed schedule of speakers and panels, all against the backdrop of a city-wide design week. A number of local studios and design entrepreneurs participated in the daily events leading up...
Sketchnotes: TEDxGateway 2012
December 2nd saw the third edition of TEDxGateway hosted in Mumbai. An independently organised version of the now famous TED talks, the day brought together 21 speakers from 17 different countries for the largest event of its kind in the city. While the TEDxGateway met its organisers’ objective of sharing “unique ideas from India and...
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...
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...
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