Creatives in the time of Corona

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Above and Beyond – Chaal Chaal Agency

June 17, 2020

Long before the pandemic and its aftermaths started bothering us, making us aware of the binaries in our society, shocking us into realizing and acknowledging our privilege, Kruti and Sebastian had been working on ground, with people of underrepresented communities – identifying and solving the problems of their day-to-day living. Their association goes back to 2016, when both got acquainted while pursuing Masters at CEPT University. Sebastian had come down from Bogota (Colombia) and Kruti from Mumbai. They both stayed back after graduating, to explore opportunities within academia to look at bridging the gap between the urban and architectural realm. They offered immersive design studios at Faculty of Urban Design, where they grappled with various methodologies to make meaningful interventions within fringe communities in the city. They identified the glaring lack of infrastructure provisions, but also recognized that there are short term and long term, as well as larg

Weaving stories of ‘hope’ – Sneha Ravishankar

May 26, 2020

Sneha Ravishankar is a textile designer and an educator and would cringe on reading this as she does not like to be slotted and defined by terminologies. But Sneha is a warm, open, empathetic human being who is making each moment of the lockdown count – by doing what she can in her capacity – not just as a designer, but as a decent human being. At the beginning of the lockdown, she began working on the donation drive for the migrant workers, and making sure people around her were feeling alright. But as days advanced and the situation started getting grimmer, she began receiving many phone calls from students of the design colleges where she teaches. She realized that there was a need to pro-actively reach out to more people – just to talk, to make sure they were coping. Hence, she started offering online weaving classes – her fees, she said, “feed a needy family, or feed some stray animals on the road for a week” And thus began, an exciting, moving and motivating journey

Small Steps, Big Impact – AMD-SHIELD

May 19, 2020

Mitalee Parikh is an energetic architect, currently pursuing her Masters at IAAC Spain, who has found herself back home in Ahmedabad, in the middle of her semester owing to the pandemic. This interruption did not deter her from pursuing her interest in “how we make things, and making meaningful things”. In fact, the current circumstances have accelerated her study on the future of manufacturing – evaluating mass production, fully automated process against a more distributed system of design and manufacturing. She has been studying design in emergent futures – where design taken on a more widespread view rather than being restricted to specialized silos or branches of design like product, graphics, architecture etc. The whole pedagogy prepares them to speculate possible futures, identifying problems that may arise tomorrow - so they could intervene today, thereby changing the course of the future. This is where she finds herself, actively engaging amid her immediate context – provi

The Big Picture Contextualization – by Thumbimpressions

May 18, 2020

Thumbimpressions is a collaborative practice focused on architecture, construction and active research on materials viz. earth and bamboo. The collaborative’s diverse team includes architects, urban designers, planners, civil engineers, photographers and an in-house team of skilled artisans. With a nuanced sense of understanding of urban contexts and human needs, the team has been proactively formulating the way forward for architects, engineers, planners and programmers. Through a series of deliberate discussions on the possible scenarios of the effects as well as aftermaths of the pandemic, the team has put together a cohesive proposal that spans systems level integrations to the minutest details of execution and implementation of some design ideas catering to the growing needs of the healthcare sector. The primary proposal is that of temporary hospital infrastructure that can help increase the efficiency and ease of the medical professionals and government bodies. The pro

Agile and Aligned – deployable multipurpose isolation cells

May 16, 2020

Centre for Human Habitat and Alternative Technology – CHHAT has been always active in designing emergent structures for emergency needs, focused specifically on providing for the under-represented strata of the Indian society. This has also earned them the coveted Buckminster Fuller award for socially responsible design. With their background in architecture, engineering and education, Chhat has always been agile and proactive in offering their expertise whenever the need emerged. With this medical emergency and a man-made disaster in the form of COVID-19, the team found themselves overwhelmed as, although they had designed and prepared for natural disasters, they had never anticipated a calamity of this form. They were looking at it, trying to see where designers could fit it, especially young architects who can build with their own hands. It required them to quickly re-configure themselves – all spread across various cities in the country. They processed all the informati