Creatives in the time of Corona

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

Design has always been about problem solving, and about well-being. This holds true even in the times of a pandemic. Hence, when the world stood still, except for front-line workers who continue to fight, screen, salvage and heal – some designers and engineers have stepped up to support these front liners, through the capacity of design. World over, the maker movement has woken up to the need of the hour. Open source files for the 3D printing of face vizors and shields for medical professionals are available. Surat based firm D3LAB that finds itself at the confluence of technology, art and architecture took up the manufacturing of these face vizors as an altruistic endeavour – to donate as many face shields as possible to hospitals and medical staff across Surat. Adapting the basic open source file for 3D printing, they experimented in materials and other technologies like laser cutting to afford them maximum efficiency for production of large numbers is a short time period....