Creatives in the time of Corona

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...

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....