Creatives in the time of Corona

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...

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...