Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

• City Spinning: Prayas Abhinav
• Interactive Multi-Touch Table: Dharmang Prajapati
• Babita Harry: Chinnara Chandrayaana

City Spinning: Prayas Abhinav

In December 2008, I began working at the Centre for Experimental Media Arts on the City Spinning projects; what I collectively refer to as the Porous City. Spaces are locative anchors for memory and history. The city of flows finds it difficult to change with the ‘anchors of memories’ weighing it down. Performative dreaming about what our cities and neighbourhoods can be is what Porous City is about.

I started out by doing two things which eventually came together. One was to shape a space or a vehicle which could be moved and parked around Bangalore. The other was to locate unused land or buildings and establish a space for neighbourhood conversations.

A 'cultural space' is open to diverse expressions and aesthetics and allows a wide range of social interactions, across hierarchies and boundaries. People go where there is a possibility for rich social inter-mingling to be inspired. Sometimes there is a vacuum; few spaces can play this role. My project seeks to prototype some possibilities for filling the vacuum. My role in this process has been that of a 'curator' and 'artistic director' using the creative energies of other individuals in various capacities. I have initiated and carried out a few projects and performances myself.

Interactive Multi-Touch Table: Dharmang Prajapati

With recent technological advances, it has become possible to provide multi-touch devices to the common man. These devices have brought about more interactions and human factor challenges.

My project aims at working out an economically viable / beneficial ecosystem for users and installation companies. The users should be able to get an enhanced social gaming experience while companies will be able to get returns on their investments with an increase in brand recall. My main focus is on creating / defining unique or extensive sets of interaction paradigms for users. This will involve understanding human factors and incorporating natural gestures users make, while interacting with similar applications (onscreen / board / physical). The aim is to manipulate sound through drawing, where the user can draw and generate music at the same time. These sets of interactions give the user a unique platform to understand and work with sound art.

Babita Harry: Chinnara Chandrayaana

My project was a 10 day 'Space Camp' in July 2009 with an artistic intervention collaborating with participatory science practice in ‘Drishya Kalika Kendra’ as part of 'Project Vision', a research collective. The ‘Moon Party’, another aspect of my project, took place in the Mallya Aditi International School with Grade 6 students on a weekend. It was a day-long workshop of telescope-making and sky-watching. Space science and technology are contested spaces in India. My project aimed at introducing ‘outreach’ events of an artistic nature into this environment, thereby battling the perception that knowledge is the right of scientists only. In India, participatory practices operate within cultural and social constraints. Through a combination of workshops, events and fieldwork, the project has pioneered collaboration between knowledge organizations like ISRO and educational institutions, venturing into a new ground of science practice which combines participatory art practice with formal science education. Working with underprivileged children from urban slums was a major part, dealing with meeting the challenges of local languages and the language of science. It showed scientists the possibilities of new ways of thinking and engaging with educational programmes. The space industry being a local phenomenon, the opportunity to embed space science knowledge across all languages using open source ideology is doable in Bangalore.

• Alisha Panjwani: Sensors and Vulnerabilities
• Aliya Pabani: I Use Water
• Gourav Madhogaria: Career Framing
• Hari Shankar: Responder 08
• Namrata Mehta: Everyday Place, Everyday Traces
• Tanvi Srivastava: Augmentia

Alisha Panjwani: Sensors and Vulnerabilities

Design or rather design-thinking is regarded as a way of understanding the needs of an audience of varied age groups (including children) to effectively create powerful experiences of participation and engagement. Through this project, I have tried to explore the benefits of design-based pedagogy and tools in education, particularly in classrooms.

Using design-thinking to articulate the physical, emotional, psychological and cognitive needs of youth belonging to urban-poor communities, youth between the ages of 12–15 were able to cover the content of a ninth-grade physics text while simultaneously making connections with their personal environment. The theme explored was “wellness and well-being for the self and community” in the context of electromagnetic radiations due to mobile communication (including the location and position of cellphone towers). The invisible and the visible communication aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum (a commodity of today) helped highlight the vulnerabilities of this exposure to the children.

This project culminated in a community event where educators, parents, members of the urban-poor community, activists and others debated on significant aspects of learning, with the children.

Aliya Pabani: I Use Water

“I use water” is a project that involved creating various games and interactions that are meant to encourage water users to collaboratively engage and reflect upon some of the desires, beliefs and concerns surrounding their daily water use.

“To the Source” is a tabletop game that’s meant to encourage participants to express the characteristics they associate with various sources of water and information. “Waterlog” is a game that’s meant to be played through the postal system. It asks players to reflect upon the tacit experiences that colour their engagement with mundane water-related tasks such as washing dishes, boiling water and using the toilet. Both games are based on popular party games that have been adapted as a means of conducting ethnographic research for design in a way that engages individuals as members of collectives with shared ideologies and information flows on one hand, while fostering the agonistic opinions lying between them on the other.

Gourav Madhogaria: Career Framing

Career Framing is a guide on career exploration and strategic career planning for Indian school students. This book is completely designed based on the Indian students’ requirements which will provide them complete knowledge on each discipline in one place. Detailed information (areas of specialization under each category, qualifications required, work description, institutes providing courses, fee structure, cost of equipment and necessities, related careers, etc.) on each discipline, backed by an experienced professional from the respective field, gives a realistic picture of each career and guides the students on the process to be followed while making their career decision.

The aim here is to engage students in exploring various careers for themselves and letting them take the responsibility of being fully informed before taking a decision.

Hari Shankar: Responder 08

In the wake of natural as well as man-made disasters, it has become quite important to cope with these situations in a better and more efficient way. Responder 108 is the framework design and a feasibility prototype of a disaster management simulation game, intended for use as a training tool by disaster management personnel to understand and experience such circumstances, and hence respond better when faced with them in reality.

I have attempted to create the framework of a simulation game, such that the defined elements that play a role in a disaster situation can be substituted, added or removed into preset environments to create entirely new scenarios that can be trained on. This allows disaster management personnel to get exposure to situations they have not experienced before, and possibly, recreate past situations and find better ways to have handled them. This is not a drill replacement, but it rather complements drills by letting the personnel experience the scenario beforehand. The player is the First Responder, i.e. the first person from any of the emergency services to arrive at the scene, and has to manage the situation till all the services arrive and are set-up. The feasibility prototype is built on the CryENGINE® 3 Sandbox Editor (developed by Crytek GmbH). It shows the capabilities of the game engine to render realistic environments and scenarios into a game.

The prototype and framework were developed in conjunction with the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), Bangalore; a pioneering private non-profit organization that conducts research on subjects such as energy, infrastructure, materials science, information and communications technologies, and security.

Namrata Mehta: Everyday Place, Everyday Traces

Everyday Places, Everyday Traces, creates inventive strategies of exploring urban landscape by capturing and collecting the perceived geographies of everyday life. Arising from a participatory art practice, the project came about as a way of exploring the urban geography of Yelahanka New Town through the people who live and move through it. After recruiting participants and tracking their chosen routine movement using a GPS device, the collected data was used to create drawings of their movement, de-contextualized from any annotative substance. These drawings were then taken back to each participant. Participants were then asked to guess which drawing, out of many, belonged to them, and represented their movement through city space.
The strategies employed, the memories recalled and stories told allude to the many ways in which people think about their surrounding geography. These playfully poetic moments of identification with one’s own movement is captured and retold through a series of videos.

Tanvi Srivastava: Augmentia

Ex | Change | Able is a project that looks at the possibilities of real and imaginary exchange to enable positive action. It seeks to understand the difference between social exchange and market exchange, attempting to understand why people act the way they do when certain norms are prevalent. At a real level, Ex | Change | Able posits to create a social venture that uses exchange as the premise for a positive learning experience.
At an imaginary level, Ex | Change | Able analyzes the fictional possibilities of a futuristic economy that functions solely on the basis of altruism and
social exchange.