Her belief that 'one shoe can't fit them all' makes her book non-preachy and defies the fact that a particular parenting style is a mistake. She propagates her love for books as a frequent dramatic storyteller at Chatoveracuppa and Reading, Caterpillar, Delhi, taking care to explore works beyond the ubiquitous Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. Coming from a city with no libraries she has catapulted to setting up a library of her own, Reading Racoons Library in Kisan Bhawan.

A master of many trades, Tanushree is also an artist, a baker and a blogger. You can check out her blogs at tanushreesingh.wordpress.com and at Huffington Post India. Her blogs of course are mostly about books and storytelling; some also evoke a sense of nostalgia. On the side, she gets additional brownie points for having an extended family of six dogs and lots of fish in her fish tank, other than her human family of two children and a husband.

Written by Namita Jain

A community level project was embarked upon in one of the old colonies in Nizamuddin in 2001, which has relatively more open spaces and greenery. Water logging areas were identified from drainage maps procured from JAL board Delhi. Water storage structures design by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) were constructed in suitable locations as against the prevalent Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) design.

In a typical CSE structure, water from drains flow into a desilting chamber of size 1.5m x 1.5m. Any overflow is rechanneled to the recharge pit. Additional layers of filters are added. Semi filtered water is then taken through perforated pipes wrapped in coir ropes to the bore. The bore stops short of the actual aquifer. Soil in-between acts as a second layer of filter. The structure is designed to be easy to maintain.

Challenges faced are:

• The design cannot be registered for admissibility of subsidy.
• Escalating cost of maintenance increases over time due to various factors (labour,  material charges etc).
  
• The Government funds and promotes the MCD design which is structurally flawed,  difficult to maintain and expensive to build.

CSE monitored the project for over a decade and the findings unambiguously established the benefits of recharging groundwater. During subsequent dry seasons the project colony not only had a shallow/easy to reach water table but the quality of water also improved.

Vandana also shed light on importance on proactiveness to resolve issues which, when rectified at micro level, leads to optimal exploitation of meagre resources for sustenance of the fragile and overburdened ecology at the macro level.

Architect Vandana stirs our collective conscience with the postulation - Is it design that is holding us back from being responsible?

Written by Vinod Anthony Thomas

“Raise global design education to an Ivy League standard, while at the same time reduce costs to as low as possible.” This is the mission for the independent non-profit organization – Interaction Design Foundation. By collaborating with top universities like Stanford and Cambridge, leading in-field designers and best-selling authors, their educational material is backed by academic rigor and practical relativity. Members can gain access to this comprehensive library of design-related textbooks and instructor–led courses.

Depending on what kind of ‘take away’ from the course you’re looking for, you can receive guidance from professionals, manage real-time projects or even volunteer in local design communities. All of this design-diversity can be added to your professional experience and help you in the design world. The learning process doesn’t stop outside the ‘classroom’ – members can also learn via ongoing discussion forums, local meet-ups and global design events.

Written by Prasun jain

While she studied Lifestyle Accessory design, Vrinda’s shift to furniture and interior design was very organic. It enabled her to approach designing with the bigger picture in perspective, making sure all elements worked in cohesion. Fresh out of college, and with access to a furniture workshop run by her parents, she and her friends experienced the workshop firsthand - how furniture was built, how materials are used, and how karigars work.

‘Re-Love’ was a collection of furniture born out of raw material lying around the space, in which they saw potential. Vrinda says, “We re-love, we redesign, we repurpose the complete aesthetic and the function of the product.” For instance, they made drawers into poufs, shelves into tables, and chair legs into lights. Refurbishing was popular in the market at the time and there were many offerings; what helped them stand out was that no one was offering a complete redesign of form and function as they were.

#SWC was formalised to Studio Wood with a mixed bag of product designers, interior designers and architects: this allowed them to dabble in many fields within the larger scope of design. This diversity of professional backgrounds allowed every partner their own specialisation: Navya concentrates on interior spaces, Sahej, an architect looks at built structures, while Vrinda pays attention to finer details. With each aspect accounted for, everything comes together well.

The studio space is in the urban village of Kishangarh. Desiring to interact with the people of the village, they painted a huge map of the area on the facade of their studio building, using the village chaiwalas and fruit vendors as landmarks. Over the four-month making phase, and even post that, the map has remained a conversation starter with people trying to identify their own houses, their friends’ homes or even mapping routes.

With the furniture collection, 3.0, all the products are disconnected from each other, but together they convey the essence of the brand - a young, new and fresh sensibility for furniture design in India, still in a nascent stage. They are open to experimenting, failing and rising back up again to deliver well-researched, functional, aesthetic, and quirky design. This approach can be seen in the Romeo and Juliet wall in the office of a dating app called Truly Madly; the chandeliers made from cycle gear for Ciclo Cafe in Gurgaon, a cafe that promotes cycling as a lifestyle; or even the minimal and focused design for Rod Anchor’s only-haircut salon.

For Kochi Biennale, they picked up inspiration from the local woven baskets to create seating called the Objective Basket. They worked with people, and materials from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Kochi, and Assam. Scaled down to 16 inches, and scaled up to 10 feet, the aim was to create site-specific furniture which seemed more like an object than anything else.

Studio Wood aims to continue doing many different things as they have been for the past five years. Vrinda says, “We enjoy this multifaceted approach to design and it also keeps our keeps our mind running at all times.”

Written by Stuti Sukhani

Vishnu graduated in 2014 with a BFA (which he describes as an advertising-ish course) from College of Art, Delhi, after which he completed his Masters in Graphic Design from NID in 2017. After an initial stint at an animation studio, he joined an advertising agency, where he won design awards as an intern. Finding he was comfortable with the idea of storytelling through imagery and illustrations, he sharpened his skills in illustration and narratives in a publication house. Finally, he joined Co-Design, where he currently works.

In his varied design experiences, one tool was common - illustration. Vishnu began to use illustration into his own personality to influence his work, integrating his approach to wit and humour. His work ranges widely from logo design for an animation studio and a children’s book which talks about gender stereotypes, to a heart-wrenching graphic novel. He has done other books, which he says are “strange” and purely visual. Vishnu’s skills lie in telling more with less, and weaving narratives into design through his strengths in illustration and semiotics. “There are certain places” he says, “where the rigour of design overlaps with the craftsmanship of an artist.” He believes illustration is not just a matter of form or style; it all boils down to the content. Vishnu’s sketchbook is his creative soul, where he immortalises fleeting moments from daily life by instant captures in his characteristic scribbles.

In a project called Motorcycle Muse for Royal Enfield, Co-Design was tasked with bringing this historic icon to the 21st century. Capturing the entire history of the Bullet in a single shot was a struggle. Vishnu then created a ‘coat of arms’ using the initial factory slogan- ‘made like a gun’ which uses symbols and imagery from its rich past. Each Bullet is handcrafted, and various modes of representation like etchings and paint-stripes are used. So, Vishnu argues, an illustration depicting the motorcycle should be equally well-crafted. But why would Royal Enfield go for an illustration when they can fly any model to any desert in the world for a one-off shoot?

Vishnu explains, “An illustration is not defined by the vocabulary of what’s available to you - it is defined by the vocabulary of your mind. You can put things together and make things that have never existed in the world before.”

Written by Arjun Dutt