Viewbook
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November, 2016 Design + Environment + Law Laboratory The lab is housed at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology
TEAM Deepta Sateesh Director & Co-Founder Shambhavi Singh Design Researcher
DEL Lab Logo Design: Sonalee Mandke
ADVISORS
Cover photo: Rutuja Patil
John C. Keene University of Pennsylvania
Photo credits in this viewbook: Deepta Sateesh, Alaka Kavallur
Geetha Narayanan Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Studio Faculty: Deepta Sateesh, Dilip da Cunha
Kabir Bavikatte The Christensen Fund
CONTENTS VISION
1
DESIGN AND PEDAGOGY Studio I & II
3 5
PRACTICE AND DIALOGUE Doctoral Research Lab Research Humanities & Design Workshop II
11 12 14 19
PROJECTS AND PLATFORM Bypass Lab Entitle Conference Bangalore Project
25 25 31 32
SCOPE AND IMPACT
34
VISION We believe that the designer brings a unique approach to complexities and contradictions on the ground, in contentious landscapes, through synthesis and imagination, to investigate, image and intervene. The Design+Environment+Law Laboratory (DEL Laboratory) is set up to challenge existing legal, environmental, social, economic and cultural frameworks through interdisciplinary thinking and creativity. The studio-lab carries out collaborative research projects, to explore the intersections between design, humanities, law, ecology, policy-making and place-making, through active engagement in the environment. We bring a design inquiry to pedagogy and practice.
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PEDAGOGY AND DESIGN INQUIRY We move design thinking out of the institution into the field, pushing towards activating and catalysing change. We use design as a practice that stretches across inquiring, investigating and imaging ecologies, and how we engage with them. This is achieved through design studios (student and faculty) which feed into the larger scope of the design research undertaken by the lab. Values that guide our approach, methodology and pedagogy are: • • • • •
Interdisciplinary thinking Openness and reflection Embracing complexity Design sensibility Curiosity and criticality
• • • • •
Empathy and mindfulness Experience-based learning Ecological sensitivity Consensus building Emergent ideas and practice
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Studio I & II Two postgraduate level studios were run this year. The intent was to bring interdisciplinary ways of situating, visualizing and engaging in complex environments in order to maintain an understanding of processes, forms, functions and relationships in the environment. The site of investigation was Bangalore City. Bangalore has been the focus of many kinds of research and development activities, and colonial and post-colonial influences. Without contesting those approaches and activities, we used design (thinking) as praxis - bringing together the humanities and social sciences, planning and design, landscape and the natural sciences. The studio attempted to image the city beyond its many identities - Garden City, Silicon Valley, Biotech City, etc.
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The Design Process
I: Inquiry into a ‘particular’ of the City To initiate this process, students undertook diverse inquiries into a particular thing, process, event, or rhythm of the city, something of their choosing. The inquiry would construct for them a lens, an orientation, a condition, and set of locations that will guide their fieldwork in the city.
II: Traversing the City With the lens, interest and agenda developed through the investigation of a particular ‘thing’, students undertook a journey - crossing the city, documenting territories, phenomena, conflicts, materials, processes, cultures and environments along and across this constructed line.
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Plot of the Attur tank, exploring the grounds and practices, by a masters student Alaka.
III: Initiating Design In this stage of the studio, students developed a new imaging and language for tanks and bunds of the city (Attur, Yelahanka and Puttenahalli). The intervention was in the form of a visualisation that places the tank bund as a spine, structuring different conditions and practices of the tank bed.
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PRACTICE AND DIALOGUE The DEL Laboratory is currently engaged in research work to begin a revisualization and reimagining of landscapes, through studio projects as well as doctoral work. The research entails practitioners and scholars to develop design methodology that offers a new lens to challenge dominant constructs and nurture emergent ideas. The projects provide a rich and rigorous learning experience that is shared through a constant dialogue with those outside the lab space, in workshops, seminars, exhibitions and the public realm. Some of this work is in collaboration with Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (faculty at Department of Landscape Architecture at UPenn).
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Practice-based Doctoral Research The Western Ghats today continues to be torn between the world of the colonizer and that of the inhabitant, perpetuating familiar problems that stem from familiar conflicts of development versus conservation, culture versus nature, outsider versus insider, global versus local. The thesis is that these conflicts arise from an inherited picture of place described in a quasi-scientific language. The use of this language can be traced back to colonial texts; but the roots of the image behind it are more difficult to unravel, being embedded in articulations such as maps, object drawings and literature that have structured a ‘lens’ with coastlines and contours, species and systems, hierarchies and classification schemes. This lens, or imaging, which is assumed by both sides of the conflicts in the Ghats today, is a work of design. The research explores the construction of specific disciplines, and Kuvempu’s 1967 epic novel, Malegalalli Madumagalu, which tells the tale of the rich tapestry of the Malenadu region, rainforest, human relationships and practices.
Walking as a practice to explore the grounds of the Western Ghats.
The practice-based research aims to reveal a different ontology of place emerging from the everyday practice of walking in the Ghats. Initial explorations were presented at “Undisciplined Environments,� ENTITLE Conference, Stockholm, Sweden on 22nd March 2016.
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Lab Research In 2012 the Western Ghats was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As a result much debate has sprung up between the notion of land uses and practices on the ground in context of the Western Ghats. This inquiry takes on the exploration of a thota in Kallahalla near Tirthahalli, and its construction in its surroundings. The practices in the thota are constructed of movements and rhythms that are gathering, accumulating and generating new associations with the ground over time. Thus the thota extends beyond its physical and spatial boundaries. These active constructions that are always in the making are lost in a static representation of the thota in a map. As a form, along with other representational strategies of land use, the map bounds the it spatially and reads as a ‘plantation’ that is separate from the residence and the forest. This visual language does not allow for it to be seen as changing over time. The project begins to challenge these representational strategies by imaging the thota.
A map of Bharatipura, 1904, showing the Kallahalla plantation ground.
Above: The edge as a line that divides
Material exploration of porosity, revealing the ‘edge’ as an active surface.
Edge as a perforating surface
Edge as a dissipating surface
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The plot reveals a different understanding of an ‘edge’ or a ‘line’ as an active surface constructed by various practices on multiple grounds, and not one ground. This imagination opposes the lines on a map that separate the elements of practices occuring on the ground through the fixing of land uses.
Plotting of practices gathering/accumulating along the grounds of the Thota.
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Humanities & Design Workshop II “Between the Home and Maidan” The first Humanities & Design Workshop sought to outline the ground on which design as a mode of inquiry could meet the effort to re-conceptualize the human sciences. Some of the presentations made in that workshop found their way into the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought (41 Summer 2015) edited by Professor Venkat Rao (see articles by Dilip da Cunha, Venkat Rao and Vivek Dhareshwar). The second workshop set itself the task of understanding the different learnings and investigations the seminar and the studio enable. The idea was to make explicit the kind of learning that happens in the seminar and studio spaces through the exploration of ‘home’ and ‘maidan’.
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Dilip da Cunha presenting Maidan as a moment of inquiry.
The maidan being more than a ‘nondescript’, ‘appropriated’ and ‘informal’ space in the city; is a ground at odds specifically with the city’s urban nature that is set apart on its own terms. Dilip da Cunha’s presentation built on this oddity of the maidan. It asked whether a design studio modeled on the maidan as against the city could be a way to explore and invent ‘things’ beyond those that the humanities have take for granted as subjects of study and critique, including the ‘city’.
Presentations centered on the following topics: • • • • •
Rahul Srivastava, URBZ - Tracking Circulatory Urbanism in India Dilip da Cunha - Maidan as a Moment of Inquiry Vivek Dhareshwar - Varieties of Critique and their Relation to Pedagogy Shipra Upadhyay - Revisiting & Redesigning Fairs, Festivals and Rural Landscape Deepta Sateesh and Shambhavi Singh - New Grounds of the Western Ghats
Rahul Srivastava presenting Tracking circulatory urbanism in India. Design + Environment + Law Laboratory | 21
The workshop had a dual focus – asscientists, designers the task scholars was As social humanities to: or artists, the challenge was to be able to see how the conceptual resource of one’s discipline or medium between home and maidan;responds to the issue and to the inquiry.
a) ‘Set a stage of design’ b) Call out the ‘design language’ of this setting; and c) Consider the ‘difference’, ‘critique’, and possibilities that the stage introduces.
Vivek Dhareshwar presenting Varieties of Critique and their Relation to Pedagogy. Design + Environment + Law Laboratory | 23
PROJECTS AND PLATFORMS BYPASS LAB: BY PASS INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE PERIURBAN FRINGE Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (IGCS), IIT Madras, Chennai 26th June-2nd July, 2016. Deepta Sateesh co-facilitated the BYPASS LAB. BYPASS LAB was a one-week hacklab organized by the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (at IIT Madras), focusing on the peri-urban fringes of cities in India. The workshop focused on new ways of recording (and inventing) data in the field, visualization and design research. Its current edition is devoted to Chennai’s peri-urban fringe in the area of Sriperumbudur, which is undergoing urbanization at a rapid pace, manifested in the zoning laws, housing plots, fly-overs, gated townships and more. The main intention was to question forms of representation beyond the paradigms of urban-design, data analytics and GIS technologies, to rethink the roles of fieldwork, reconnaissance and design. “The Seen and the Unseen” was presented by Deepta Sateesh, where she exhorted the need to engage with the visual paradigm. She emphasized the importance of design as an attitude, sensibility and as a tool to critique an existing construct.
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Karl Beelen presenting at the one week hack lab.
Speakers
Core Team
Arun Ganesh, Pratik Yadav, Sajjad Anwar Mapbox
Karl Beelen, Research Scholar ICGS, IIT Madras
Arunava Dasgupta, H.O.D Urban Design School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
Lalit Kishor Bhati Urban Planner PATH, Auroville
Christoph Woiwode,Visiting Professor ICGS, IIT Madras
Vidhya Mohankumar, Architect and Urban Designer UDC (Urban Design Collective)
Kiran Keswani CEPT University, Ahmedabad Seetha Raghupathy Urban Designer AECOM’s Singapore Studio Siddharth Hande Data Analyst Kabadiwalla Connect
Deepta Sateesh, Director Design+Environment+Law Laboratory, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore A summary of each day’s proceedings may be found here: Website: www.bypasslab.net Blog: urbandesigncollective.wordpress.com
Durganand Balsavar Architect, Activist, Writer Artes - Human Settlements Research Collaborative Lalitha Subramanian, Assistant Professor Department of Social Engineering RGNIYD, Sriperumbudur
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Participants presenting their explorations through the six-day workshop.
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ENTITLE CONFERENCE “UNDISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENTS” Stockholm 20-24 March, 2016 Deepta Sateesh presented her research and the challenges in the area of political ecology and environmental humanities, that not only explore the construction and complexities of conflicts in the Western Ghats but also explore a new approach towards seeing a (nature-culture) unity that can transform the way we engage with our environment. ENTITLE is a European network of research and training on political ecology that brings together scholars and fellows from a variety of institutions and disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. Power and conflict are at the core of socio-environmental change, but existing knowledge and higher education structures are ill-equipped to address them. Most of socially-relevant environmental research takes place within isolated disciplinary silos and has a disciplinary orientation. To discuss the potential for an undisciplinary political ecology, the European Network ‘ENTITLE’ launched the International Conference UNDISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENTS, co-organized by the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and the Environmental Humanities Laboratory of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
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THE BANGALORE PROJECT The terrain of Bangalore has been given many names. From Garden City to the Silicon Valley of India, it has been explored through a lens that is either inherited from our colonial past or is an aspiration that the administration has for this city. The study of Bangalore’s terrain that was undertaken by Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur in 2006 (Deccan Traverses) culminated in the exploration of Bangalore through a unique design approach. They explored the implications in the modes of representation used by the European surveyors and how that representation has been taken for granted without question in the present day, problematizing Bangalore’s landscape. Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur: Times of India, Bangalore, 7 August, 2016 One of the key aspects of their work was uncovering the network of tanks and bunds, that shape the terrain of Bangalore’s “naked plains”. These water storage tanks were critical when it came to regulating the seasonal flows and over flows of water in the region. This system however would manifest also as fluctuating accumulations of clay, and not the perennial reservoirs of water rendered in blue, as they are projected and believed to be today. They were built as a non-linear network, to work with water. The ‘lake’ imagination however, has trapped these systems of flow into static water bodies, manipulated and often controlled over time to be subservient to the beautification of the city, or tourism/ real estate development activities. Old maps of Bangalore.
LAKES Scenic Perennial Consumptive Isolated
LOW GROUNDS Working Temporal Productive Systemic
The proposed project revolves around this assertion of Bangalore as a terrain of tanks and bunds, focusing on its low-grounds. The Lab along with Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur, aims to develop a strategic plan that can activate Bangalore’s low grounds in the following ways: • • • • • •
Uncover the gutter and keep them clean Use up rain water gathered in tanks Reconnect storm drains to tanks Recover low grounds where possible Dig open wells strategically Educate ordinary citizens that Bangalore is a rain terrain.
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SCOPE AND IMPACT The DEL Laboratory has been creating action-oriented projects for research where certain gaps have been identified and can contribute to research and activism in addressing the nature-culture divide. They are: • Investigating environmental legal history of a landscape • Critically reflecting on the construction of landscapes developed over the years through multiple disciplines • Exploring design practices in the areas of ecology and environment • Creating new methods and tools that can operate in complex contexts • Experimenting with ‘inclusive’ approaches in the creation of new data • Creating non-disciplinary design models for learning, doing and acting in the environment • Imagining new ways of ‘seeing’ and acting in environmentally sensitive regions that can inform policy-making at large
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Facebook: www.facebook.com/DELLaboratory Email: ledlab@srishti.ac.in Tel: +91.80.4044.7000 Twitter: twitter.com/LEDLabDeepta Address: P.O. Box No. 6430, Yelahanka New Town, Bangalore - 560 106