Design and Daru by Design Evenings

Concrete alleys of Hyderabad are treated by residents like boyfriends of their teenage girls. They’re only allowed inside upto 10 feet of the courtyard. However, the Pongal muggulu is a unauthorised and celebrated expansion of individual territory into parking spaces. I saw a young parent hollering insults as a pigtail and tail shot across it. But the muggulu had more concerns than Paragon and paw marks. For miles away, this winter solstice belonged to a rather, intelligent Design. At Heart Cup Cafe, Design Evening was celebrating its first warm-up session, Design&Daru, for 2015, giving the muggulu a shudder in the cowdung area.

They have been a comprehensive place for Design Thinkers, startup owners, problem seers and solvers alike. The Design  Quadragram, Tulsi, Prashanth, Imran and Arpan believe that Design Evenings are not a consultant group, but a family. A family that leans on each other, and fosters and celebrates the creative community in Hyderabad. Between Irani chai and Osman biscuits, Design Evenings have provided spaces where crowdsourced apps, like getRTI have emerged, which let activists and citizens to access RTI information from the government. Route boards for RTC buses have been revisited, in favour of the Urdu and English speaking Hyderabadi, who gawks at the approaching Telugu characters. Not bound by domain or theory, the mad methodists have also discovered “designs for graphic storytelling”. Spilling outside the Evenings,  they have given rise to the student-initiative dLabs, which, as I see, is the badass education within IIT-Hyderabad. Student enthusiasts and their mentors have coalesced engineering and design solutions together to create better habitats, and better technical and managerial skills. To the Quadragram, the most important people are those who can ask questions.

More than all else, Design Evenings have provided a culture for the traditional “Kya KartuN” question of the city. Collaborators have been found, ideas have gushed and procedures have sprung, and the ubiquitous “jugaad” is now being replaced with robust, reliable designs. At Design&Daru today, we celebrated the ebbing, frothing Design Culture in the city. Sponsored by Policy Innovations, Design&Daru painted contentment on every face that attended it. An outsider would have called it the contentment of the ravishing music in the backdrop. But the insiders left having struck the right chords of innovation and design, and a promise to take it forward.

For more updates, log on to http://designevening.com/ or sign up for the newsletter http://tinyletter.com/designevening

Comments

comments