Category Archives: Pune Design Fest Blog
Architecture and Design- the old and new!
Let’s start with the new beginnings…
India finally has it’s own body for the Design Industry. Called the ‘Association of Designers of India’ (ADI), the initiative of forming this body began a year ago, when the Pune Design Foundation and AIDI, Bangalore members decided to dissolve their respective local bodies and come together to create a pan-India body for Design. So history is being made and the Facebook group, within a matter of few days only, has a membership of 300+ designers, all raring to come together and work for Design and it’s promotion.
The ADI will be formally launched on February 10th, 2011 during the inauguration of the Pune Design Festival.
The Pune Design Festival or PDFest as it is more popularly known as, is in its 5th year and promises to be a wonderful collaboration between different design fields, with various events lined up.
Mukund and I from Sarvasva are proud and honoured too, to have been part of the founding body of both – the ADI and the PDFest. What glorious times we live in! And I’m sure, this is just the beginning of more to come.
Look up ADI on www.associationofdesignersofindia.com (the site is still coming up, will keep you all posted) and PDFest on www.punedesignfestival.org.
On another note, I have been doing a month’s course on Indian History/Archaeology and Architecture and have been learning so much of what makes this great country; including some of the renowned teachers who are taking time out to lecture and share their work and viewpoints. I especially wanted to do this course so that I could further supplement ‘Pune Walks’ (the heritage walks that our firm conducts) with the knowledge from experts.
And while I have been seeing the extreme passion and care being taken for projects in archaeology, I have failed to see the same happening in the heritage conservation/ restoration segment, especially here in Pune. And what is saddening more so is the huge gap between the ancient history (archaeology) and the modern times; which makes the middle segment of history/heritage all the more so important. And hence required to be respected, saved, documented, conserved, restored and maintained. Not retrofitted with the new only, or with the modernistic idea of what we think these buildings /structures should be. Because, if these structures are not going to be part of our present and future, we will in the long run have no link to our immediate past.
And the past is important for the future to exist.
- Darpana.
India Design Festival
The Pune Design Festival became a larger platform called the ‘India Design Festival’ this year.
Apart from giving a presentation and help in organising, Sarvasva also had come up with an installation called ‘chaos theory’, for the overall theme of ‘Environment and Design’, wherein we collected discarded bottles and paper every day at the Festival to show how much waste the designers themselves generate, in a matter of a week.
We also got the ‘Polar Bear’ down from Mumbai. Our friend and artist Hetal Shukla, and the creator of this car, was here too.
And some of the highlights for us was the participation on the panel discussion on design, with CNBC (to be broadcasted soon), the very interesting talk by Prasoon Pandey, the various new friends we made and the great learning experience.
