Public toilets have always been a big problem in India. New and innovative solutions are created everyday to solve this problem. The latest in the row of toilet innovation is the E-Toilet by a company called  Eram Scientific Solutions which is a part of the Eram Group, a technology research and development company.

The company created the toilet called ‘Delight’. Delight is an automatic public toilet with automated payment collection, door opening, flushing, floor cleaning and sterilization. The GPRS enabled system allows controlling the toilet remotely by administering collection monitoring and unit health status through web application and mobile phones. Delight is equipped with a Bio Membrane Reactor that helps recycle the water and reuse it for flushing and cleaning. Solar panels are available for alternate energy needs. In the areas where drainage tank facility is not available Delight can provide a Green Eco Friendly solution to manage the waste and its disposal like the Bio Membrane tank system and the Water recycling unit.

The toilet needs around 45sqft of built space and comes with a coin validator where the insertion of coins opens the door. Delight is first in the line of world class sanitation facility in India. Around 150 toilets have already been installed and another 300 are due to be installed.

The cost of e-toilet varies from Rs.350,000 to Rs.850,000 (inclusive of bio-membrane reactor’s price). Bio-membrane reactor is a nano-technology-aided device that instantly recycles the used water and makes it ready for future use, according to an article in IBN Live. The income generating model for these toilets is the advertisement panels attached outside and the collections everyday by the users. The present installations have been made possible by funding sources like the Local Area Development Funds, local self governments, corporate social responsibility funds, Lions Clubs and NGOs and trade organizations according to an article in Business Standard.

Sustainable Comprehensive Hygiene Initiative (SUCHI) @school project

Kerala is the first state in India to offer the connected toilet facility and other states will follow soon. Eram Technologies has also joined hands with Toonz Academy and created cartoon characters on the front panels of the units to be installed in schools in Ernakulam to make students aware of cleanliness and hygiene. More information about this project is here.

In this interview, Deepa Mehta who is an urban planner living in San Francisco, talks about heritage, modernity, technology and urban design. She explains how the integration of modern tools and technology with traditional arts and crafts will help carry these age old techniques to the next century. Deepa mainly works in cultural heritage planning and sincerely believes that community, culture, and design are catalysts for sustainable development. She likes to test out this hypothesis by engaging in relevant projects.  One such project is Shipyard Community Arts, spearheading the development of a new arts center and cultural district through innovative partnerships at Hunters point in San Fransisco.

Supertable (previously called the Mobile Activation Station) is a project  by Holobiont (Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert) . It was  selected as the winner of the ‘Grand Idea Competition‘ organized by Designwala this summer. Haruka and Frank won a grand or $1000 to make their idea come to life. Supertable is a portable reconfigurable table with built-in power distribution, lighting and storage. It turns empty stores into communal spaces. Once built, the Station will be available for short-term use in vacant storefronts along Rogers Avenue in Crown heights, Brooklyn.  Supertable will be built off of an easy set of instructions with easily available kit of parts. It follows the idea of hackable and DIY culture of building structures that are flexible, adaptable, reusable and community driven. Stay tuned for the Holobiont’s other community and urban planning projects in the upcoming second part of this series.

Jyoti Hosagrahar is faculty at Columbia University, New York and Director of Sustainable Urbanism International at Columbia University, and Bangalore, India. Architect, planner, and historian, she advises on urban development, historic conservation, and sustainability issues in Asia. Her research interests include urban heritage, cultural and environmental sustainability of cities focusing on the intersections of nature, culture, and the built environment, and postcolonial perspectives in design and planning. She serves as an expert for UNESCO on historic cities.

Hosagrahar is the author of Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (Architext Series, Routledge, 2005) awarded a 2006 book prize by the International Planning History Society. At Columbia she teaches courses on urban sustainability and postcolonial perspectives on non-Western architecture and urbanism. Recently, Hosagrahar has been extensively involved in the conservation and sustainable development of historic cities in India in partnership with UNESCO. She is directing the preparation of an integrated site management plan for the conservation and sustainable development of the heritage of the Hoysala towns in Karnataka.

Sustainable Urbanism International’s minimalist design and planning interventions aim to enhance local economic development, while enabling local populations to express their historically derived placed-based identities. SUI is involved in a range of studies, policies, and design interventions for historic townships through extensive community and stakeholder consultations. With Sustainable Urbanism International in partnership with The Energy Resource Institute, India, Hosagrahar has coauthored, ‘An Exploration of Sustainability in the Provision of Basic Urban Services in Indian Cities’. (TERI, 2009).

Stay tuned for Part -2 of Jyoti’s video where she discusses Indigenous Modernities. We will release that shortly.

Anab Jain is a designer and a TED Fellow, interested in creating stories that lead us towards new, alternate futures. Educated in India, Vienna and London, she is the Founder of Superflux, a design practice working at the intersection of people and technology.

She created ‘The Power of 8’ a collaborative project to imagine alternate, optimistic futures. Most recently she was working on a project called 5th Dimensional Camera that explores the wider implications of living in a world with quantum physics. Her recent talk called ‘My Elastic City – Designing for India’s immaterial urbanism’ at the World Congress for Information technology revolved around soft urbanism in India.

The recipient of Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, Anab has also presented her work at MoMA, NY, Apple Computers Inc, LIFT and SIGGRAPH.

This video footage was recorded on skype so please bear with the quality. Thanks!

Jay Thakkar’s first book, Naqsh, is reaching out to individuals from varied backgrounds and his second, Matra, was just named ‘Best written work on Architecture 2009’ by India’s ‘Foundation for Architectural and Environmental Awareness’. Jay Thakkar, author, designer and faculty member of the School of Interior Design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, talks to Designwala about India’s vernacular architecture, documentation, and design policy.

Click below to hear the interview with Jay Thakkar:

by Shuchi Vyas

IN THE OLDEN DAYS, the popular Gujarati dish, Undhiyu (a medley of vegetables eaten during the Kite festival in January) was made underground in an earthen pot with carefully handpicked vegetables from the market and fresh homemade spices – and chatting while it was being cooked was a part of the ritual. Now it’s either made on the stove, or worse, it’s take out. “Crafts were about time, and people don’t have too much of time now. It’s all about getting things ready-made,” says Jay Thakkar. What Jay aimed to do with his first book, ‘Naqsh: The Art of Wood Carving in Traditional Houses of Gujarat’, was to present it all to a larger audience instead of confining it to academic circles.

A majority of drawings for Naqsh were done during Jay’s graduation thesis at the School of Interior Design (SID). “I wanted to do something which was urban, so I looked at old cities and how the urban inserts started to take place. I would sit down in the old city of Ahmedabad and just sketch. This turned into an expression of wood carving which Naqsh was then based on,” he explains. Along with his team, he completed the entire project using one of the earlier versions of Pagemaker, which in hindsight seems almost impossible and primitive considering it lacked the basic ‘undo’ function.

Naqsh has been used extensively by people in the restoration field, historians, textile designers, and pattern makers, among others. A teacher at the Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad even conducted a class exercise where the kids made colored versions of the Naqsh designs

While the purpose of publishing ‘Matra: Ways of Measuring Vernacular Built Forms in Himachal Pradesh’, co-authored by Skye Morrison, was to cater to a larger audience and broaden the dialogue on vernacular architecture, it was also a reason to get SID students out of their classrooms and feel architecture and design. About 60 students voluntarily and enthusiastically worked with him, and brought in different perspectives and various design technology to enhance some of the images.

“In India, there are two categories of books on architecture: coffee table books and research books. The idea for publishing Matra was to combine both – it’s more of a research travel book,” says Jay. After Matra was published, the team went back to each home in the Himachal village, gave them copies of the book and asked all those involved in its making – students, drivers, villagers and their children – to sign the first couple of pages of one of the books as a symbol of ownership and involvement.

Click here to see the video of the book signing

“People became a part of the book. We wanted it to be of use to the local people and we made everything three dimensional so that it could be referenced by the masons and carpenters,” explains Jay. He also had architects and builders in mind for if and when they want to reference the structures covered in Matra there to build something similar in the future. “Technicians get to see the seismic side of the region as Himachal has a history of earthquakes and landslides which we’ve managed to cover,” says Jay. This detailed work also caters to historians and anthropologists, even as it is an easy read devoid of jargon for the layman and tourist interested in vernacular architecture.

Some useful insights about vernacular architecture came to the fore during their travels to Himachal Pradesh for Matra. For instance, the team studied a particular house that was made with 40 trees. You’d gasp, “How is that environment friendly?” Jay feels it is: As the lifecycle of a tree is about 25 years, people in the village made it a ritual to plant anywhere between 25 and 40 trees whenever a child was born, so by the time he/she grew up there would have enough raw material to build a house. “While we buy insurance, they invested in nature. If you have a reforestation process in place, wood becomes very economical, but we don’t have that system in India,” Jay explains. The sad story now is that the government is restricting the use of wood and so these people don’t have wood to repair their houses.
“There are a lot of students that want to pursue research after Matra’s success,” Jay says. “Now when we take up a project at school, we think about the possibility of it being published, and we work on it in such a way that it becomes viable,” he adds. CEPT has been documenting since 1962, which means that it has a sizeable amount of work. “But because there has been no real encouragement for research, it all remains on campus,” says Jay. It’s only recently that SID started a research cell and gained the required funding to be able to publish about a dozen books. The Sir Ratan Tata Trust published Matra and some of the other work that is now being published from CEPT.

Another problem he outlines is the lack of funds for academics. There are individuals that are interested in research, but are carrying it out on a small scale. “When we were working on the second book, my whole team gathered around 6:00 pm and work till 3:00 am for two years. You can’t sustain yourself like that, you’ll soon burn out,” says Jay. “If academics are asked to write a grant, do the research, get the publishers and do their own marketing and publicity, isn’t that too much?” he adds. But this is slowly changing. The Indian government is getting more involved and interested. The system for disbursement of funds for such projects is a slow and laborious one, but CEPT has a few proposals in the pipeline.
Jay feels the main issue that plagues interior design today is licensing. As the field is relatively new in India, there are no laws or regulations that certify the practice. Anyone can practice interior design without the required education and training – a carpenter, a housewife and even celebrities call themselves ‘interior designers’. But this is changing with efforts by the Institute of Interior Designers (www.iiid.org) that is formulating rules and plans to certify those from a five year course and encourage those from a two-year course to work a little before meriting them with a license. The Council of Design is being formulated by the Government of India to regulate most design fields in India.

So, what’s next for Jay? He is interested in publishing more research work, for which he is looking for funds and grants from the government, individuals or NGOs. The larger issue is how to enable it to reach more people and not just lie in store rooms. CEPT University is not allowed to sell research books that are worked on by the students, so whatever money comes in for Jay’s books, is mostly in the form of a donation. “I have worked on these books honorary. Normally, you need a grant, publisher, research assistant, production designer and a team,” he outlines.

If all goes as planned, Jay hopes to work on a host of projects: For one, he plans to work closely on wooden architecture in India. “There are five states that have wooden architecture that’s bound to get lost soon. So first, the idea is to document it, which will hopefully open it up to further research,” he explains.  Jay is thinking about a large-scale project on the vernacular architecture of India, for which, he jokes, he will “need a lifetime”. The books available on the subject today are a few and niche. As 2010 is ‘Swarnim Gujarat’, the State’s heritage year as it completes 50 years since establishment, he wants to produce a body of work on the state’s indigenous arts and crafts by creating a platform to bring NGOs, handicraft corporations and the government together to better document these subjects.

Click below to hear Jay’s views on India’s cultural and social issues :

Bruce Sterling’s short story The Interoperation , featured in the Technology Review published by MIT, (Massachusett’s Institute of Technology) can be briefly summarized as a tale of a future where robots build and tear down buildings based on pre-set programs and a future where people ride bamboo bicycles.

In present times, this story is not too far from the truth. Well, at least, the latter. Today I had the opportunity to talk to Vijay Sharma – creator of Bambike- India’s first bicycle made of Bamboo. After accidently being enrolled at the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, Vijay’s foray into manufacturing bamboo bicycles began nearly two years ago, when his wife Niyatee bought herself a cycle to commute to work. Currently located in Bangalore, He began researching cycles online and came across the trike design. A trike (abbreviation for tricycle) is a three-wheeled vehicle, different from our very own cycle rickshaws in its placement of two wheels in the front and one at the back. While tricycles are often associated with the small three-wheeled vehicles used by pre-school children, adults also use them for a variety of purposes. In Asia and Africa, tricycles are used primarily for commercial transportation, either of passengers in pedicabs or of freight and deliveries.

The idea of trikes were far too irresistible for Vijay and soon he began to design his own. After a brief stint at a furniture design company, since he always wanted to have a workshop of his own, Vijay began his own workshop called ‘6mm Designs and Furniture’ along with two friends. It was in a rundown garage in a small alley of one of the crowded areas in Bangalore. Slowly they expanded and reached out to a bigger clientele, mass-producing furniture for them. The workshop provided Vijay with the space to continue his experiments with bicycles. The trike took 6 months to come to life – from the drawing board to execution.  Last year, a friend suggested he design a bicycle using bamboo. Armed with months of research, and with a few ideas of his own, Vijay made his very first Bambike in 3 days.  The first prototype was made with raw bamboo with metal sleeves on junctions. This resulted in a little fishtail wobbliness at high speeds. The second prototype was made using thicker bamboo sections and this time with a jig to hold all members and important junctions like bottom brackets, rear drop out, head tube and seat tube.  Here the parts were glued together without metal sleeves and using hemp fiber. A more streamlined and ergonomically superior one followed. After making the first prototype of the Bambike, Vijay met Arun Katiyar. Arun is involved with the Ride-A-Cycle Foundation that promotes biking and going green – a small way to give back to the environment. He was instrumental in encouraging Vijay to develop his bamboo bike further. While Vijay made more prototypes, Arun tested them out and gave him relevant feedback to improvise on the designs.

Bambike then went on to associate itself with TFN – Tour of the Nilgiris. The TFN is a challenging mountain bike event and would be a great avenue to test out the endurance of the bamboo bicycles as well as get it more endorsements. Vijay decided to create a bambike for the event, that would be awarded to the most sporting participant of the 8-day 900km cycling rally.

At 12 kgs, it weighs 3 kgs less than the first prototype and does not compromise on features, functionality or aesthetics. Bamboo serves as an apt material given its tensile strength and tubular structure. The fact that it is eco friendly doesn’t hurt one bit. Using Bamboo also cuts down the energy consumption as compared to steel, aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber. Bamboo has better shock- absorbing power for rough roads, and Vijay is working on a stiffer version for smooth roads.

Given the story so far, one would think that Bambike would have more buyers. This query led us to a discussion about the notion that most people have about Bamboo being a poor man’s timber. This notion tends to result in an expectation that given the material replacement, the cost of the bicycle should be tremendously cheaper. However what people seem to forget is the amount of effort that goes into the creation of a single handcrafted Bambike. While the idea of the bamboo bicycle has gained popularity in the country, it has had very few buyers. This doesn’t seem to deter Vijay’s spirit. He believes that he has achieved what he set out to, when he decided to design and create Bambike. While an increase in the sales of Bambike would definitely be a plus, he hopes for more people to start cycling for its health benefits and as an attempt by people to reduce their carbon footprints. It’s a hope for more environmental consciousness in an age of mass consumption.

For more information visit – http://handcraftedbikes.blogspot.com