The Sustainable Urbanist – Jyoti Hosagrahar Part 1
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, [...]
A Grand Idea – Inhabit Section Finalists
A Grand Idea -Inhabit Section competition culminated on June 17th. A lot of interesting entries came pouring in from all round the world. The ones published are a few that stood out. Our judges Raul Smith Correa from FAISCAS and Soo-in Yang from The Living are going over the entries and plan to pick a [...]
Mapunity – Social technology at work
Mapunity uses and develops technology to tackle social problems and development challenges in India. They provide map based services and design geographical information systems along with mobile technologies mostly for government departments and civil society organisations. They are also extend their services to R&D initiatives of commercial ventures.
Of all the various project Mapunity is involved [...]
Bambike – A Bamboo Bicycle
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 [...]
Babajob.com – Connecting employers with informal sector workers
Babajob.com is a Bangalore-based start-up that uses the web and mobile technology to connect employers and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) informal sector workers (i.e. maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) with the goal of creating a scalable, replicable and profitable solution to combat poverty. Babajob aims to do this by creating greater market efficiency in the informal sector through [...]
Jaaga – Creative Common Ground
Having spent a long weekend with Archana Prasad –Co Founder Jaaga, National Institute of Design alumnus and Bangalore based artist, in Pondicherry, where she was performing with her group The Manjunauts, (she is also a VJ) at the Freedom Jam; I had the chance to engage in a dialogue with her about Jaaga.
Jaaga’s name has [...]
ReThink Waste = Thunk in India
India’s headcount of approximately 1.17 billion people consists of more than one-sixth of the world’s population. In a country as large as this, it is rather alarming that there is no Indian policy document, which examines waste as part of a cycle of production-consumption-recovery or perceives the issue of waste through a prism of overall [...]
Designers as Change Makers – Part 2
Shweta Mudgal is an architect previously working with L&T in Mumbai and SOM in New York City on the Mumbai International Airport. Shweta acquired her BArch in Mumbai and her MArch from Southern California University of Architecture (SciArc).
For the second part of the Designwala feature – ‘Designers as Changemakers‘, Shweta talks about architecture as a [...]