The Goa Project

Design

Design Track of The Goa Project 2016

Lenses or Frames are a crucial element in any design. Through the last few years of TGP we’ve been exploring methodologies & principles of design, thoughts on various domains of design & your journeys through novel concepts & explorations. This year we thought we should pick up one lens through which you can view your design - Designing through the lens of India.

Being a part of a global community means taking in a lot of concepts from the east and west giving rise to a state of constant flux - but what have these trends meant for our cities, people and places? Through this years design track we want to invite speakers to talk about their work through principles, ideologies or (even better) work samples of how they’ve understood an element of our country and designed for it.

We’re throwing out a few ideas to elaborate the type of topics we’d like to encourage this year - Designing for preserving our past / cultural heritage, designing for the evolving needs of rural India, designing urban farming techniques to grow crops more economically, Designing modern housing units (and also in the process defining what it means to be a Modern Indian!), designing a type-face resonating the spirit of urban youth, designing a system of ethics for using mobile apps, designing for local eco-systems, designing a rural education system that allows you to earn while you learn. We’re keen on understanding the challenges you pick up in your work / your practice and through it understand the elements of an Indian context you work with.

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TP
The Goa Project
#The Goa Project Funnel The Goa Project is an unconference - where unlike a typical conference, the talks are not put together by a panel or knowledge partner - but is proposed by the attendees themselves. You propose a session or talk that might be of interest to the audience at the unconference, … more
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abhijit sinha

@sinhaabhijit

Project DEFY : Design Education For Yourself

Submitted Jan 9, 2016

Technical level: Intermediate

Show how you can learn by yourself, and how schools can exist without a teacher. A philosphical statement on definitions of education.

Outline

We created a school, very close to Bangalore, in a village. However, this school is different - it has “no teachers”.
The school is a complete democracy where people of all ages and backgrounds learn what, when and how “they” want to, and also run the school themselves. An interesting mix of cheap technology, small space and community spirit, showing people how to teach themselves. It is so different that we won the Global Junior Challenge from among 1600 school and education projects in Rome, Italy.
I will be telling the story from the bare beginnings of how we came up with this concept of a complete alternative, and where we are going next. And most importantly - HOW IT AFFECTS ALL OF US!

Requirements

Microphone

Speaker bio

Brought up in Mumbai, school was not our only source of education; and of course, education doesn’t just mean books and exams. We learned how to travel safely, to speak fluently, even that teachers were not always right; all this not only from the school, but from friends and people we met, and situations we were in. Movies, plays, night-outs, camps, Internet, gaming sessions, traveling, picnics, sports, walking around the city – everything added something. School-life was amazing, not because of the school itself, but for how we were discovering new things, and ourselves, each day outside of school.

I wish I could say the same for college. A fancy place, with thousands of students from all over the country, in a town in South India. Yet restricted in thinking with limitations on what we study, when we go out, what career choices we make. The real problem was that students tolerated it and believed it was okay to live this way. Their goal to ultimately get a job, after four years of proverbial “jail-time”. Their school-life was much different from mine, so they found nothing wrong with the college system.

In my tail-ending college period, I developed many projects, always keeping social impact in mind. I created a $500 ambulance in Uganda, a $25 water-less urinal, an app for detecting car-accidents and more. My classrooms did not help me here.

But, I had Internet. I could find courses and great teachers there. I learned everything through my unrestricted laptop-screen. I began believing that future schools will not be in a classroom, with a teacher on the board. After college, I worked at an IT company for 6 months and quit. I moved to a village outside Bangalore, and started building the school I imagined; my first makerspace in Banjarapalya village. A makerspace is a creative environment for community collaboration, with no strict definition, where people explore, discover, build, cook, paint, play and have fun.

I wish a world where more people are ready to take challenges and not jobs, and an education system built on this notion

  • www.projectdefy.org
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Hosted by

TP
The Goa Project
#The Goa Project Funnel The Goa Project is an unconference - where unlike a typical conference, the talks are not put together by a panel or knowledge partner - but is proposed by the attendees themselves. You propose a session or talk that might be of interest to the audience at the unconference, … more