We had a visit to Srishti Institute last week, and were quite impressed with the breadth of areas and innovative projects that the faculty and students are working on. The projects were across the spectrum, related to ecology, education, urban city design etc. from the perspective of art and design.
I would like to invite the faculty and students here, to talk more about their research and products that have an intersection with social and environmental solutions.
The approach to create 1000s of younger changemakers who learn to look at climate/urban/social issues through design is a pretty solid one. The students are super hands on and involved in real world efforts too, not just academic projects.
There’s been some really good work - examples I remember are - visual tools to help folks understand and assess their ecology, biodiversity, etc, and their relationship with it, a focus on frugality as a problem solving tool, a focus on the design of env law, decolonizing the environment, rewriting SDGs for local relevance, the India Sustainability manifesto, a prof who’s a conservation biologist, work as part of the LENs learning network.
One missing link is how the efforts/ideas and prototypes travel out further. Maybe connects with incubators etc could help. A chair/long running project focused on how to create scaled impact from Srishti’s learnings and ideas, engaged with multiple players, could be a good idea.
We are considering a fellow program for
a. Students who want to continue their capstone/thesis project in a pre-seed stage, a runway for 12-18 months that can have them do further research and move from proof of idea to proof of concept.
b.Fellows to also work in a relay race of pushing an idea or concept further building on the work their predecessors have done
c. Fellows can join together to work on project ideas not just from within the Srishti/Mahe communities but cast their nets further
Faculty mentors, practitioner mentors and subject experts can all come to play.
d. We expect a version of this to be kicked off as part of World Design Protopolis not only at Srishti but also at up to 20 other universities in BLR offering design studies.