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| Itsy
Bitsy Spider |
By
Lavina Melwani |
| Indians are beginning
to crop up in next generation designs. |
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Buildings made of spiders’ webs,
sandals that clean the earth, crockery
constructed from corn, furniture that
is grown rather than manufactured, and
garbage bag mini-skirts.
Sounds weird, impossible and a bit
wacky?
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| Designs by Abhijit Bansod,
who developed |
| the Karmameter. |
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Well, these
were some of the 204 entries in Metropolis
magazine’s Next Generation contest,
creative ideas of a whole new generation
of young designers and indicative of the
trends you might see in the future in
design. With Indians popping up everywhere,
it wasn’t surprising to see a handful
of desi names cropping up here too. The
winner of the prize was a young Boston
design firm, Single Speed Design, whose
innovative proposal transforms abandoned,
dismantled sections of a huge elevated
highway in Boston into the Big Dig apartment
buildings. Talk about turning life’s
lemons into sweet lemonade!
In a related collaboration with the International
Contemporary Furniture Fair, about 20
of these designs were collected together
for an exhibition — Raw: The Next
Generation, at the Jacob Javits Center
in New York. The ideas were all innovative,
some radical, and some environmentally
friendly in today’s changing world.
Karin Carter, who was born in India and
raised in Denver, came up with the concept
of SLiK fabric developed as part of her
thesis project on sustainable fashion.
She used plastic shopping bags to create
snazzy SLiK clothing: a non-woven textile
made of 100 percent post consumer polyethylene
film. So now there’s finally a use
for all those Walmart shopping bags!
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Sandals that clean the earth is another
feel good solution to the world’s
environmental woes and these JohnnyAppleSandals
were created by Lift, a design firm headed
by Eric Bergman, which has Amit Mirchandani
on its six-member team. These sandals disperse
soil-cleaning seeds through channels embedded
in the soles.
With wear, the soles release seeds, some
of which take root and clean the environment
through phytoremediation, a process by which
certain natural plants can destroy hazardous
contaminants in the ground. So now you can
save the world by merely putting one foot
in front of the other — wearing the
right footwear, of course. |
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While the Danish design team
of Anne Bannick and Lene Vad Jensen had
come up with PAPCoRN, plates, bowls and
cutlery made out of Bioplast, a biodegradable
thermoplastic derived from cornstarch, Abhijit
Bansod came up with an intriguing concept,
a Karmameter!
Bansod, who did mechanical engineering
in Nagpur, is a product design post-graduate
from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
and works for Titan Design Studio in Bangalore.
He bases the concept of the Karmameter on
the Bhagvad Gita, which teaches that individuals
must accept the consequences of their actions.
“The unfortunate fact is that the
world is an exhaustible resource at a crisis
point and citizens of a democracy have duties
that complement their rights,” he
says. “We are not helpless; and man
can never be certain that there is no afterlife
or rebirth where actions in this life are
tallied up and made to count at some subsequent
time!”
Buying stuff never felt so good! With Abhijit
Bansod’s Karmameter, shopping becomes
almost a moral issue. In fact, as Bansod
suggests, design takes the lead in fomenting
a morality induced cultural discourse. |
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| It involves a voluntary
system where the designers, the government,
industry and consumers sign up and work
together; smart technology is designed
and built into products that are manufactured.
Under this system every product that
is designed, and subsequently manufactured
by industry, is assessed a certain number
of points. These points take into consideration
the “environmental” expense
to manufacture, use or consume, and dispose
the product.
Whenever a product, recognizable by the
Karmasun logo is purchased, the purchaser
must provide his karmameter, where points
are deducted against the total.
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| Abhinand Lath
created the Optrix |
| fiber optics panel embedded
in resin. |
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| If the product is used
in an optimal way and disposed in a proper
manner, points are added to the individual’s
account. These points increase or decrease
on the individual’s Karmameter with
every purchase and every disposal. If
the consumer is involved in purchasing
recyclable products, using biodegradable
ingredients, points are added. At the
end of allocated periods the points can
be used for redeemable purchases, tax
rebates and benefits, holiday schemes,
or charitable donations.
At Titan, Bansod is involved in product
design of everything from vases to picture
frames and watches, and his designs are
fresh and whimsical. His latest lifestyle
accessories collection is Lifethings,
fun items that bring cheer into daily
living.
The award for best new design at the RAW
exhibition went to Abhinand Lath for Optrix,
his fiber optic panels embedded in resin
and react to changes in light intensity
and color. It not only looks beautiful
but also has great potential for use in
architecture, lighting and signage.
It is only in India, one thinks, that
prosaic engineering students are also
poetry enthusiasts. In fact, Lath who
came to the United States from Jaipur
to study electrical engineering got the
concept for Optrix after reading the following
poem:
I repeat my vow
in unchanging colors of the ageless bamboo—
which still creates ten thousand generations
of shadows
— Gyokuran (an 11th century Japanese
poet)
“Translating this poetic idea into
a physical form, one that is able to provide
a corresponding sensory experience of
the imagery while being abstract enough
to be removed from ‘the bamboo forest’
and become a thing in itself, resulted
in Optrix,” says Lath.
The material is created from acrylic
or Plexiglas into which light conducting
channels are carved, these then carry
light and color within the material. As
he explains it, the basic Optrix system
consists of two parts. A transparent material
that acts like a conduit for light and
a substrate that it is embedded in: “Together
this composite either reacts to the presence
of light by redirecting it or reacts to
the absence of light by reconfiguring
shadows.”
Lath first started making things with
his hands in his mother’s design
workshop, and later got interested in
robots, building a large one for the Birla
Science Museum, just after high school.
His interest in robotics brought him to
the United States to pursue electrical
engineering at Arizona State University.
Last year he also completed his MA in
architecture from the University of Michigan.
With help of the University of Michigan,
Lath has applied for a comprehensive utility
patent. He is forming a company that will
explore the commercial possibilities of
SensiTile, and is doing an installation
for Digital Globalsoft, an Indian subsidiary
of Hewlett Packard, in Bangalore.
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| Lath’s journey as
an inventor started early. “I had
started building small robots quite early
on in school. By 12th standard I was making
pretty complex ones that could move around
and pick up things and had some degree
of automation. These caught the eye of
the young director of the new Birla Museum
and Planetarium that was coming up in
Jaipur and he talked me into building
a very large and complicated robot for
the Museum.
The robot would show the visitors around
the museum. It took me about a year to
complete this machine and since there
were no parts specifically available for
a robot in Jaipur in those days, it was
made with recycled automotive and other
odd parts.
The head as you can see is made from
a motorcycle helmet! The completed machine
could roam around and had a fully functional
arm. It had a tape recorder to talk and
the lips were synchronized to its speech
so that it would seem to talk! |
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| Tallayi Raja Viswanadhan. |
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Unfortunately, the leadership
at the Birla center changed soon after
the machine was completed (the new director
had his own plans) and I left for the
U.S. so I don’t think it was in
service for very long.”
Which finally brings us to the astounding
notion that spiders’ silken webs
could reinforce entire buildings! Yallayi
Raja Viswanadhan who graduated with a
B.A. in architecture from REC Bhopal and
an M.A. in construction management in
the United States, came up with this futuristic
concept that seems right out of science
fiction.
He says, “It’s a fiber, which
has evolved over 400 million years, and
it’s just one-tenth of the diameter
of a human hair and if it can stop a bee
traveling at 20 miles an hour, I guess
there’s a possibility that this
fiber can be combined with other materials
to develop structural elements that can
be effective in resisting wind and other
forces such as the attack on the World
Trade Center.”
In his proposal, Viswanadhan explained
that spider silk is stronger than all
known materials and the dragline of the
European garden spider can support a weight
of 0.5 g without snapping, whereas a steel
strand of similar thickness will snap
under the strain of just 0.25 g. It is
also five times more elastic than Kevlar
and Kevlar is several times stronger than
steel.
He points out that Nexia and the U.S.
Army have mimicked the spider’s
spinning process and produced recombinant
silk for a wide range of applications
and material composites and says, “So,
probably in the near future, new fibers
can be developed in place of steel to
support curtain walls.” |
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| Minnecola, who is Zakir's
manager as well as a dedicated Kathak dancer
and teacher, has seen the mix of Caucasian
and South Asian Americans at the sold out
concerts as well as in classes: "I'm
extremely encouraged. It's wonderful to
see the young people coming to be interested
in the music. I also feel very satisfied
as an American who fell in love with this
dance and this music myself. It's an affirmation
to me; sometimes I've gone to teach and
I've all Indian students studying Kathak
with me! It's a real testament to universality
and that we all can meet in the arts."
She gets numerous emails from Indian students
on college campuses, who are very proud
of their culture and want to present the
maestro's concerts through their Indian
associations. She says, "That's a piece
of the pudding right there, that there are
all these associations all over the place,
all over the country."
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| Spider Silk by Tallayi Raja
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| Viswanadhan. |
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| So what is happening? Is
it a full scale Renaissance, a revival of
India's great music and dance traditions?
And why is it happening now?
There's a simple, one word answer - demographics.
As the Indian American population has escalated
to almost two million, the sheer numbers
ensure an increased demand for such services,
as immigrants, now well established, try
to catch up on what they've missed and their
American born children, who have come of
age, reflect on their roots. You have Indians
everywhere, in major corporations, hospitals,
and college campuses and of course, Silicon
Valley. There's wealth and a hunger to reconnect.
"Our numbers are so much higher now
that people feel hey, it's ok to be part
of the culture," says Raja of YICG.
"You have a larger pool, so you have
more people who are good in dance, in music,
in teaching. There's leadership that's thrown
out when you reach critical mass."
She points out the generation, which came
30-40 years ago, pretty much wanted to blend
in with the landscape and most of their
cultural efforts were basement operations.
Like the Irish and the Chinese before them,
they tended to congregate in enclaves. Even
though they had money and were educated,
they did not build cultural institutions.
"My theory is that they weren't so
comfortable with themselves and wanted to
blend in, and their children too,"
she says. "But what I see now is definite
pride in oneself. It's OK to be who we are,
we want to keep our traditions, we want
to preserve them, we want to learn them.
The critical mass has been reached in certain
areas." |
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Of Article..... |
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