Teaching – Research & Practice Archive of Prayas Abhinav

History ·
Industry ·
Lecture ·

History of Manufacturing: Work/labour, Debt and Change in the Nature of Time (2019)

[at School of Design, Nirma University] History of Design is a very complex thing. It offers an opportunity to understand the different components of industrial and communication design. How have these components been effected by the growth and changes in the economy and society? What is the scope for learning in this for future entrepreneurs and startups? The industrial revolution was a unique period of high-growth, population shift and growth and changes in the urban environment. This course looks at the repercussions of such an intense time on labour, conditions of work, our indebtedness and the nature of time. These four aspects of our life have been altered in an irreversible way by industrialisation. This course offers a reflective study of these issues.

Archiprix ·
Campus ·
Public Art ·

Hybrid-space Use & The Informal Economy (2017)

[at CEPT University] Workshop brief: Ahmedabad is distinctly fractured. There is one aspect of the city’s life which is very pious and frugal and bases its value on community service and ethics. There is yet another aspect of the city which is speculative, expansive and entrepreneurial. I am not placing a moral value on either. Through the framework of a past project that I had done, I am suggesting that these two can be brought together. There can be a schematic for utility based public structures that incorporate cultural and social functions as well. Doing so will not only create a link between public needs and public imagination but will also attempt a connection between the urge to serve the public and the desire to render a service to the public and charge for it, thereby creating a sustainable node for trading within the community. The creation of such nodes is entrepreneurial at a scale which the voice and sentiment of the street can still be heard and reflected upon. We will identify structures that the public space needs in terms of facilities that might need to be provided. Such structures might need to be provided in the form of services that are sold (chai shops, snack shops) or allowing communities to express or realise a need (play ground, local farm, medicinal plant herbarium). Once such structures are identified, they can be mashed together in di!erent combinations based on aesthetic play, novel placement for neighbourhoods and an imaginative renewal of what has essentially become a dry and functional sprawl of a city. Design professionals might enjoy and find meaningful their participation in a mashup exercise that also critically weighs the value of each new notion of the urban that each mashup proposes. Purely functionalist approaches to crafting our urban neighbourhoods have failed and we need fiction, speculative storytelling and the crafting of dreamworlds in equal measure in order to create a certain fluidity that will put us all at ease.

Framework ·
Games ·
Introduction ·

Game Design: An Introduction (2016)

[At Digital Game Design, National Institute of Design Bangalore] A ten day workshop with the first year students. Some thoughts behind the workshop contents follow. A game is literary form. It is a way of telling stories in an immersive manner. The form of the game and the process to arrive at it are not different from each other. The experience of a playing a game can only be understood by playing it. On being narrated, it will only denote the nature of the metadata of the experience. This reflects the nature of code and rules. Within a rule-based system, players seek liberation. Liberation is towards arriving at a stage where there are no rules. Understanding rule-based systems means to understand that liberation is not possible. The density of rules that exists keeps changing though. The game design process involves designing a game that will yield another game. Narrative extrapolation is a process similar to designing an experiment as a part of a scientific research process. Experiments are the only way of proving something and likewise games are the only way of delivering an experience that need not be imagined any more.

brief ·
Internet Studies ·
Workshop ·

Web Curation (2013)

[at Arts & Humanities, CEPT University] Web Curation is an emerging practice of engaging with web based content in a way that attempts to listen to voices in the pool of noise that the web has become. Seeking out content from this pool of noise means to understand the context from which the content emerges and design strategies around that context. If expression is a sign of a trigger, then unfiltered, untapped content can be accessed most easily and abundantly on the web. It then becomes the responsibility of other co-inhabitants of the eco-system to be able to design flows and channels that tender this expressive content in a navigable form for audiences. The curator, literally the one who cures, is not the gate-keeper in the context of the web, but is the agent who can create envelopes of meaning and frames of enhanced signification and audience. This process will be outlined in the one week workshop.

Framework ·
Masters ·
Workshop ·

New Media Studies (2013)

[New Media Design, National Institute of Design] Workshop brief: As an introduction to theory and philosophical threads in the study of media, its relationship with society and its development across time needs to be understood. Much like the application of design process, the definition of problem-solution has had a primary role in the development of media. This is one set of questions that we bring back and look at, but once we already have the media environment populated by an array of media, how do we interrogate them? Theory offers us one lens to interrogate the past in the language of analysis that delineates a continuity with the specific objective of tracing a link to our present. But the density of dealing with texts the offers another difficulty of wading through them and synthesising a personal vision. Experiencing the construction of a philosophical argument is much more enriching process. We will experience the construction of such arguments in the space of conversation, enactment and group play. Each such experience will be clustered around themes and scripts developed out of a distilled understanding of moments of philosophical clarity in a historical landscape.

Analogue ·
Animation ·
media ·

Computational Aesthetics and Experimental Animation (2012)

[at Arts & Humanities, CEPT University] The workshop introduced the Master's students to different ideas and techniques involved in animation. It discussed some of the following ideas: animism, illusion of motion, memory, screen and interface, generative code, and recording.

International ·
Introduction ·
Public ·

Public Art Workshop @ dis-locate (2011)

[at dis-locate - Tokyo/Japan] An open public art workshop for the community as a part of the dis-locate festival. The workshop discussed methods and contexts for starting a public art practice and let some exercises with the participants.

Fiction ·
Future ·
Science ·

Questioning the future: science-fiction, philosophy and fantasy (2010)

[at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology] The course introduced the second-year students to different traditions of philosophical enquiry into science-fiction literature and cinema. This introduction will then be followed by an exploration of the relation between science and politics in India. This will involve a review of the work and publications of science academies around the country and extrapolate the kind of fictional worlds they can lead us to imagine.

Highlights of Teaching