“Leadership is not wielding authority – its empowering people.”
‘OFFLINE’ is a unique initiative by the Research and Curation team of the School of Design at Pearl Academy. It is meant to be an informal and collegial yet a robust and rigorous forum for faculty to present previous, current, or future research projects and ideas. Here, the faculty propose discussion around professional projects that provoke or are able to lead to a research investigation.
Such intellectual and thought provoking initiatives are laying a strong foundation in the field of Design and expand the array of opportunities to play with. The title suggests the valuable intellectual ‘labour’ our academicians engage in when they are not ‘online,’ that is after fulfilling their teaching and administrative duties.
Let’s briefly walk through the topics covered in this super exciting series called ‘OFFLINE’.
• ‘Textile Tectonic’ by Dr. Anuradha Chatterjee (School of Design) – The inaugural seminar exposed the textile and sartorial foundations of architecture through the writings of John Ruskin. Dr. Chatterjee’s made a presentation on the Transformations/ Text / Tectonic/ Textile which depicted John Ruskin’s architectural historiography as ‘creative’.
• ‘Design and Fashion: Method and Madness’ by Dr. S. Badrinarayan (School of Design) – Dr. Badrinarayan’s talk considered the role of method and madness (where madness is interpreted as arbitrariness, a chance eruption into the calm waters of the method) in the parallel disciplines of architecture and fashion.
• ‘Green Energy Retrofit’ by Manisha G Das (School of Design) – In the third instalment of the series, Ms. Das discussed the findings from the study that was initiated at SUM@ark during the presentation. It is part of a series, which constitutes the research identifying parameters that may catalyse Green retrofits within residential built stocks in urban precincts.
• ‘Portents and Prospects of Corporate Social Responsibility in India’ by Dr. Poonam Kumar (School of Creative Business) – The primary aim of the research is to understand the development of CSR policy in India over the past few years. The paper she presented also examines an in-depth analysis of current DPE (Department of Public Enterprises) guidelines, GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) reporting and its implementation in few companies in India.
• ‘MILLENNAGOGY’ (Teaching Design in the Digital Age) by Nidhip Mehta (Head, School of Design) – Digitalism is the new technological heroism. This research emphasized the fact that history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but it echoes itself. In the past, design pedagogy tended to be ahead of the technological curve, but now the design academia is now facing a crisis that hasn’t been seen in 150 years. In this presentation, Nidhip aptly explains how we got here, what it means for the current student generation, and what to expect in the future.
• ‘Wearable Structures’ by Rashmi Malik (School of Design) – An interesting study carried out by Ms. Malik aims to break the monotony of the traditional jewellery and encourage the use wearable structures. In her presentation, Ms. Rashmi discussed the benefits of Computer-aided 3D jewellery modelling, which is an excellent tool to supplement the conventional approach of representation (freehand technical drawing) and the traditional jewellery techniques, in order to be able to develop projects from the design phase through the development stage and up to actual production. Her ongoing research focuses on parametrically designed jewellery via computational tools and hybrid explorations among the several design disciplines.
OFFLINE occurs fortnightly on a Friday late afternoon, a great way to celebrate the end of the week. With its increasing popularity, ‘OFFLINE’ is seen as not just a gathering but a culture – “a culture of reflecting thoughts, sharing ideologies, investigating issues, and synergizing the creative intellect at and beyond Pearl!”
