Indian Institute of technology -Delhi - Industrial Design Masters
I earned my Master's degree in Industrial Design from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2007. During the two years I spent there, the institute became like a second home, immersing me in the fascinating intersection of engineering and creativity.
My master's thesis, titled "Using Tibetan Visual References in Design," explores visual grammar as a response to the cultural vacuum created by the distress migration in Tibet. The thesis involved.
Studying historical material anthropology narratives around distress migration
Object culture shifts in tibetan community, pre and post migration (secondary research)
Primary Research and ethnographic immersions in Kibber, Spiti and Majnu ka Teela, Delhi; first one being a continued habotation and the second being a resettlement colony.
Drawing and sketching existing visual references built an attention to specific set of details. This was the first step to move towards solution space.
After immersion, the solution space was directed towards defining the problem more specifically.
Tibetan script and it’s usage in the chant “Om mani padme hum”, was used to anchor the next steps and explore further.
A visual grammar was created was created by deconstructing the letter forms. Two dimensional forms deconstructed using following parameters
Looking at nature of joinaries and contacts- eg. Surface 1 point connected to surface two, surface 1 wedged inside surface two, surface one resting over surface 2 etc
Looking at placing objects in different plains and in different angles to each other
Changing the scale of objects in relationships with each other
A set of three dimensional forms were created through this experiment, which were then translated into cad models that were 3D printed using laser sintering. Some of these models were also made using Papier mache.
