Art on Autopilot - Since you dont have time!

Long back read that some sculptor spent his whole life making several sculptures for a large garden, sounds cool but what a waste of life, seriously! In case you paint a Monalisa or something than you might think its worthwhile, since you made a masterpiece for generations to come, but all of us ain't Vinchi. 

With whatever capabilities we possess we can have two possible choices to make, one is to make a masterpiece to be remembered or to create abundance of art for yourself and for humanity. Abundance can give you instant opportunity to channelise your creative energy rather than waiting to make that one masterpiece for which you are waiting since last 10 years. And we are not talking about just fine arts, it can be anything, any form of creative affair which you love to be engaged in, you see even pattern of numbers is art for statistician, that's art for her!

So how will you create abundance when art is not your bread n butter and you are ever occupied with inexhaustible to-do list for your lifetime. Solution is to put your art on an autopilot mode. Making art anywhere everywhere, art which consumes least amount of time but is still an art to your satisfaction.

To keep your thinking wheel rotating an example can be like; take a complex peice of sculpture or object or take simply a junk, spill a bucket or mug of  water in front of it, see the amazing reflection in water, now click or capture or paint or draw that reflection or the whole environment or simply observe and feel blessed to see your creation, additionally spill some paint in the  water or add a mirror in the backdrop if you want or just do anything you like and your are ready with your art piece.

Idea is that it might take substantial time to create that very sculpture or art piece for example, whose reflection you are trying to capture but the moment you added thin film of water or a mirror for example the whole dynamics changed, now the whole setting is complex enough to qualify for an art, your personal art. See Master Artists used to paint pomegranate and guava to create classic masterpiece called “Still Life”, you simply cut them in half and one-click-capture the intricate pattern or just cut-n-shape them in cube and you are ready with your modern piece of art.

The best thing is that it’s you who have created this art, and you own this art; at least it gives you satisfaction to see your creativity manifested, in a blink of eye almost. This shortcut of art is just an example, because you were really running short of time to be devoted to art but you really wanted to create some, now you can think of infinite possibilities to dump the excuse that you could have created something only if you had time. This is how you beat the art!  

Art from Archive - I

A decade old or so..

In that very creative moment availability of tools at ones disposal seems immaterial, it was made by oil paints applied on paper like water color that time, probably water was also used instead of oil just to somehow spread the colors on paper, or may be a bit of fabric color as well. One could have created something like this even with charcoal, or eyeliner or toothpaste, or shaving cream, or tomato catch-up or may be with some combinations of them. Its that very urge to create something that one feels is art, getting caught up in arranging the perfect colors or brushes or tool or a perfect setting in merely postponing the creation of Art. 

  

If "Law of Physics" is working in your piece of Art or Architecture...

..then you know you are going in the right direction!

From Wonderful Classical Art to Good Design to Amazing Architecture, one thing is common that is "Law of Physics" which is and should be ever-present there to make it a success. If Gravity is acting on you, it can and should act on your Piece of Art or Architecture as well. Though Gravity is just a simple example here to explain the impact of Physics on Art or Architecture.

A page from the old Notebook

Art without true reflection of natural physical laws is like making a portrait of someone sitting in front of you and assuming that there is no force of gravity acting on your subject of art or may be your subject is floating in the air or something. Remember the good old classical art works from master artists, with beautiful bulky art subjects of individual or group portraits?

There is another way to look at it as well, that is; you can also make a successful art or architecture by beating the gravity or natural laws itself, like an architectural work having an appearance of floating in the air. No matter what, a good design revolves around the law of physics whether going with it or challenging the Natural Laws, Laws of Physics!

Do you consider marketability of your design based on color demand?

Something they didn't tell you in Design school!

Something like this.....

• If they are looking for "Red" Give them "Red"! Even if you personally like purple or yellow.  
• Red color product will have way higher mass demand than Purple one, no matter what the product is or how well the product has been designed. 
• The only place were you can sell purple color product is in the niche market, while red and blue captures both niche and mass market.
• The only way you can make profit selling purple color product is by targeting high end segment with higher margin. 
• Its okay to be emotional about your product and defensive about your design, but you need to listen to market aspirations first and modify your  design as per demand, even if that requires keeping your ego aside. 
• If you haven't shipped it, it really doesn't matter how cool your design values are.  

Playful Mobile Advertisement (2008) : Unpublished work.

Advertisement graphics for imaginary client.

Graphics by: Anoop Jha (Blog Author)

A Portrait In Mirror

Mirror, A subject of art itself - Fluid and Subjective!

What are the urban planning challenges today?

Inferences from review of JNNURM CDP & Appraisal Reports!

Following sectoral list of “Urban Planning Challenges” have been compiled based on data extracted and analyzed from JNNURM Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) for selected cities of India and its appraisal reports. Though these aspects are generalized and somewhat overlapping across most of the urban nodes of Indian sub-continent, lessons and inferences can be equally valuable and applicable for other cities across the world to considerable extent. It’s just an effort to have a consolidated perspective and understanding of future urban challenges, you can further suggest additional planning constraints and challenges to the list!

Comprehensive list of Urban Planning Challenges-

INSTITUTIONAL 

Functional overlap

Jurisdictional overlap

Issues of convergence and coordination

POLICY     

Lack of stakeholder consultations or under-participation

Disaster management issues

Governance issues

Delegation of functions to the new ULB

Prioritizationof action and projects alienated from problems and vision

Matters of resource sharing with neighboring states

ECONOMIC

Lack of value-add sectors

Expansion of informal sector

Continued influx of low skill manpower from neighboring states in some cases

Expanding un-organized sector

Lower work participation rates of women at some places

SOCIAL     

Issues of urban sociology in a multi-ethnic city

Social unrest,

Civil disobedience,

Public safety,

Unemployment,

MUNICIPAL FINANCE   

Unstructured financial profile of urban local bodies

Long-term financial viability of municipal finances

Capital investment requirement

High level of dependency on state government grants

Un-assessed properties for property tax base

Tax rates not being revised regularly

Irregular flow of specific grants

Irregular servicing of debt

PROPERTY 

Low coverage of properties by taxation

Low collection efficiency,

Inefficient user charge

SLUMS & URBAN POOR       

Security of tenure

Quality of housing

Access to infrastructure

Rehabilitation and resettlement

Problem of sanitation

Community toilets

Inadequate night shelters and security

High density with poor infrastructure

Issue of ‘unapproved slums’

PLANNING 

Infrastructure deficits

Unplanned growth

Constraint on growth in city areas due to natural or environmental constraints

Increasing gap between demand and supply

Inadequacies in the basic services in unauthorized clusters

Encroachment,

Non-confirming land use

Missing link between physical and fiscal planning

Protecting, conserving and managing heritage resources

Skewed spatial density distribution

TRANSPORT

Limited road space

Shortage of public transport system

Regional traffic through the city

Inadequate management of streetlights

Problems of roads and transport during festival season

Congestion in the old city areas

Lack of facilities for NMV

Rapid increase in vehicles

Lack of land use transport integration

Inadequate facilities for physically challenged, pedestrians

Inadequate parking

Multiplicity of agencies

Missinguser interface

WATER     

Nonrevenue water

Leakages

Losses in distribution network and transmission main

Inequitable Distribution

Obsolete distribution system 

High energy cost in water production and Distribution

Ground water pollution

Water supply Vs storage capacity gap

Ground water depletion

Problems of water supply on specific festival days

O&Mproblems

Unequal intra-city distribution

Inefficient network hydraulics,

Old and dilapidated networks

Pricing and cost recovery

High pollution in distribution network

River/ Sea odor

Lack or failure of river action plans

SEWAGE   

Limited sewerage treatment facility,

Release of untreated municipal waste into rivers

Release of untreated waste into natural drains and open grounds

Disposal of industrial effluent into the city rivers,

Soft soil condition

Storm water management

DRAINAGE 

Frequent floods

Lack of proper drainage system

Silting

Uncontrolled solid waste dumping causing blockage,

Stagnation of water & waste water runoff

Backflow of water from the river system

Flooding during monsoon season

SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT (SWM)

Absence of effective primary collection mechanism

Inadequacy of waste dumping sites

Lack of scientific waste disposal

Continued use of open dustbins

Un-segregated waste disposal

Land availability for sanitary dump sites

Issue of industrial slag

HEALTH CARE    

Inadequate bed strength

Ill-equipped and inadequate operation theatre in some government hospitals

Ill-equipped corporation dispensaries and health posts

Unsafe hospital waste disposal practice

ENVIRONMENTAL

Depletion and pollution of water resources,

Degradation of forest cover

Deteriorating air quality

High incidence of environmental health problems

NATURAL  

Earthquake

Fire

Possibility of epidemic events

JNNURM CDP & Appraisal Report Source: http://jnnurm.nic.in/citywise-cdp.html. 

What planners of urban environment can learn from online environment?

Radical possibilities if they get it right!

The single largest advantage of online environment over urban environment is that online environment is spontaneously morphing and mutating. It’s a spontaneous collaborative environment with user generated content, individually conceived collective community efforts, within a larger set of easy to understand rules with basic governance and minimal intervention. Best part is that it all comes unasked. All you need to do is to create an online platform intuitive and sticky enough to appeal to masses, leaving rest up to user’s creativity. Users are motivated and willing enough to spend their own time and money and whatever it takes to contribute to this global phenomenon, mostly unasked mostly free, they are even willing to pay for it in some cases, be it social or professional networking platform (Sharing/ Facebook/ Twitter/ Linkedin) or cloud environment (Storage/ Backup) or virtual collaborative tools (Building/ Sharing/ Docs), open source programming environment (Building Blocks/ Learning/ Sharing) or just a platform to share their own piece of mind or simply converse (blogs/Forums). Amazingly this ever-thriving virtual environment with apparently intangible inputs even gets translated into tangible outputs. A self-sustainable virtual community environment with little bit of nuisance andchaos which can be managed and currently being managed through series of governing and control instruments! Wonderful!

Let’s talk about urban environment a bit, parallel to online environment. Let’s identify the obvious constraints and major differences. Urban environment is tangible in nature, things like - raw material, physical infrastructure, resource intensive, capital and labor intensive and then there are governance and management issues since resources are limited and stakes are high. Let’s see some common somewhat overlapping traits; both urban and online environment needs basic physical infrastructure in place some of which are common as well (Power, Water, transport VS Telecom infrastructure/ Wi-max/ Wi-Fi etc. with common later part), both environment require serious manpower to build, sustain and grow, they both demand control and security, both need a heterogeneous mix of business models as well and so on. What comes to mind now? What you are thinking right now absolutely makes sense - with so much of similarities while having “people” and “community” at center stage in both cases, why haven’t we explored the mutual learning possibilities and why we haven’t been able to translate the online functional learning experience into building of physical community called “City”.

Can we do it? Think so; at least we can give it a try! By establishing a logical, statistical, mathematical and philosophical co-relation between the two, leaving possibility to weave the city fabric and its functionality further in future! This analogy of physical (urban) and virtual (online) environment presents a model of self-evolving self-sustainable community further translated into urban community where every member of community is contributing to build the “physical environment”, though they are already doing it “Socially” well at present. Can we give a community or region enough flexibility to shape its own environment, customizable up to their personal needs and choices without hampering the public interest, with basic infrastructure built in place to start with, a set of basic rules to play with, some basic building blocks to kick-start, with flexibility to select platform and tools of their choices to build, with a governing, supportive and helping hand, watchful eyes as well as security and rescue mechanism in place, with some kind of layered public, community and personal finance model and so on, all this flexibility within a controlled and transparent environment. Reinforced by supervisory control and incentive instruments! Building with a vision of “sustainable community” and “fairness ofopportunity” at center stage! Fortunately we have analytical tools, informative resources and accumulated experience of mankind today which can help extract and derive and establish useful correlation between the urban and online environment paving a way for better and sustainable future!

Making places - That street corner…

Traditional planning approach and values - being lost in transition?

Any random street corner of any random city, corner at the junction of streets, streets busy or calm, chaotic at times, still having its own order, order in transition, transition of daily commuters, transition of shifting daylight, transition of shadows, glitter of street and neon signage light, LED shop window and synchronized traffic light, that flux of casual traffic light, that changing activity landscape across the day across the seasons with occasional pause. But peculiar are the streets of old and heritage cities, cities with history, those streets and corners evolved from the centuries of planning and urban design experience, tailor-made to the local needs of community and neighborhood, with varying characteristics across the region across the city and across the world. Wisely adapted for local climate, some designed for extreme harsh summer, some for tons of snow, an ancestral legacy of planning and design up-to the last fine details of drain cover and cast iron light-pillars and articulated bollards.

Though respected, preserved and encouraged in some cities, that example and inherited legacy of urban design and planning is fast deteriorating and disappearing, sometimes out of ignorance sometimes purposefully ignored, in several parts of the world and almost in any upcoming new city in any corner of world, that local wisdom of traditional planning is increasingly being lost and being mechanized, being templatified. Traditionally those streets and corners were designed to protects commuters from harsh sun, from icy wind, and from pouring rain and sudden snow, those meandering streets used to have a texture of character with those spaces to pause and relax and in the comfortable safe niches, a place to chat and socialize and a place to engage oneself in that active buzz of street, corners reinforced to give it a distinct recognizable character. That legacy of traditional localized planning is calling for justice and revival.

Thinking about fabric ofcity especially within city boundaries, a natural question comes to mind, why a vast country with extremely diversified heritage and climatic regions and special needs should have only few standard templates of streets sections and junctions and street corners with little bit possibility of urban design integration mostly for sake of localization formalities? Templates though give advantage of planning execution, better control and cost efficiency; it tends to encourage deterioration of heritage characters and inherited values and learning mostly in the name of infrastructure and technical feasibility, commercial viability, changing lifestyle requirements, uniformity, standardization, international acceptance etc. Of-course needs are different today, speedy transport, higher population density, quantum shift in lifestyle and technology, higher latent demand, etc., hence the different planning approach visible and practiced today, but we should ask ourselves, can we incorporate those learning experience from our past generations into today’s planning process and can we infuse them in today’s “easy way out templates”? With all the technological advancement and possibilities and centuries of learning experience, one thinks that it’s somewhat possible to strike the balance between traditional learning and present planning approach preserving the character and dignity of that specific city that specific core and that neighborhood, starting right from the careful planning of that street and that street corner. All it needs is a tender heart, logical brain and collective will of planners, urban designers and policy makers and may be few extra bucks!    

Urban Underprivileged segment-what can we do for them?

While you are driving down the busy city lanes sometime of the year someday, from there to somewhere, busy negotiating ruthless traffic, busy minding the gap, minding your own business, busy processing next to-do-list on your mental map, driving with occasional subconscious glimpse of buzzing city with all that glam and beauty and buzz and noise and colors; glimpse of the city with constant familiar flux; suddenly on the footpath, on the next turn, on the traffic junction or on the dim corner of street you spot a poor deprived child, a beggar in patchwork cloth, an old discarded person or a doped fainted soul, often pretentiously indifferent but sometime being concerned it comes to your mind, what can you do for them? Why they are in that state? What opportunities they lacked? What is their future? What is the way out for them?  Is there someone listening to them? Apparently it’s not their first choices to be there in that unpleasant state!

No matter how rich, how well off, how busy you are in your own life you must have come across such instance and have thought at least for once that what can you do for them? There might be policies, might be schemes for their revival but they might not be aware of such things, there might be some poster of welfare scheme to rescue them from that situation posted right at the display board of that bus stop but may be they don’t know how to read, no one told them either, may be they are educated but they lack a caring hand to push them towards a better life, may be the sheer number of them making it difficult for city administrations to deal with them, may the same sheer number of them calls for restructuring of public welfare policies and re-engineering the implementation strategies.

Something somewhere lacking, some lessons to be learned, some immediate rescue actions need to be taken, with a sincere note of hope we need to initiate a discussion on variety of such issues on variety of platforms to come up with some concrete and realistic alternative livelihood solutions. Something which will give them a respectful livelihood and a dignified life! One still feels that it’s more of policy level issue than the monetary one. Policies like customized education, mandatory skill development, upfront plans for aging city population, teaching survival tricks and strategies right from the elementary education up to the higher education ladder and even to the uneducated population, survival from financial breakdown, survival from natural calamity, surviving from personal, professional, physical and medical emergencies, surviving poverty and old age in a dignified manner of course with institutional support, citizen participation and motivation!

We need to make every citizen skilled and able enough to earn their own livelihood even if they already have livelihood resources at disposal, even if they have family and people to take care of at present, at least as a backup livelihood plan so that they don’t end up being abandoned and begging in streets in case of major setbacks, so that at least there offspring don’t spend whole of their life on street relying on other’s mercy. Simply educating 100% of population is not the ultimate solution for urban poverty for that matter poverty of any kind, even formal education will have to be skill oriented from the very beginning; we can keep narrating encyclopedia to them later! Just an argument though, an 8 to 12 year child who has some livelihood skill up his sleeves can survive even flourish in his life picking up right opportunities, if hypothetically he has no other options left, but it might be very difficult for many of children of same age group to deal with such situations with generalized Not-so-skill-oriented mass education which is being transferred to them at school at present. Education system need to include more and more of technical and creative skill and hobby oriented course structure from the very beginning, one can even think of tailor-made customized education for every single student identifying there talent and inclination early in life. Even if they don’t have to use those skills they can peruse them as their hobby or alternative income source in course of time, and we’ll have a pool of incredibly talented, confident, morally and financially elevated citizens. 

What is the most important aspect of mall design?

Is it space and freedom to maneuver without feeling forced to buy?

Of course there are competition among mushrooming malls and multiplex across city, but there are some visible differences between some of the highest and lowest footfall malls. Ever wonderer why? Is it location, is it design, is it scale, is it publicity, or is it people themselves who make any mall successful? 



[Handpicked Books]





Why some malls fail to attract footfall in spite of all the hype and facilities. Possibly it’s the architectural language of mall which defines the success of it through its public or private nature. Malls are meant for public and its architectural language should speak out loud about its open and inviting character. The moment malls start assuming private nature people start losing interest. The moment it fortifies itself through built architecture in the race of achieving maximum commercial advantage and built up area, people hesitate even to enter the premises. People hate to be in a position where they feel forced to buy, even if there wallet is stuffed, or bank balance is soaring high. Consumers have to be attracted to the commercial centers passively, without being felt impose for something. Idea is to provide an environment where they feel comfortable enough to walk in and walk out without being forced to buy something, allow them this freedom to maneuver and they will come again and again, and subsequently buy something or other.