A lesson from a drifting feather!

So, while he was walking slowly, lost in casual thoughts suddenly a floating white feather caught his attention, it was tiny but was in its full glory and was slowly drifting in light breeze towards a nearby fountain in a gravity defying act. Anyway it gracefully landed on the clear sheet of overflowing water and suddely its motion was seized but only for a moment, it was like feather finally found its ground only to realise it was a slipping, drifting ground again. It appeared that this otherwise serious flowing water sheet was happy to receive that feather friend. Though in a fraction of second that feather was mobile again with the flow of water, only to reach its next destination. Possibly "keep drifting effortlessly" was mantra by which feather was living, it was full of life in its lifelessness, and possibly it touched the conscience somewere leaving a life lesson - a lesson of effortlessness even in its full dignity, even in its constant motion!

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Digital art on the go...

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Decoding secrets of good visuals - What makes some images and photographs stand out from the crowd

Some tips, tricks and subjects of images, graphics and photographs which is bound to cast a spell

1)     B&W background subject with semi-transparent bright techno/pop color in      foreground

2)     Picture with range of depth and focus

3)     Green appeal in innovative way

4)     Lush rainy/moist green landscape in terra incognita

5)     Realistic corporate affair capturing the mood of subject and vibes of business  minus ( - ) plastic smiles

6)     Simple things in perspective view

7)     Pattern or geometry unseen before

8)     A well framed shot of pets or wildlife with serious engaging looks

9)     Capturing Interactive and playful pets

10)  Green appeal in innovative way

11)  Bird’s eye view of Rooftop innovation

12)  Well framed commercial subject

13)  Black & Yellow Composition

14)  A well framed worm’s eye view of skyscraper or anything towering

15)  Caves or any undulating interior, lit with bright morning sun displaying    excellent interplay of light and shadow

16)  Translucent colored containers

17)  Hand drawn-water color effect in this era of 3D Simulation

18)  Morning sun rays filtered through simply anything

19)  Innumerable colorful interplay of sunlight and cloud at dawn, dusk further  accentuated if captured in hills

20)  Laughing giggling girls

21)  Asymmetrically captured frame of symmetrical building or symmetrical  something

22)  Translucent building glowing from inside - filtered hint of colors further acts  as charm

23)  White doodle on black background, call it old school blackboard nostalgia or  whatever!

24)  Futuristic ambiance and setting seemingly within reach in near future, not  just another fancy unreachable idiosyncrasy

25)  Anything overwhelmingly luxurious and classic specially interiors

More to come….

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Let me show you the true artist in you!

No art is as inclusive as fine arts or call it whatever. 

It seems every single person is born with artistic talent specifically more pronounce and visible in the field of fine arts, abstract art or call it whatever, an artist even in you, whether you consider yourself an artist or not that is irrelevant,  proof is your childhood notebook filled with weird characters drawn by you and spoiled pages of your dad's diary and all the tattoo that you made on your hand, graffiti on your school desk and crayon spoiled walls of your house where you spent your childhood days and that creative surge when you were staring at the damp basement or loo walls trying to infer some meaning out of those grunge damp patterns, or even today if you occasionally tend to draw a smiley face on moist, dew clad surface and so on. Every adult was an artist in his or her childhood so they are today, so are you. 

Every child with his or her genuine creativity, making and living their own dreams in their sketchbook or on wall, vivid and real in their own imagination, a spell-bounding piece of rawness with bit of influence from surrounding, and we are not talking about all the art and craft assignments forced by educational curriculum and competition, those are plastic, manipulated, and imposed, threatening and robbing the very creative rawness of child. We are not talking about biased aesthetic judgement here. We are talking here for example the child's own interpretation of how round a sun should be or how round his dexterity allows him to draw it, not the Vinchi style geometric perfectness of circle which we tend to impose on them. Since art being essentially a true expression of self does not necessarily demands shape of circle to be a perfect circle so it really doesn't matter how well you used to draw a circle to qualify as an artist in your childhood, and since art is beyond the clutch of time so if you draw the similar weird circle today when you are grown up it is still an art and so you are an artist. Another reason is that if making a perfect circle is a qualification criteria for an artist than our computer or tab can do that job better than our master artist. 

So acknowledging the truth of your own childhood talent now you can appreciate the works of kids around better. Not judging them on their perfectness but admiring them for their innocence. You see these kids will grow up one day and change the very definition of understanding of what an art should be. After all its art if you can prove it. 

You might also like to read this post on "design diplomacy"

There used to be character and stories associated with every city street in good old time!

Contemporary Déjà vu streets - the price of mechanization, optimization and efficiency. 

Though green, well groomed, with cool informative signage and everything in place, contemporary city streets lack something, possibly lack of identity, lack of character may be! Every street looks the same more or less, you see from streets of your housing society to the neighborhood to city arteries, apart from little exceptions of some filth some beautification. What has gone wrong with the planners, landscape architects and urban designers today. You should first visualize the impactful streets of historic cities and meandering streets of untouched villages and then have a look at today's super functional streets, speed corridors rather, these are impressive indeed with all its robustness, but these are not impactful, at all, not something leaving lasting impression on our mind, not something to be remembered, not something to be praised by our future generations. Functional but industrial. Templates of supposedly best practices. But we forget that best practices lose their significance the moment we start, duplicating, imposing and transposing them. some of the mass public housing are the best example of how best practices can go wrong. 

Is it that there is no incentive left today at all to plan or design a street with character, is it that cities, public administrations and private clients lack fund (a myth) or we are robbed of imagination, is it that there are some big loopholes and ambiguity in the planning and design guidelines giving planners and designers an excuse not to be creative, is it that we have become so much efficiency oriented that we forgot we are not machines, is it that land is so scarce (a myth again) that we cant afford to have luxury of building streets with a memorable character, is it that after reading all those wonderful street characteristics in school we finally resort to the super efficient mechanized street templates, has it something to do with our optimized geometric city grid and complex infrastructure requirements, is it our drafting software to blame which has almost replaced our dear drawing boards, is it that scope of creativity is increasing being confined to the pedestrian and bicycle streets only, is it that urban designers role has been limited to the extent mentioned in their design guide book which either don't exist or is too vague for the cities of developing countries or too standardized for developed country? You see those bizarre public sculptures and momentous in the streets at places, those are nothing but helpless reactions of creative urban souls who are not being able to create a place called street in the way it should be, due to much propagated and regularized contemporary templates of streets. 

Can we dare to show some creativity amidst this long list of incentives and loopholes for "not to be creative". Can we as a planner, urban designers and landscape experts show them our humane side keeping cities monetary limitations (A myth) aside for a while. Can we design a street with an innate quality of "place" where you would often want to spend your time or something which you would like to appreciate while you driving back home?

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!

Next time you are bullied tell them you are on an exponential learning curve!

Is it "the right time" for education system to introspect on its evaluation and certification process?

You see, you have been bullied every now or than for apparently no good reasons especially in your early growth phase as you can recall from your childhood memories and being bullied even today while you undertake every new challenge. Take a pause and rewind, being bullied for not performing as well as the next bright child in your class or neighborhood, not been able to memories the obvious answers to the obvious questions asked in the endless class tests, being bullied for not performing financially as well compared to people with similar background in life.

Let’s see what's the DNA of this bullying business and has it any significance in the light of the fact that learning and absorption capacity of a person is mostly independent of their childhood performance due to several unknown and very unpredictable environmental influences and opportunities available in one's life as they grow compared to limited and intentionally restricted options available/ provided to them in early childhood. Has it any significance at all in today’s rapidly changing world with emerging technologies, accessible and free resources of knowledge and why this business of bullying should fade away real fast, at least why its high time for the same to happen. Let’s see why the boundaries of education system should and will disappear very soon.

If you will closely observe the peripheral resources of learning available today while tracing the chronological changes in streams of information dissemination and future possibilities of technological infusion in informal learning process which all cumulatively presenting a new and broadened learning process, this informal learning process is getting so inclusive, so fast every passing day that it will make your head spin. These informal learning tools are mostly ignored in education process at present. 

Let’s look at the parallel growth in education system, which apparently seems way behind the real life real time pace of development when it comes to learning process - internet, smart phone, social networking just couple of examples though, you know! Unfortunately none of these wonderful tools of information exchange and knowledge transfer which have become core of everyone's everyday life are in the priority list of education system at all, and neither going to be an area of interest or exploration very soon for them, rather they will make sure that this plethora of life changing tools shouldn't get into the education system in the name of discipline, in the light of childhood vulnerability! Of course you need some kind of regulatory mechanism.

If we go with the current ideology of educational evaluation system then people in their life should be arranged in the exact same order of professional success as they were arranged in their school or graduation class, as evaluated based on their marks gained, based on their knowledge of the curriculum, but take a look around and you will realize it’s not true, it can’t be and it will never be true. The current evaluation system doesn't acknowledge the real potential of individual; they just care about the part of potential confined to their established boundary of curriculum, including peripheral limited activities like cultural and sports participation, ignoring the future environmental influences especially technological ones.

Present educational evaluation system seems somewhat flawed and bit dangerous as well; this whole process of establishing and certifying who has what capacity at the very early stage of individual's growth period while the growth of a person is directly proportional to what kind of opportunities he or she received in post schooling or later part of educational or personal life. Imagine a hypothetical situation in which an institution firmly establishes this fact that some particulate child has capacity of a D+ grade performance in primary or high school level, imagine if he or she could not get through selection process of a good school at secondary or higher secondary level and hence could not further got enrolled in a good university because of that D+ grade. Now imagine, what if that same child becomes extremely knowledgeable and efficient few years down the line after completing primary or high school education possibly due to new environmental influences, due to the latest learning tools and vast knowledge resources available today, what if he or she is the first one to grasped and master the latest tools of learning and research, what if that D+ grade student is technically the soundest candidate for higher secondary or university entrance but couldn't secure admission just because some institution had long back established and authoritatively certified the poor grade of student based on some skewed benchmark. A dream might get devastated due to early certification of knowledge on a discreet fragmented evolution system often within a limited bandwidth of educational framework. Couple of questions for you to answer - Can you justify assessment establishing poor performance of a geek child in cultural and sports activities or visa-versa? Can you justify assessment based on questions asked in class tests, answers of which you can find out in less than 20 seconds in Google? Can you justify bullying of that poor student who does not know the one word answer of that textbook question, when he or she can find out a precise and elaborate answer of that question within seconds while learning much more in the process only if you could have allowed him or her to use their smart phone? What’s the validity of asking such questions today and what is the validity of educational assessment based on such questions today at all? Don’t you think it’s the right time for the education system to introspect?

Mutation of educationsystem due to technological infusion is an emerging area of exploration which educational strategists should focus on. Learning is a constant process, and with the exponentially growing free and accessible resources of knowledge, learning process is bound to be an exponential phenomenon. So, if you are a parent or a teacher or educationalist think twice before bullying your child or student or to those supposedly less knowledgeable than you today, because they are going to come back tomorrow loaded with knowledge and laced with such innovative tools of precise knowledge acquisition which we can’t even imagine today. Today's comparison of two kids has no realistic relation or reflection at all with the actual success in their life in future when they will be at the highly accentuated curve of learning, the only deciding factor would be who shows how much interest in the emerging technologies and sources of learning, who familiarize himself or herself how much and who absorbs how fast and all of this is totally independent from the performance and potential assessment of today.

It’s not just the fault of education system which apparently fails to timely acknowledge the impact and possibility of technological development which has and will always outpace the development of educational system. Education system has its own constraints which we should also acknowledge, which is that they need to thoroughly investigate, assess and validate everything before letting it into the curriculum of education system, they can’t really merge the trending knowledge into the mainstream education without thorough understanding of the trend and its possible impact on the students, young or mature, and by the time they understand the trend and tame it down to the extent to be eligible for the mainstream educational inclusion, that trend becomes outdated, hence this constantly lagging process of chasing new knowledge and hence this outdated dissipation of knowledge through structured education system. And since the benchmark of assessment is outdated, there is grossly wrong process of assessment of students as well. For another example, no matter what and how extensively that particular student knows about some area of his or her interest, it is not going to help him get the good grade unless that knowledge is about one of the couple of subjects specified in the curriculum. That student is supposed to stick to the curriculum diet imposed on them by the institution; apparently every other knowledge is irrelevant in the eyes of education system at least that’s what they think is important to secure a good job at the end of the day. A fundamentally wrong notion of educational performance at least a highly irrelevant model of evaluation of talent in today's world when you are not just solely dependent on schools and universities for your learning, while you are learning wherever you are, whenever you want, in that very moment, learning on your mere wish. In spite of all this free and immense knowledge the existence of educators can’t be negated, what is needed is to have a holistic approach towards talent evaluation and fast inclusion of technological shifts.

This is "Learning on the go" generation and we can’t confine it in the predefined boundary of education, we can’t impose on others what they should learn, rather they should decide what they want to learn and it’s our responsibility to provide them the customized curriculum of their individual interest, education system will increasingly have to be much more flexible, it’s inevitable and its need of the hour. What needs to be done here is that to create a macro framework for the education system, flexible, fast and inclusive enough to quickly notice, sanitize and accommodate the changes occurring in technological field and otherwise, into the mainstream education system. A framework which makes the educational system sensible and smart enough to allow unlocking the true potential of unique individuals rather than mass production.

A Public Art you will appreciate!

Making Vibrant Public Spaces and Amenities 






 

At an Art and Craft Festival Near Delhi, India

Absolut city...

When “Traffic Merging Ahead” on every alternate road, clashes are bound to happen

Bad transport infrastructure and poor road designs leading to conflicts on road.

No one wants to get into argument or fight on the fine morning office hour or while on the way back home, really!! Everyone has some plan for the day ahead, and they really can’t afford to waste time here on road arguing for nothing. But what to do with these urban roads that make these people susceptible to conflict and road rage due to design which lack consistency and continuity. It’s ironical that in the same alignment of road where mile long vehicle queue is witnessed also has a part of stretch like super smooth expressway, either right in the middle of metropolis or connecting neighboring cities, districts and states leading to gridlock. It’s like speedy route to gridlock. So 70-90 % of the whole journey stretch you can cover in 20-30% of journey time, spending rest of the journey in gridlocked section travelling in snail’s speed. Journey on that reaming 10-30% stretch becomes more frustrating because you have just witnessed a test of speed on the expressway like road stretch back on the journey.

Things become worse when variety of vehicles start competing for the lanes with suddenly reduced carriageway near bottlenecks at every few hundred meter due to variety of reasons like poor road design, bad road geometry, old narrow bridge, recent construction and maintenance works, frequent vehicle breakdown, faulty or unrealistic traffic signals (it’s unbelievable that there are also around less than 10 seconds of green signal assigned for some stretches at some busy road junctions) etc. at least similar is the case in many developing countries.

This induced conflict is result of lack of cohesiveness and isolated accountability among different agencies and consultations hired at different point of time, for revamping urban transit stretches and systems. In Urban scenarios, Road stretches cannot planned and designed in isolation, hence no question of isolated accountability, like trunk routes cannot be designed in isolation without  considering feeder traffic flow. What is happening here in bottleneck situations is that vehicles are allowed to reach the bottleneck at high speed which encourages quickly accumulated high volume traffic at bottleneck, and then the real struggle begins, people ruthlessly competing for limited lanes!! It’s a painful experience of struggle for daily commuters, not because of slow speed but due to immense psychological pressure and tiresome drive to negotiate that rude, ruthless competing traffic while trying to protect their asset and peace of mind. No wonder it also leads to frequent road rage incidents. Even if bottleneck situation is unavoidable there has to be smooth transition from high speed stretch to the bottleneck point, which can only be done through proper road design, sensible signage and its highly visible locations, commuter education, manual or automatic traffic assistance and guidance, strengthening alternate route, staggered office timing, land use restructuring, etc.

It's been done this way since ages doesn’t make it the right way today!!

Rethinking academic research methodology.

So, you are up to research, thesis, dissertation or something, great!! Let’s consider few  things before we move ahead, considering few establish academic research norms, said or unsaid, which you might like to question, which you might like to challenge, but you won't, may be you can’t, because someone else is running the show.

Let’s understand the anatomy and objective of research and what should be the scope of any academic research for purposes, like thesis, PhD and so on and let’s see if there is any loophole in the well established century old research methodology and why it’s high time that research methodology has to reinvent itself.

What usually happens is that you choose a topic of your expertise and interest, narrow or wide and a mentor or guide as well either to guide you throughout or just because its mandatory to have one as per university norms, whether its architecture, planning or sociology or something else, it’s all the same. Then you start collecting supporting evidence and snippets of information first to validate the selection of research subject and then to back your conclusion. 

If you delve deeper you will realise that any chosen research subject or topic no matter how wide or narrow it is, has a very wide possible scope for exploration which we unjustifiably narrow down due to many reasons. You can have all the freedom to narrow down the subject or research topic itself which you choose but how can you narrow down and limit the research domain yourself and how can you decide in the beginning of research that which external influences to choose which might affects the subject, just because scope of research seems unfathomable to you for that particular subject or topic, just because someone told you to do so, just because your curriculum allows you the freedom to do so. If you are limiting your research to the review of few books on the subject,  selected by your guide who can have his or her own biased inclination towards those particular books or those authors,  if you limit your research only to some good books which are remaining  in your library after best books of the lot which has already been lifted by the academicians and professors long ago,  if you limit yourself to handful of primary sample survey which has its own grave issues and which is bound to give inaccurate picture, and if you limit yourself for any other similar innumerable reasons, you  are doing a big injustice to the research subject.

The issue with age old academic research methodology in context of today is that there always has been a strong stress on authenticity and completeness of content, fixed research structure, rigidity of data structuring, stress on literature and book reviews and first hand data gathering, there always has been submission to the authority of few established individuals in the field and imposition of idiosyncrasy and idealism of mentor or guide, ignoring the massive and continuous stream of relevant information which is available today and which is already growing and going to grow exponentially in the future. In the inertia of age old established research methodologies we are knowingly or unknowingly ignoring the possibilities that today’s technology provides us in conducting our research. Ignoring the technology of data mining and data exploration which they are already using ruthlessly in business and corporate domain is almost absolutely missing in academic research.

Two fundamental truth which majority of academicians today would be highly hesitant to be confronted with, is first that "Billions of half-baked data is much more reliable and contextual than handful of authentic publications when it comes to research and establishing a fact, excluding field of science and mathematics" and second that "Skewed focus towards book reviews and published literature for research purposes tend to glamorizes second hand work and dampen free and creative thinking spirit". There is nothing new and creative in quoting some author on some instance or subject, nothing new in putting someone else's inferences and analogies in your own words in your academic research report. When there is too much focus on structure and format (Thesis, synthesis, analogy, reference, bibliography and all) content starts losing its significance. This prominent conventional research methodology only leads to half baked conclusion at the end of your research span, because of just few numbers of cases studied and fewer perspectives of authors analysed.

Main constraint here is time and it’s up to you how you manage to get optimum exposure in that short span of time to arrive at valid inferences. More intense the exposure more authentic would be the conclusion or outcome. You are given a limited time to conduct and conclude your academic research whether thesis, dissertation or PhD.  You cannot stretch it infinitely. now you zoom in and pick up few published literature on the subject for your research reading pages, first to last, how many of these  books with "authentic" information you would be able to read in that assigned research span of few months or years, five, ten, twenty or fifty? That’s it? Come end of the research span and you are aware of point of view of five or fifty different authors, thinking you have known enough, thinking it’s time to conclude. No matter how very authentic information you have at the end to conclude your research, these are just point of views of handful of published authors out of millions equally talented or more or less out there in the world working, thinking, deliberating on the same subject, who never got the time, inclination, money or right publisher to get their work and thoughts published but who are constantly writing on forums, blogs, constantly tweeting and sharing and so on, may be you also missed out the brilliant thoughts on the subject because it didn’t reach your library shelf, because your guide didn’t recommended it to you, may be you didn’t have enough money to buy that book or eBook or may be because it couldn’t get the attention of the masses due to competition with shear number of literature on the same subject.

It’s high time that students and researchers need to be encouraged to look for unconventional, previously unexplored and untapped streams of data for mainstream academic research by their colleges, universities and most importantly from their mentors and guides in their dissertation and PhD,  sources like massive free and dynamic data from online environment of blogs, discussion forums,  audio-visual data from established or amateur masses, tiny bits of information which individually doesn’t make any sense but which collectively presents fairly recognisable, logical and surprising patterns, and it’s high time that such research methodologies should get mainstream recognition. It’s time that they should shift their fixated attention from literature reviews to data source explorations and analysis, broadening the domain of literature itself.

You see, it would be much more exciting, authentic and wholesome an experience to explore from the dynamic, widespread and crude "sea of knowledge" rather than exploring from few well-maintained but stagnate "resource lakes".

BY- Anoop Jha 

Data Visualization as a planning tool

When Statistics marry Graphics, it creates immense possibilities.

Data is lifeblood of planning and holds massive information potential, need is to decode the pattern it holds, pattern of importance, patterns which are vital and patterns which help understand the previously unexplored recesses of statistics. Now we have datamining tools to extract and visualize data, sources which were previously nonexistent, data from social media, data from online resources etc..

These charts have been created from number series (Fibonacci number), just to represent clear, informative and convincing patterns which can be derived from numbers. Numbers tell stories!!