Girls heading to the Apr 14-19 i Saloni furniture fair in Mumbai.
It is rumoured that about a thousand people from Mumbai are either on their way or about to leave for Milan for the i Saloni furniture fair 2010, to be held from April 14 to 19.
Those who form the number are also well-heeled, established architects and design practitioners who make this annual trip to know the latest in décor, installation art and all manner of experimental work.
Five of these are winners of Home Review Design Quest, who have been chosen from close to 800 online profiles that took three months of virtual voting, offline presentations and essay submissions, to boil down to.
The winners will fly to Milan today to rub shoulders with the big names in design, they have so far only read about.
The youngest among the winners is Baroda-based Vidhi Mehta, 20, a student of second year product design at NID, whose project was about general attitudes towards design.
Mehta has been collaborating with an NGO to fuse plastic picked by rag pickers to make products. “So far I’d only heard of Phillipe Starck; now I will get to meet him in person,” she says.
Goa-based Andrea Noronha’s project was a six-month stint in Tripura where she and a group of people went to remedy the destructive replacement of handmade bamboo baskets with plastic ones. Not only had they lost the means to a livelihood, they were also at the risk of losing self-sustenance values.
Noronha and friends worked with them and created lamps, stools and hangers and explored an external market for these. “My responsibility as a product designer,” she says, “is to also promote the interests of the people who made the products.”
Graphic designer Kanika Jain Gupta’s project MAD dwelt on her work process explained through pictures - “how a doodle becomes a drawing, and the drawing, design”.
Of the five winners, only Khushboo Gupta is not an NID student. Mumbai-based Yashmi Prasad had spoke about the concept of jugaad (improvisation)”. “Unlike the West, Indians don’t serve design on a platter. Here everyone improvises. At the conference, I’d like to put Indian design on a platter and tell them, we do this in India every day and not just at fairs,” she says.
Anish Bajaj, managing editor, Marvel Infomedia, of which Home Review is a part, says he intends to keep the engagement continuous, running similar contests through the year.
You can read the winners’ side of the Milan story on www.thedesignquest.com.
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