Media Lab
Department of Design, IIT Guwahati
The Media Lab in IITG is an interdisciplinary research laboratory which conducts thematic and ontological research to investigate the role of digital technology in our societies and explore innovation at the conjecture of technology and design. Media Lab currently works in the following domains.
India has been a fertile ground for frugal innovation, fueled by access or even the lack of it towards new solutions to everyday problems. Design Speculation looks at imaginaries based in the Indian context, as projections of the existing context towards future possibilities.
The Right to Matter
Sajal Maheshwari
The Right to Matter is a speculative design project imagining a future civil rights movement led by artificial intelligence. Set in the year 2088, the project explores a…
Share-able
Sarrika Dawar
The project “Share-able” aims to re-establish the connection between the public spaces and the people and also among the people in the public spaces. A set of modular…
The Dharma Protocol
Vani Singh
The concept of Time, in India, has never really been understood as something that simply moves forward. It is seen as a cycle, something we move through again and again.…
Project Ozymandias
Anand Krishna, Shital Bhise, Siddesha Pawde
This project explores a near future where advanced predictive AI systems evolve beyond tools of assistance into structures of belief. As systems become increasingly…
Dead Drop
Himanshu Kurzekar, Rohan Nikam
Every time you upload a file to a cloud service, you sign a contract. The contract is long. The font is small. The lawyers who wrote it are very good at their jobs. You…
Re-Focus Labs
Sandeep Rabha, Rohan Nikam, Aniket Sharma
ACSW exists as speculative design project exploring future relationships between cognition, overstimulation, AI-assisted learning, and attentional support technologies.
Sporenet
Amogh W., Pratham Dev, Vismay K. Nair, Yukeshvar K.
In the year 2051, floodwaters pushed heavy metal across 340 hectares of urban soil in the western districts of Jalad. An official survey that detected it came six weeks…
Survival Without Agency
Aravind S
This project explores a near-future where the limitation of artificial intelligence is no longer algorithms, but the substrate that supports them. As traditional…
Life Around Abstracts
Prabodh Sharma
Life Around Abstracts is an experimental art project based upon exploration and understanding of experiences majorly driven by visual and auditory senses. The experiment…
Day Zero
Nishita Sudhir
For years I’ve wondered, where are we going? What is our future headed towards? Through the medium of a graphic novel, I am exploring a dystopian world, within the…
Time and again we have been inspired from biology to learn more about emergent behaviours and technologies with nature as our starting point. In the current context of global warming it seems more apparent that we change the way we look at modern solutions and change our attitude towards nature itself.
Distributed Systems in Nature & Blockchains
Abhishek Chauhan
The main idea of this project revolves around the encapsulation of our understanding of science and applying it to the various design forays. Nature has been inspiring…
Imagining Biocentric Futures
Anupam Sai
Human beings have designed the world by keeping themselves as the center of existence, and most of the world organizes itself from a western point of view. More often…
The role of design and systems thinking has been changing from just proposing solutions towards an ontological perspective of the base or roots on which our modern systems exist. The Pedagogy research group aims to deconstruct and reimagine new frameworks to address the way we comprehend existing systems, in order to reframe or recontextualize our understanding in the modern global context.
Food Connect
Sarrika Dawar
Life around Food is an exploration to study and revive the role of food as a social medium. The project was carried out in two parts: studying and documenting the two…
Museum-going at Assam State Museum
Mohijeet Das
The future lies in the hands of the young and I agree that this saying hits the nail on the head when it comes to children visiting museums. Children are never too young…
Design for Wellbeing
Surya
Considering the fact that mental health reflects in everything a person does, there is a scope for improving the wellbeing of people in this fast moving world of…
Performance and Performativity
Angela Matthews
People are becoming increasingly stagnant. A lot of the modern technology we use during large amounts of our lives allows, or even requires us to be stagnant. It…
The unprecedented impact of data only recently made evident from a global mobilisation of technology to use and abuse data, in a quest to control metabolic flows. The data itself is neutral unless assembled with the right constituents to reveal a certain part of the story.
“I think visualization in the Information Age is what photography was to the Industrial Age… it's a kind of ‘photography of data.’ Changing parameters with your virtual camera allows you to reveal different patterns (for) better or worse.” — Lev Manovich
Farrago of Information & Bias in News
Shruti Toshniwal
A lot has been talked about the agenda-setting political behaviour of many popular news publishing organizations of India, especially during the last decade. These…
How do Indians do YouTube?
Vishal Kumar, Nisha Gupta
As we move more and more into the 21st century we are seeing digital media as a tool for revolution and misinformation as well. More and more people in India are getting…
Visualising the Consumer Price Index
Ashish Khandalikar
The Government of India releases a huge amount of data under RTI. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one such index released by the government. A CPI is designed to…
Film and video has been a long standing way to archive and deliberate on the existing cultural dimensions by the use of narratives to bring forth fragments of our life to a wider audience. With the influx of digital technologies this notion of the cinema is increasingly challenged and reiterated towards a more meaningful vision of life itself.
Draining into Brahmaputra
Tanima Das
A documentary film about the relationship of river Brahmaputra with the city Guwahati.
Nerkik
Deepshikha Pegu
The film Nerkik attempts to explore certain cultural aspects of the Mising tribe which are deeply rooted in their indigenous values. A festival of sowing seeds, which…
Faqeer
Mohammad Al Khalid
It is difficult to define India without using the words diversity and multicultural society. Since time immemorial, India has hosted a plethora of cultures, subcultures…
self-portrait.
Ashish Mathai
The very concept of film as an art form misleads many people into considering only the films which resemble traditional art forms — free creations rather than…
Space Time Experience
Apoorv Tomar
Parallels between cinema and architecture have seen interesting possibilities in exploring theories and praxes related to conditions and characteristics of two entities…
Morin Khuur
Oko Togtokh
The project aims to explore visual communication as a narrative experience, and stop motion animation. The project looks forward to bringing back Mongolian cultural…
Narratives of Virtual Reality
Pradeep Vegireddy, Mahendra Indukuri
New-age VR filmmaking is still being approached in the 2D format. The focus is on the content and not on the filmmaking techniques, so the new degrees of freedom are not…
Video Essays on Film-Editing
Deepanshu Sharma
Cinema is a vast field to study, having over 100 years of rich history. Before the audience views a film it undergoes several revisions, first by the script-writers…
Life and Learning at IIT Guwahati
Satyan Chawla, Tushar Chhabra
A short exploration of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, covering its academics, student life, and facilities.
Sound is an integral part of our daily life. This research group deals with the various aspects of audio: sensing, processing and generating. The researchers have worked towards possible deconstruction of various audio forms hinting towards its applicability as an interaction tool, games to assist school children with their speech problems, and its use as medicine.
Sound As Interface
Siddhant
This project explored what it would be like if we could custom design the interior sound design and acoustic signature of our spaces of being.
Emergence of Data
Ani Dalal
The problem behind solving problems is the creation of new problems resulting from the isolation of an object from its network and the myopic study, directed by its…
Audio Reactive Synesthetic
Rupesh Sudhanshu
With the onset of the Information Age, we have witnessed various cultural shifts in the way we perceive, absorb, process or create art-forms, like paintings, sculptures…
Sound as Medicine
Avik Biswas
Sound is a crucial part of our lives. It has its own effects on this universe at all sorts of audible and inaudible levels. Since it is not visible, people tend not to…
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Afterimage
Arin Bandyopadhyay, Dhruva Ingale, Aditya Pawar, Piyush Rajta, Shivam
A small glimpse into Uttarakhand.
Sonder
Arin Bandyopadhyay, Dhruva Ingale, Piyush Rajta
Sonder — the sudden realisation that each passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, populated by their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and…