Redesigning the Future
The key to understand what is coming is to be more meaningfully involved in the past
The year is 2035. Fresh from dealing with the fall-outs of urban desertification, the ever-expanding Bombay salt-flats form a large part of our premium neighbourhoods surrounding the new Hyperloop & Hyper-speed racing track. Most of us grow our own produce in tiny yet bountiful hydroponic farms, and the new Mumbaibarter app is now trending with the new breed of hipster urban farmers. While the market crash and riots of 2030 haven’t really faded from memory, we’re trying to rebuild our city from the ashes. Mumbai seems to benefit from the commerce around home factories, and is now attracting world talent in additive building and manufacture, truly a future city.
Future imperfect
As you can surmise, my current obsession is with the future and to visualise the flow of time more meaningfully. We’re increasingly thinking of time as a river with all it’s nuances of flow. Upstream elements from our magnificent history of craft, art and architecture inform our experience of the present to bring fertile nutrients along from the upper reaches of the mind. In the distance we can see where this river plunges over rapids, where the flows are fastest and where they create tiny rock-pools with life, and parts of what gets submerged and parts of what floats. This distant vision informs how we regulate the flow of the present, what we choose to dam, and where we choose to open the floodgates.
Perspective shift
About five years ago, we were in the midst of a full flow of projects, working on a bunch of high-visibility hospitality projects, offices, sound studios, clubs, breweries, residences and architecture. Within the mainstream river of work though, a few smaller eddy currents had been forming. then, we had dabbled in some heritage conservation inquiries, with our ongoing Bandra Project, involving pedestrian upgrades, art and micro-economies in and around the suburb we collectively loved.
Inspired move
It’s amazing how a simple change in landscape and topography can alter everything, and switch flows so drastically. Two years ago, with a one year old baby, I shifted to Goa to formalise a new way of working, moving from being a studio proprietor to a collaborative part of a family of design thinkers. What I feel gives meaning to my current work, is this awareness of our position in the stream. We’re now actively pursuing two directions, one is to involve ourselves more meaningfully with the past, and understand the grammar and beauty of architecture and built form, as well as meaningfully transition these elements into the future, so that our visualisations of ‘smart cities’ can always have, something of the old, to remind us of where we come from, on their horizons.
The road ahead
Our Futures Lab explores new ways of problem solving that are informed by the beauty of our past, for example we’re visualising solar farms of the future based on insights from the stunning step-wells of Rajasthan. It is our deep belief that we exist in a continuum, there is no divorce between the past and the future, and the sense of optimism and exuberance that we see in our shared history must inform the spirit of building our common future. Speculative design allows us to dream of alternate ways of being—in inspiring and sometimes disturbing ways, to embrace the entire spectrum of futures as an exciting new terrain to flow to.