How can I design a pavilion to make more people aware of an excluded community and their role in society?
By understanding and communicating the essence of what the ‘excluded’ community does, while being empathetic to their experiences in the society.
For this project, I decided to work with the excluded identity of the Bohari community. Through Primary research (that I had done as a part of another project), I understood what the community is, and what the community does.
The Bohari is one such community that goes around door to door, collecting old clothes/rags in exchange of new utensils. These rags are upcycled in multiple ways, thus overlapping with other systems. What the community does is not recognized- by the commoners or by the law, thus raising problems in terms of sustainability of the job and survival.
I wrote a diary, imagining the life of a Bohari, trying to empathise with their experiences. I speculated on the feelings, experiences and needs of the community.
Whenever I look back at the project, I often realise how much of a difference speaking to the community would have made. It could not be done at the time since I was in another state and I had chosen to work with the Boharis from Maharashtra.
As citizens running by the clock, we barely realize how much value we discard through our mindless disposal of waste.
While there are communities that take care of this very carelessness, the swift lifestyle that caters to the capitalist world has rendered their position purposeless and consequently camouflaged it behind the constructs of class.
Post all the research and conceptualization, the last step was to design a pavilion with the aim of informing the ‘lay’ man about this community.
While this was not just an exercise of space design, the idea was to design an experience. Working with space and content together to convey the intended message. I came up with a pavilion that became a space of performance and exhibition. Through a performance that is specific to the pavilion, the aim was to express the value of the Community. A parallel aim for the space was to evidently create opportunities for recycling, what the Boharis stand for.
The design is inspired by the structure of a step well– also a performance space where the audience and performers aren’t physically separated.
Bringing together metaphors, conveying emotions through space design, not just information, and provoking thought through not so dull information, all at once was challenging. Looking back, I would have done a lot of things differently- deeper primary research, learnt SketchUp to share my vision of the space more accurately, and so on. Yet, it was an insightful experience in understanding inclusion, and the plethora of elements that go into space design.
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