Abhilasha

Abhilasha is a design awareness initiative by the Department of Design, IITG for school children of the North East. It was established due to unusually low participation in fields other than Engineering and Medical professionally and low representation of people from the NE in the field of design despite the presence of IIT, Guwahati.

The primary event of Abhilasha is always a hands-on workshop. My role in the first edition was to design the worksheets and conduct the workshop with another teammate. We got a whopping enrolment of more than 400 students from different economic backgrounds.

Our plan for the workshop was to teach problem solving through empathy. The worksheets we designed were inspired by d school’s wallet exercise. Children were divided into groups of 4-5, with students from different schools mixed up.

The idea was to design a school bag. In the first phase, students spent time understanding the difficulties faced by and needs of the person sitting beside them. Then they each started ideation by coming up with the wildest ways they could solve their group member’s problems, keeping reality aside. Ideas like shrink rays, and heli-coptas (Doraemon is still famous, yes) were all accepted. We only provided them with thick markers to prevent fixation with ‘good drawings’. Then they moved on to the group part of the exercise where each student discussed the problems they identified and their ideas. By this point a group easily had 25 different bag sketches. The group then sketched out a final bag combining the most loved properties of all the bag sketches and made a physical prop for it.

The workshop activities were a hit and talking to the kids the whole day was definitely .


Unfortunately, COVID hit after the first edition and despite working for it, we couldn’t properly conduct Abhilasha for the next two years. Post covid, we re-started Abhilasha on a smaller scale with 50 students.