+kaustuv.net

Bankside Paramorph.

Integration of environmental, structural and architectural parameters in a seamless, synchronized and parallel software architecture. The project radicalizes process-form-material logics with significant gains in corresponding efficiencies.

The George Problem.

In early 2005 my advisor drew two large squares partly intersecting each other on the chalk board and asked what we saw.. :) - He was alluding to the fact that if we froze our descriptions about the world right from the start, the new rectangle at the intersection wouldnt exist. The truth was there was no right answer. The moment we described what we saw, we were freezing our way of seeing and there was always another way of looking. Simply put, "descriptions fix things" - I didnt get it for a long time. The question bugged me so much that i had to a thesis on it.

Mindtrace - Vocabulary generation in a drawing space

Inspired by the constructivists, we (Daniel Rosenberg and I) set out on a research program to investigate design as a pre-representational (pre-symbolic) process. Unlike contemporary frameworks which are heavily dependent of preset and fixed languages, - Mindtrace allows the user to generate his/her own language through the act of drawing. We are excited by our progress and soon to publish our work!

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant

- J.G.Ballard Folkert
Visual interpretations of sounds from Peter Whincop's electronic (music) composition class.

The realization that an observer, the observed phenomenon and the process of observation itself form a totality, which can be decomposed into its elements only on the the pain of absurd reifications, has far reaching implications for our understanding of man and his problems.

- Paul Watzlawick

Chemical Morphogenesis with Alex Tsamis

"A system of chemical substances, called morphogens, reacting together and diffusing through a tissue, is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis. Such a system, although it may be originally quite homogeneous, may later develop a pattern or structure due to an instability of the homogeneous equilibrium, which is triggered off by random disturbances." - Alan Turing, 1952

Springy Dragon - Behaviors in Drawing Space

Along with Seah Li and Mikey Fujihara, we developed a system where multiple contexts (eg. sun, wind) can be simultaneously activated in a drawing space, along with logic-embedded-components which respond to target contexts. Simply put - its a killer! :) I am waiting to rework this out into a design tool.

Social Entrepreneurship in India

I am a core member of the MIT India Reading Group. The over-arching motivation is a way finding exercise to generate scaleable businesses in the social space; we have looked at various issues and devices in different domains such as education, infrastructure, urban renewal, and health-care with the aim of having a nuanced understanding of their interwoven-ness and complexities.
My Presentation on Microfinance
My Presentation on Urban Renewal
My Presentation on Informal Economy and Vocational Education

Performance Analysis.

I wrote this library which allows performance analysis (Incident Solar Radiation and Incident Daylight Levels) of free-forms within a parametric modeling enviroment in dynamics (Generative Components).

Urban Mobility + Electrics + dplay

The Electrickshaw is a cheaper, lightweight, and zero tailpipe-emission electric vehicle. It is a replacement for the unsustainable and polluting yet increasingly useful and predominant mode of Para Transit mobility in Indian metropolitan cities such as the CNG three-wheeled scooter autorickshaw.
Beyond the city, the Electrickshaw project is also motivated by the larger socio-cultural dynamics of the lower-middle class in India. We expect a significant impact by increasing day-to-day profitability of end-users.

Teaching at The Ohio State.

Taught computation courses and seminars as a Lecturer in the graduate school with the aim of introducing designers computational techniques in design exploration.

dplay, Co-Founder

dplay is a collaborative for research+practise at the intersection of computation, design and education. dplay's core vision is to remain experimental and playful, democratizing and integrating state of the art technologies in design. We seek to make an impact on the design space in India by revising thought-styles in contemporary design.

Its an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever - Tralfamadorians differ however

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter House Five
moments 2010-
moments 2004-2009

Springy Thingy - Can I dance my house?

In 2005, Jimmy Shen, a colleague of mine was designing a house for a ballet dancer for his studio project. He came to me and said - "i want to dance my house." The springy thingy project took off that instant. Thank god for Jimmy :)

Automatic Story Generation

Aplam Puncho are computational avatars exploring an abstract world, writing stories in realtime.. If you really want to read a Aplam-and-Puncho's story, here is a transcript
of one their explorations. Project Page

How Aplam always found his way around MIT :)

Once someone managed to accidentally let aplam slip out of my office - When I came back from class, it was a scare - I frantically searched everywhere - only to find him relaxing under the sun in his favorite Kilian court, with a policeman as his escort. I wondered how he found his way through the maze?...

To a complaint that his portrait of Gertrude Stein did not look like her, Picasso is said to have answered, "No matter; it will."

- Nelson Goodman "Languages of Art", p33

Synthesis of High-Performance Architectural Syntax

Right from the start, one of my central interest was an 'integrative' approach towards problem solving in design - Decomposing a problem into several pieces, solving them independently and then trying to put things together at the end has axiomatic deficiencies - This was central to my undergraduate thesis. How could i consider critical environmental factor of heat, light and wind synchronously to examine building envelopes? I struggled with it for sometime and didnt know how to formulate the issue at hand. At this point, I chanced to meet Gourabmoy Nath at a coffee house close to school - he asked me whether I had heard about 'Genetic Algorithms'... Extract from my undergrad thesis (2003)

Teaching with Daniel Rosenberg at MIT

The objective of the seminar was to generate a discussion around computation literature from different domains - from Psychology to AI, from Art to Science, from Philosophy to Cybernetics. As a method, we discussed several classics and enquired the proposed epistemic models in terms of the philosophy, language, process and form - eventually seeking to find connections and linkages between them. Reading List

Spacefighters. It was about democracy.

It was more than an interactive urban design game. It was about the conversational planning model that released the need for a god-like being (think Le-Corbusier/Chandigarh) to ascertain the form/diagram of the city...
more on this soon!

Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered 'useless', will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.

-John Maeda via The universe will fly like a bird