Teaching & Making Together

A design studio, prompt cards, and film and Raspberry Pi work with young people, on teaching as a situated practice.

The questions that show up in the research, about power, about whose knowledge counts, about what tools do to the people who use them, show up in teaching too.

At Srishti Manipal I co-taught a semester studio on gathering spaces, asking students to learn from markets, parks, and street corners before reaching for design methods. Designers ACE is a deck of 101 prompt cards that group the traits a designer builds, observation, listening, critical thinking, storytelling, into exercises anyone can pick up without art-school training.

Most of the teaching happened outside institutions, though. In Mirzapur, working with young women from rural Uttar Pradesh, the problem was access, not curriculum: how to make tools usable for people whose modes are oral and visual, and whose relationship to technology is shaped by language, literacy, and connectivity. The Kishori Film Festival gave 11th-grade participants the means to make and screen their own films on reconfigured devices. Jingle Tales let them claim a Raspberry Pi by customising its boot-up sound, a small bit of technical agency that opened onto who technology belongs to.

The Imposter Among Us is a reading list and panel on how platforms manufacture “truth” and “ignorance,” and what media literacy means when the platform itself is built to erode it.