Bangalore

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner…

He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we’ll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic.” – Don DeLillo, Point Omega

Image from LiloRann

Proud to be a part of LiloRann, a project exploring land degradation in the deserts of North Gujarat, India, the state where TED Fellow Anab Jain grew up. She and her design studio Superflux started this project, which launched today and will continue to develop in the coming months. Stay tuned…

Bangalore

I wish I needed everything in stationery stores.

Mysore, India

Pune, India (photo by Question Box)

Question Box provides easy access to information on health, agriculture, education, and more through SMS and talk boxes in public space. Push the button, ask any question, and receive an answer from a live operator. It’s free and helpful for residents without internet access or adequate literacy on a topic, and they’ve answered over 3,000 queries in Uganda, mostly about agriculture. Thanks to the TED Fellows program, I met Jon Gosier, founder of Appfrica and CTO of Question Box, who introduced me to Question Box founder Rose Shuman. They needed to make the service easier to understand, so I worked with them to make some pictorial instructions. Here’s one version on a box in Pune, India as they test out different configurations. Their good work is also open source and they encourage all to use their system.

Medan, Indonesia

Jo-Fen, Taiwan

Bangalore

Istanbul

Berlin

We met each other on swings and mattresses in a big bright metal treehouse… At TED India Freeman Murray gave a talk about his pallet rack building and invited us all to check it out in Bangalore. Using standard warehouse storage pallet racks, he and other creative locals built Jaaga, a three-story collaborative community space for art exhibits, dance performances, film showings, lectures, parties, and anything else you can think up. It’s super flexible and relatively low-cost ($15,000 for 3000 square feet). Coincidentally a few days earlier I was chatting about flexible spaces with Adam Greenfield in Helsinki and he put Cedric Price on my radar – a British architect who, in 1961, came up with the idea of the Fun Palace, a flexible community space of moveable and modular units whose only fixed element was a structural grid of steel columns and beams. It was never built, but when I saw Jaaga I thought snap it is now!

Cedric Price’s drawing of the Fun Palace

Bangalore

Johannesburg

Somewhere in North Carolina

Medan

Panama City FL

Placencia

New York City

Tallinn

Nice

Johor Bahru

Johannesburg

“Should have gone with peanuts.”

One of these magnets is not like the other…

Grenoble

Maui

Bangalore

Genoa

Johannesburg

Prague

Singapore. No durian fruit, a.k.a. the stinkbomb.

Driving etiquette turned around – trucks and autorickshaws in India actually ask drivers to honk at them with some pretty elaborate bumper signs. It’s the lazy man’s driving strategy – “Ima keep driving like this. If you have a problem with it then toot.” You can imagine what kind of ruckus this causes in traffic and the things they’ve tried to stop it, like No Honking Day. But how do you tell the driver in front of you to stop honking…

Bangalore

“Have you sold any today?”

“Yes, to that restaurant over there… Don’t go there.”

While in India I learned a new word – jugaad = making do, being resourceful, getting your MacGyver on. Sometimes this comes in seriously retooled forms like a floating bicycle by Mohammed Saidullah to fend off flood waters and cross the river. Other times it comes in small details like these magazine pages and flyers turned into street food containers. Neat! I asked vendors where they got the idea and they all said they saw another guy doing it. Cheaper than buying dedicated bags and more striking and customizable to boot. And imagine the bonus reading material and centerfolds customers could unfurl after eating…

Get excited for unique developments in Johannesburg like Another Urban Renewal Project!

Buy this Ethnic Coaster in Cape Town! It’s from Ethnic.

Welcome to our exhibit on doorways from the Fancy period.

Visit Bangalore’s many landmarks like The Oterra and Something Else! Be sure to take Stuff and make sure you don’t do That Thing.