The Park Hotels, pioneers of luxury boutique hotels in India, in collaboration with Elle Décor India, organised “The Park Elle Décor Student Contest for the sixth consecutive year. The contest aims at promoting young designers in the country and gives them an opportunity to work with prominent design icons and stalwarts from the industry.
The winners get an opportunity to get a firm foothold in the design industry by showcasing their creations at India Design ID 2018, one of the paramount platforms for the new generation of designers. For the first time, this year, the winners will be mentored under the following luxury designers and innovative brands — Architect and Celebrity Interior designer Ashiesh Shah; Rooshad Shroff Architecture + Design; and the leading designer innovator Sarita Handa.
Opportunities galore
The winners of the Textile designing are Ivy Chakma, Banani Das and Amisha Sharma, students of National Institute of Design who called their product “I Stand Alone” as they used the basic fabric jute to make a convertible lamp.
“The most striking feature of this competition was that it helped us to explore our creativity as there was no specific theme or conditioning that restricted our exploration. We got to know about a real picture of the market that made us realise where we stand,” said Ivy Chakma.
“This process was full of trial and errors. Our idea was to use material innovation as a technique to create a lamp by using jute as the prominent fabric and we wove the fabric in gradation that led to changes in transparency of the light. Fabric and the lights used in the product are also very eco-friendly,” said Banani Das.
“Never underestimate your ideas. Any idea can be a huge success if it fulfils the needs of the society. This is the most valuable thing that we learned in this competition,” added Amisha Sharma. The challenges faced by Shravani Joshi, the winner of furniture designing from National Institute of Design, were completely different. She said, “This competition made me question the system of classical joinery in furniture designing and I never thought that it would be a great idea. However, I received a good push from my teachers to continue with my innovation called — “The Piece” which is not made from basic materials like wood and plastic.” “I could place my design in a non-economic and non-commercialised context where creativity was as important as the functional aspects. Moreover, it helped me to find my own identity as a designer,” she added.
The slogan that the architecture designing winners Danay Kamdar and Parth Rathod, students of Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, stood by was — “Be effective or be in show business.” They called their project “Salvaging Swadeshi.” Their idea was to recreate the spaces of the Mumbai markets instead of starting from the scratch and taking away the accumulation of culture and familiarity with the places. “We are trying to remodel the spaces in order to conserve the existing building rather than aggrandizing it in the shadow of the West. The isolate city lives must be converted back to a social community with the help of good architecture,” Danay Kamdar said.
Interior Designing winner Preeyanka Gandhi called her product “Hidesign Kiosk” and the aim was to convert any house into a home which she successfully achieved through her product.
