School for Reimagining Technology
What if the imaginations are from the people who have been making, crafting, working with technologies as part of everyday life, and shaping both the technologies and their own creative practices. What kind of human-technology relations and forms could such imaginations hold, and bring forward?
Our work in this school has revolved with one question: How do technologies take shape in the places and people that hold and carry them?
Instead of seeing technologies as distant inventions delivered from elsewhere, we approach them as imaginations that emerge from lived practices, those of people who create, recreate, and work with them on a daily basis. These imaginations do shape its machinery, while also shaping livelihoods, creative expression, and ways of living together. Sometimes this means tracing how a craftsperson adapts tools for new possibilities. Or asking how communities invent forms of technology that carry their own socio-cultural signatures. Technologies, for us, hence become ways to continually reimagine.
Our school becomes a space to test, adapt, and re-imagine technologies in dialogue with the communities who use them, we co-imagine connection and knowledge-sharing.
Our work with Sanchari, a travelling device we co-created with residents of Hara. We invited children and residents to connect with it through their own devices, opening access to local stories hosted on the Hara website and even media libraries like Jellyfin. The device itself seemed to work with the environment locally but also proved challenging. One resident asked, "How different is this from downloading things onto a pen drive?" reminding us that for technologies to take root, their difference must be felt in practice. The challenge of poor network coverage remained. What it taught us was that Sanchari needs to grow in the forms of interaction it offers so that it becomes more than a static archive to carry data and meaning both.
The key questions that guide this school are:
- 🔎How can trans-disiplinary research show new ideas for technology that grow directly from the unique social, cultural, and environmental details of a specific place?
- 🔎How can educational approaches be designed to place the learner at the centre, fostering deep understanding, empathy, and critical reflection on complex societal issues?
- 🔎In what ways can trans-disciplinary collaboration, enhance the understanding of complex contexts and facilitate innovative, inclusive approaches?
- 🔎How can art and design practices serve as catalysts and mediators to sense, shape, and shift conventional developmental paradigms?
Past courses
Past
Participatory Mapping with People, Bidar and the internet: Tools and Technologies
Public maps and knowledge of places may often be centralised and made with intents not from the people: What tools and technologies can we use to subvert and reimagine maps and the representation of knowledge of places. Learners will work with community collaborators and technologies.
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Micro-Context: Ecology In Urban Spaces
- Micro-Context: Old Residences
- Place: Bidar
- Learning Module: Deliberate Practice
Past
Experimenting With Interactivity
Course will be available soon! Our courses are collaboratively designed in the field, that takes time. Fellows are currently weaving their practices to carefully think and articulate the purpose of the course and meaningful learning outcomes. Many a times these happen to be our learning interests too in a place. We invite learners who share similar curiosities as us irrespective of their practice-research interests or backgrounds. Our course design draws from never-ending learning possibilities
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Learning Module: Primer
Past
Data Politics
Learning Module: Primers Abstract / Short description: Understanding data practices and how it affects communities? How is data/knowledge/media/archives built and maintained in communities? Tangible media/data as ownership? Ethics, governance and ownership. Concentration: Reimagining Technology Learning Mode: Baithak, Learning with Materials (from the place), Public Engagement Micro-Context: Ancient Stone Inscriptions of Bidar, Citizen Curators (Local Collectors), Dakkhani Art & Literature, Khat
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Micro-Context: Ancient Stone Inscriptions Of Bidar
- Micro-Context: Citizen Curators Local Collectors
- +4 More Micro-Context
Past
Speculative Design: Anticipating Consequences
Explores how to weave tightly the critical and the creative in early design process through drawing from Speculative & Critical design methods.
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Micro-Context: Yelahanka
- Place: Yelahanka
- Learning Module: Deliberate Practice
- Trimester: 01
Past
Micro Histories and Alternative Presents of Visual Cultures of Bidar
Mapping & Understanding the living practices of Visual Cultures in Bidar and their production. And collaboratively exploring possible alternative presents (and futures) of the practices.
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Micro-Context: Ceramic Tile Works Local Influence
- Micro-Context: Ancient Stone Inscriptions Of Bidar
- +3 More Micro-Context
- Place: Bidar
- Learning Module: Core Pathway
- Trimester: 01
Past
Techno-Biographies: Imaginations of Citizens & Places in Governance Technologies
3 Mar – 11 Apr 2026
What imaginations of citizens do governance technologies centre, and intend to operationalise at scale? If and how are these imaginations are rooted in a place?
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Place: Bangalore
- Learning Module: Primer
- Trimester: 03
Past
Artefact as Method
6 – 31 Oct 2025
Learning to intently engage to understand the relational changes occuring in a place using artefact as a method to question, critique, imagine alternates and learn.
- Schools For Concentration: Reimagining Technology
- Micro-Context: Yelahanka
- Learning Module: Primer
- Trimester: 02