Role Of Design To Control Delhi Pollution Event Held At IIAD

Indian Institute of Art and Design (IIAD)  organized a Design Jam session at their Okhla campus. This Design Jam is a run-up for the international Clean Energy Challenge that is an international competition on Global Climate Action Challenge that invites the design, research, student and startup community to rethink how smarter production, distribution and use of energy could look like, in partnership with the IKEA Foundation.

The Idea is to bring together practitioners, academics and students from across the world to collaborate, discuss and incubate new ideas that can help re-imagine our world.

This initiative is being held simultaneously in five different cities across the world - Amsterdam, Nairobi, São Paulo, Mexico City, and New Delhi.  The purpose of this initiative is   "how we can solve problems related to pollution and energy by design'. A panel discussion was organized in Delhi program on  “How we can decrease pollution while Delhi keeps growing".

Other than the students from the Indian Institute of Art and Design, students from SPA Delhi, Delhi University, IIT Delhi, IP University and Amity University also participated in the Design Jam. 

Students presented various ideas on where design can make a difference and came up with different design projects which can help the city to change. The main focus was to build eco-friendly buildings, use of solar panels, redesigning our roads, etc. The winner will get € 10,000 to further develop their idea along with an opportunity to present it to an international panel in Amsterdam.

Panelist like  Nalin Agarwal - Clean Energy Specialist, ClimateLaunchpad, Gaurav Shorey - Co-founder, 5waraj, Nishita Gill - Founder, Treemouse Studios, Pujarini Sen - Climate & Energy at Greenpeace, Bahar Dutt (Moderator) - Award-winning Environment Journalist and Founder of The Mitti Project moderated this discussion.

On this occasion, a panelist commented – “One of the main factors of pollution is the dust on roads. We should rethink and redesign our roads accordingly then we will somehow manage to overcome with the dust problem in Delhi”.

Burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change, yet this is still our main source of energy. Most of this energy is used in our ever-expanding cities. Cities, therefore, offer a huge opportunity to transform the way we generate and use energy. In Delhi, the pollution has touched the danger level and metro cities like Delhi are developing each and every day.