#5 was a guest lecture by Mr. Khaliq Parker on the new wave of ‘smart’cities being driven by the government. Khaliq discussed various aspects of what it means to by a good city to live in, what we the citizens are aware of and not aware of while continuing to live in Pune for example. Then the discussion headed on to what we wish to change in Pune, a ‘Smart’ city itself. On this basis it was further discussed is we are aware of the technological interventions in this city which have already been initiated by the smart cities mission and so on. And finally the main point of having such a discussion within the maker course context was to see if the ‘makers’ could either ride on the government initiatives or form parallel citizen science initiatives of their own to arrive at a much more organic base-up development model for an urban area.
#6-7 were a stool making workshop conducted on the 26th of January 2019 at our maker friend Mr. Sandipan’s place. We wanted to make about 5 steel and wood tall stools, wooden seat and metal legs. We got all the materials and began at about 8:30 in the morning and completed only 2 by the end of the day at 8:30 in the evening. 2 batches of students, 8 each participated in this workshop and i guess they had lot of fun actually handling some tools. They used a jig-saw to cut plywood to make a form that could be used to arrange and weld metal pieces in a designed geometry. Then they cut some metal, arc welded some of these + some polishing and so on. Some students could begin working on the wooden steats, which were basically some trunk of a tree.
There’s so much scope to explore and do, so i hope we could repeat the above workshop and finish all the stools with decent looks. Fingers crossed!!