Project Name: mobileCRÈCHES: Redefining Education within Informal Communities

Project Type:
1) urban planning design strategy
3) graphic design
4) interior design
5) industrial/product design
6) architecture

Project Mission/Goal:
1) improve the human spirit
3) respond to our growing need for clean water, power, shelter, healthcare, education
4) address humanitarian crises

Project Description:
In the summer of 2008, the International Design Center, in partnership with Temple University and D.Y. Patil School of Architecture in New Mumbai, redesigned the centers run by Mumbai Mobile Crèches – an Indian non-profit that provides education and health programs for children living on the construction sites of Mumbai. During this five-week project, our team of 40 students, artists, architects and designers forged a collaborative effort with people who spoke a different language, had different customs, and carried different values to address the complex and fluid set of programs, sites, and communities engaged by our client.

Given the fact that Mumbai Mobile Crèches, on average, only occupies a site for two or three years before they had to give way to the condos and offices under construction, they required a vision that could move beyond these known conditions and address the specifics offered by future projects. The importance of this mandate would only grow over the next two years, as Mumbai Mobile Crèches worked to almost double their capacity and provide services to over 10,000 children by 2010.

To operate well within this context, the team focused their efforts on harnessing the momentum offered by the project’s existing systems and flows to create a design infrastructure to inspire the type of “unpredictable regenerations” described by author Lebbeus Woods (1997). This created a bottom-up design process that prioritized concise moments of clarity over overarching design gestures. The resulting work quite naturally varied widely, ranging from small-scale furniture prototypes and curricular strategies to large-scale urban interventions and autonomous mobile schools.

As the project progressed, the team applied pressure to each of these points, testing their value relative to the existing flows of the project: those ideas anchored upon key principles quickly proved their mettle, garnering greater attention, while those that needed additional tenacity sought out strategic unions with other proposals through either a symbiotic merger or a complete consumption. A Darwinian approached emerged, one that would compel our team to judge the value of their work not as a static product, but as an open, evolving movement - a hybrid address of education that would allow our international partners to possess and evolve the proposed strategies in a meaningful way.

Links:
mobileCRÈCHES: http://www.internationaldesignclinic.org/make/su08india/

Project Details:
Location: Mumbai, India
Concept/Lead Architect(s)/Designer(s): International Design Clinic (IDC) in partnership with Temple University and D.Y. Patil School of Architecture in New Mumbai
Project Architect(s):
Year (s): Summer 2008 - Present
Client: children living on the construction sites of Mumbai / mobileCRÈCHES
User Client: children living on the construction sites of Mumbai / mobileCRÈCHES
Number of beneficiaries/users: over 10,000 children by 2010
Project Phase: Implementation and further experimentation / development
Major Funding:
Cost/Cost per unit:
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Nominated by Scott Shall, IDC

Location