Research & Collaborations

Srishti Manipal Institute has a strong tradition of practice-based research. The research domains range from art practices and design imaginations to situated technologies and new humanities. Creative and critical practices at Srishti involve deep engagements with and discourses around ideas from, and issues of, the Global South, communities, materials, ethics and complex ecologies.

The four creative impact ecosystems of SMI’s Strategy and Vision are:

Media Arts and Sciences
Economic Sectors, Industries and Enterprise
New Humanities
Law, Environment and Planning

Each of these ecosystems has complementary entities such as Centers and Labs, in addition to the Programs that anchor our core academic offerings.

Innovation @ Srishti Manipal – A Strategic Perspective:

Research Centers and Labs at SMI

The Centers and Labs within Srishti play an important role in creating an open, collaborative environment for experimenting with and producing cutting-edge ideas for interdisciplinary creative impact practice. In alignment with the overall Srishti Manipal strategic architecture and vision, Srishti Centers and Labs conduct their work typically based on the following principles.

Labs in Srishti Manipal:

1. Fragile Ecologies & Communities

The relationship amongst inhabitants and their environment are inextricably linked, shaping and making each other in moments of vulnerability. In the current challenging contexts of geographical conditions, ecological degradation, societal and economic stresses may lead to erasure of intangible knowledge and practices. In such contexts, how designers engage with communities and include them as knowledge holders, while supporting them to conserve their environment is key to understanding resilience.

Under Dr. TMA Pai Endowment Chair in Adaptive Ecologies & Climate Extremes –
Decolonising the Anthropocene Dr. Deepta Sateesh’s research is oriented towards working in soaking ecologies and engage with the human and more-than-human communities that dwell in them, through practice research (or praxis).

Dr. Gururaja KV’s is one of the contributing authors to the journal article on ‘Ongoing declines for the world’s amphibians in the face of emerging threats’. This article is published in Nature journal and can be read here.

2.Transition Cultures & Transition Places

The patterns of interaction between humans, life forms, material realities, cultural practices and structures of organization, frameworks of knowledge including technologies are changing at an alarming rate. This makes it essential to keep the unity, interconnectedness and simultaneity of processes and phenomena at the center of our attention, so that transitions happen harmoniously. One of the questions we ask as designers is how one can build resilience and responsivity to environmental shifts and recognize the opportunities for transitions.

3. Unheard and/or Unauthorized Voices

As designers, it is important for us to begin to listen and engage with the hidden or erased, through creative and situated modes that are inclusive and participative. As inhabitant, practitioner, scholar, and/or policymaker, SMI through the academic curriculum has been making spaces to create new norms, break binaries and bring in perspectives that allow amplifying the voices of those at the fringes or disempowered.

Srishti Films, led by Sanjay Barnela, travels across the length and breadth of India to bring forth the stories that remain untold; stories that present an alternative normal; stories that defy popular notions of progress and development.

4. Decolonizing / Defuturing

The colonial understandings perpetuate through the contemporary, seen in conflicts between citizen and government, humans and animals, and mechanized and natural processes. We engage with these conflicts by entering contemporary narratives, essential to depart from the known predictable world, immersing ourselves in the present moment. As design practitioners, we try to locate art and design practices in time and space and the influence of the past on our conception and perception of the future.

Dr. Anwesha Das’s research on Postcolonial Identities and West African Literature can be read here.

5.Data & Societies (Socio-tech life)

As the scope of our everyday practices increasingly encompasses the digital, it is instructive and intellectually responsible to consider more deeply how technology has always shaped our understandings of the world. At SMI, we engage in the scope of both design practice and the digital world by using critical methodologies and approaches to reciprocally reflect upon the other and ask deeper questions of how technology enables freedom and creativity in the art world.

6.Visuality, Aesthetics & Knowledge Systems

Artistic practice and environmental aesthetics within the frame of ecological consciousness are emergent areas requiring close study and investigation. At SMI, faculty and students actively engage in looking at traditional practices, artisanal and craft practices, modern and contemporary art practices through varied lenses and other theoretical frameworks.

Dr. Srisrividhiya Kalyanasundaram, a faculty at SMI writes on Constructing an Aesthetic Selfhood: Interiority, Community and Cultural Identity in the Aging Self. The full journal article can be read here.

Currently, the following Centres and Labs are active:

Currently the following Labs are active in Srishti Manipal:

Just Futures Co-Lab

Open Public creative impact platforms

In addition to Labs and Centres, SMI also supports platforms for creative impact making practice. These platforms through their focused engagements across diverse themes help nurture a creative space for dialogues. These include the following:

Art-in Transit
(Art) Science BLR
Blank Noise – -Campus of Belonging
Srishti Films
The Kabir Project
The UNESCO Chair in Culture, Habitat and Sustainable Development