Chandrima Home
“So, what do you teach in Srishti?” This has been the most commonly asked question in the last two and half years of my association as a teaching faculty member at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (henceforth SMI). As a person trained in ecological sciences, ending up as an art and design school facilitator was perhaps beyond my intellectual prospect.
My academic journey began with a postgraduate degree in Wildlife Sciences at the Wildlife Institute of India followed by a PhD at ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment). Both these spaces and the interspersed work stints prior to joining SMI, involved field ecology, a rigour of research-based methods and a three years’ experience in research administration. The closest I approached art and creativity was through my personal interest in creating art from trash or the occasional doodles I did to unwind. Needless to say, the course of my professional engagements and personal interests allowed me to embrace this space with excitement and trepidation.
My quickest answer to the question posed above is “I bring in the ecological lens for students in this space” and while this statement may seem simple, it is layered with the challenges, anxiousness and a sense of feeling a misfit in a space like SMI. While the sense of being an oddball has not subsided; I have learnt to understand that the structure of SMI itself accepts each of us like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to create a complete picture for the students who come to study.
Over the course of two and half years at SMI, I have facilitated curriculum spaces in the form of unit-based studios for both UG and PG students, electives and a pre-thesis project for the UG students. Each of these spaces has been challenging but rewarding in many ways. A lot of the time, I am surrounded by students across cohorts, who have had sparse experience in seeing the natural world around them. Thus, engaging them through observations, reflection and journaling comes with an even bigger challenge of having to sustain their patience in a world dominated by 15 sec reels! However, what is astonishing are the ways in which students make sense of the natural world through their creative mediums.
As a means of initial ice breaking, I usually engage the students in a nature walk/day field trip in the beginning of my course. Field immersions become an important space to observe, document the natural world and the linkages around us. Students are encouraged to journal and map these through visual tools (this could be both digital/a hand-made one!) helping them to understand how connected we are to the ecological realm. Documenting surroundings through nature journaling is a wonderful way to crystallize our observations and thoughts. It also becomes an important tool to remember and integrate new information alongside the existing knowledge.



As a facilitator each space has been a learning experience. As a person trained in ecological research, breaking the ecological components down for students who mostly do not come with a background in biology, can be both gruelling and thought provoking. For example, while introducing the socio-zoological scale (coined by Arluke and Sanders1) as a context within my Animals and Society elective course, I played a game where students were asked to ranked images of different animals that they liked based on a scale of 5 (1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest). At the end of the exercise, what stood out was the human perception of species and how the perceived cognitive ability matters in terms of our receptivity and how we feel for them.
Finding innovative mediums (such as films, images, animations, newspaper text reading analysis) have been a go-to resource for contextualizing a range of connections that we make with the environment (human-animal interactions, policy, dilemmas in conservation, ecological linkages etc). These mediums have also helped challenge the moral and ethical boundaries while delving into the narratives. Early 2024, I facilitated a five-week studio titled “Ethical Dilemmas, Engagement and Decision Making” through which I introduced human-animal interaction and understanding the various dilemmas and decision-making processes associated with the context. The final output of this studio was designing a game (as a group endeavour) that demonstrated the dilemmas in human-animal interactions, which also meant pushing my own boundaries as a facilitator. The students were instructed to build these games with recyclable material and not purchase any new stationery to build the game prototype.
The studio resulted in two games titled “Beeyond” and “Tidal Trails”. Beeyond was inspired by the human-rock bee interaction on campus to bring in an awareness about their role as ecosystem service providers while Tidal Trails was inspired by “Hungry Tide” bringing in the dilemmas of human tiger interaction in the Sundarbans. Both these games were able to bring out the interaction between people and animals through their game mechanics i.e. in the form of action or dilemma cards (Beeyond) or paths interacting between players (Tidal trails). This studio piqued my interest in exploring games to facilitate a greater awareness of environmental issues and mitigate the disconnect with the natural world.


The studio gave me an impetus to facilitate a four month pre-thesis project space for the UG students in the discipline of Information Arts and Information Design Program. Perhaps, the sheer excitement of how students perceive an ecological brief through creative mediums spurred me to engage in this capacity. The project was titled “The Disentangled Bank” (inspired by Carl Zimmer’s famous evolutionary ecology book titled “Tangled Bank”2) to highlight the loss of ecological connections that we are increasingly seeing in the Anthropocene. In the larger context of the brief, the students were encouraged to pursue a specific enquiry resulting in an art and design output. The nature of the output was kept largely open-ended with a list of potential creatives that could be explored. These included educational aids, graphic novels/illustrations/comics, multimedia/digital art, film/documentary/animation or a research paper. Students immersed themselves in the project space through field immersions, reading resources, discussions on how to probe for questions, and masterclasses that helped them orient to the larger context of ecological loss. They were encouraged to come up with their own line of enquiry situated in India, justify their context and delve deeper for a meaningful design output.
A four-month long project space with three assessment criteria mandated the students to document their design process and iterations. Eighteen students over a course of four months consumed me and while the one-on-one mentorship seemed exhausting in the beginning, over time as they settled in with their ideas, it opened a window to how each of them interpreted the context of loss. At the end of four months, the project space culminated in an exhibition displaying various design outputs that brought out the context of ecological connections and subsequent loss. These included games, animations, tapestry, paintings, data exploration and a range of books and zines.
Some of the outputs of noteworthy mention included:
- A board game on ants where players navigated ant colonies focusing on ecological functions, survival and invasion by other colonies.
- An illustrated book of poems on vulture decline.
- An online interactive narrative game that uses the context of human-leopard interactions to talk about its representation in media.
- An illustrated book on the context of self, identity and community using waterbirds and wetlands which are diminishing habitats in urban ecosystems.
- Three oil-on-canvas paintings depicting the role of communication in forest ecosystems and the anthropogenic impacts on communication breakdown.
- Two animations; one on firefly decline and one questioning the role of decay and decaying matter supporting life in forests.
- The context of umwelt in Olive Ridley turtles and the role of sensory pollution and heat on their ecology depicted in a zine.
- Drawing narrative parallels to tigers and tiger widows in Sundarbans through an illustrated graphic zine.
- An activity book for children about gharials and their importance within riverine ecosystems.
- A coffee table book on the river Cauvery and the changes in landscapes.





As I reminisce the last two and half years of teaching, it has been a blend of different mediums and methods to connect the students to the context. Needless to say, it has been a learning experience for me especially when trying to understand design processes and iterations. Specifically, teaching at SMI has challenged me to think in more ways than one to engage with students. In my courses, I engage with the students through a range of pedagogical tools that goes beyond classroom lectures. These include field visits, movies, artwork, mind maps and visual thinking tools, role plays, and project-based learning methods. Resources such as Project Zero, Nature Classroom, HHMI, Ted talks and DW Documentaries on YouTube have aided in making my classes more engaging and interactive. Simultaneously, it has also been a tussle to navigate the newly emerged AI landscape while devising curriculum assessments.
Despite the challenges, the only thing that reinforces the sense of accomplishment is when I am able to pass on the euphoria of being captivated by our environment and understand the nuances of living with non-human lives around us. In an ever changing world where human innovation has been shaping processes, we often tend to ignore how nature is the greatest inspiration. As art and design students, understanding how nature moulds each element through eons of change and adaptation should perhaps be central to the concept of design. This perhaps provides me some solace and motivation to my existence in a design school!
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Soundarya Iyer and Dr. Alok Bang for their comments that helped improve the flow and content of the article.
References:
- Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Temple University Press, 1996. Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bssx9
- Zimmer, Carl. The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Roberts and Company Publication, 2010.
The author, Dr. Chandrima Home, is an Assistant Professor at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India.
Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Confluence, its editorial board or the Academy.