- creative coding
- community
- performance
CLIENT
Self-initiated
DELIVERY
- Concept
- Development
COLLABORATORS
- Mangesh Mahajan
- Sukhmani Kohli
- Damini Rathore
- Shalin Shah
code.yatra
Godrej Design Lab Fellowship 2025
PROJECT DETAILS
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How can design be grounded in local, situated contexts? Can creative technology challenge dominant narratives in Indian design spaces? code.yatra highlights the intersection of design, technology, and creator communities through a year-long journey across Udaipur, Jaipur, and Vadodara. Emerging from code.drift, the project uses technology and tools to create new aesthetics and meaning for situated contexts. As an immersive creative-coding workshop series, it integrates live-coded visuals and music with the lived experience of urban environments. Inspired by the Situationist concept of Dérive, participants observe the rhythms, textures, and energies of their surroundings—these urban immersions become synthesis for material for generative artworks, sonic scapes, performances, and collaborative experiments. The project positions creative coding as a tool integrated in design practice rather than a purely technical exercise.
The Urban Drift The process begins with spontaneous and unrushed city walks during which participants record both sounds and visuals. These recordings form the basis of coding exercises. In the sound component, participants work with field recordings and musical textures—processing real file samples, constructing rhythmic structures, and generating melodies that translate sensory impressions into ambient compositions. The visual component adopts a collage-based methodology, drawing from collected imagery, hand lettering, local arts, typography, and simple animations to create generated visual narratives.
Collaboration as Cornerstone Culture and community become two cornerstones, and collaboration, a third, intentionally embedded within the practice. Practitioners engage in pairs, merging their perspectives to produce a single, cohesive, accessible portrayal of an essence of the city. This model fosters shared authorship and fluidly rooted possibilities, wherein the programme pivots beyond the static to encounter newer pathways that are more responsive yet impulsive. Through masterclasses, workshops, meetups, and collective experiments, yatris translate their encounters into live-coded audio-visual works using Sonic Pi and p5.js, co-creating tools from interactive board games to shared code libraries that they carry forward into their own creative practices.
Democratising Creative Technology A recurring objective in our work is to democratise design and creative technology. Rather than teaching coding through a STEM-oriented lens, we foreground intuition, observation, and playful exploration. Participant reflections affirm this shift: coding, when detached from the narrow domain of app or software development, becomes a means of inventing personal logics and exploring alternative solutions to complex problems. We frame design as an empathetic, collective pursuit—whether that is a clown performing a storytelling, an analogue designer animating collages, a musician reimagining stepwell acoustics, or a photographer mapping city rhythms.
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test videos
