JASKARAN BAWA (IND)
CO-FOUNDER, COMMUNITIES OF CARE
Jaskaran is a Designer with a varied design practice. Trained as an Aeronautical Engineer, Jas came across Human Centred Design as an intern while researching interactions between a pilot and the engine. He is interested in a systematic perspective on design, and using that as tools to understand the intersection of technology, economics, markets, and policy. He co-founded the Communities of Care support group as an attempt to comprehend the relationships between power, privilege, precarity, and agency.
Jas has conducted research with and for projects involving ANZ Bank, Paper Giant, Museum of Old and New Art, and the International Tangible Interaction Design Lab at Monash University. He also co-founded a (short lived) start up under the Monash Generator which created a product that attempted to treat Anxiety Spectrum Disorders using Virtual Reality.
EXHIBITION / PUBLICATION: 'A DOZEN DESIGNERS DESIGNING' (2019)
Design is a world-making practice. We create and shape worlds that are inhabited by others. These worlds shape the people that inhabit them. However, design as a practice cannot be separated from the local design communities that support individual practitioners. The values, goals, dreams and intentions of community manifest themselves as the outcomes of our designing.
A Dozen Designers Designing is an exhibition, a publication, and a safe, quiet space for listening and talking on the fringes of the conference. It makes space for stories about the role of community in supporting designers as people and nurturing alternative pathways.
Each of us have personal stories about our experiences participating in the design as a career and as a changemaking practice. Parts of these stories are shared – we are told that as designers we can change the world for good, all we need to do is work harder, aim higher, be better. A Dozen Designers Designing seeks to contest this neoliberal atomisation of individual changemakers – we can only make change as far as our communities will support us to do so.
A Dozen Designers Designing explores multiple presents and the communities that support them through stories of vulnerability, hope, grief, and just trying to pay the rent. We share our space and time with Designing Out Of Ruins, a podcast and design fiction for orienting and training for designers in the face of climate migration.
