Ahemdabad design week to showcase 'vocal for local' toy theme

Gandhinagar, January 29

Aspiring to be a platform that will augment the design students' capabilities about toy creation, the second edition of the Ahmedabad Design Week (ADW) will be launched in Ahmedabad on February 3.

Through this show, the ADW will be reaching out to thousands of school and design students, design faculties and professionals from the industry. This edition's theme, 'Toy'ing with Design' is inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of making India a global 'Toy Hub'.

Inspired by the clarion call given by the Prime Minister during his 'Mann ki Baat' radio programme, desiring to make India the global hub for toy production and urging all Indians to go 'Vocal for Local' toys, the second edition of Ahmedabad Design Week (ADW) is being launched with this core theme,'Toy'ing with Design.

The Ahmedabad Design Week (ADW) is a non-commercial design festival event which is annually curated by the Unitedworld Institute of Design with the purpose of networking and knowledge exchange between designers, academicians and students across the country.

From February 3 to 7, the second edition of ADW with it's core theme, 'Toy Design ADW 2021', will aim to bring traditional and modern toy makers under a single platform. ADW intends to reach out to 15,000 school students, more than 15,000 design students, 2,000 design faculties and 2,500 professionals from the design industry.

By inviting participation and discussion with toy makers from local clusters of India, the ADW 21 also intends to foster the rich tradition of local toys of India. Some of these toy clusters are Channapatna in Ramnagaram in Karnataka, Kondaplli in Krishna in Andhra Pradesh, Thanjavur in Tamilnadu, Dhubari in Assam, Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh and from Gujarat's Idar, Mahura, Patan and Kutch.

Besides this, the focus areas during the five days of the Design Week would be expert sessions and lecture sessions with people of national and international repute, workshops by design stalwarts, toy design competition, design daper presentations, technology and design, etc.

Prof. Sudarshan Khanna and Dadi Pudumjee are scheduled to give two keynote speeches at the event. International toy manufacturers, Skillmatics, Funskool, Hasbro and Hamleys shall be organising speaker sessions with their senior designers.

These toy manufacturers have also agreed to give opportunities to the winners of the toy design challenge to pitch their ideas for commercial propositions and share royalties with them for future use if the concept is commercialised.

Some of the internationally acclaimed speakers are Paul Budnitz, Founder, KidRobot, Miguel Wilson, Mariana Amatullo, Katerina Kamprani, Architect and Designer, Anita Savicka, among others.

"This will be the biggest platform for the design enthusiasts, where seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar, Roorkee, Bhubaneshwar, Indore, Varanasi, Mumbai and Delhi, the National Institute of Design (NID), the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), the CEPT University, Gujarat University, the Children's University, NIT-Srinagar, and many others are participating," said Hiranmay Mahanta, the CEO, i-Hub.

"We are emphasizing on the traditional Indian ethos and values to emerge out of this effort in the toys market. Right now the situation is such that we are accepting 'Bhim' only when it is brought from abroad. We hope to see something like an Indian Barbie alternative and some other novel creations too, emerging out from the challenge that we are organising," said Ritesh Hada, of the Unitedworld Institute of Design. IANS

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