Karkhana
Karkhana
Karkhana’s mission is to shape the face of education in Nepal by incorporating maker culture into the community. They focus on hands-on learning through workshops in schools and creating products and kits to facilitate this interactive learning style.
Workshops
I worked on a total of four workshops related to design. After leading the first workshop, I co-led the rest, providing guidance and mentorship for the other instructors. The goal here was to create a long-term impact out of my short stay, helping engineers at Karkhana learn not only about design, but also how to teach design and use design activities to enhance their own curricula.
Workshop 1: Toy product design
This week-long workshop presented the general overview and process of product design, from observation to brainstorming to prototyping.
Workshop 2: Educational kit design
This 10-day product design workshop, co-led by Dipeshwor Shrestha, presented the process of product design in the context of creating a curriculum and kit for middle school students. Karkhana has continued the projects started in this workshop and the kits were tested multiple times in schools.
Workshop 3: Communication design
See slidesThis 3-day workshop, co-led by Sakar Pudasaini, focused on communication and presentation skills. In addition, we taught basic web programming so presentations could be created using the Reveal.js framework.
Workshop 4: Design aesthetics
This 5-day workshop, co-led by Dipeshwor and Sakar, focused on visual design principles and structures. We approached the principles of design very methodically, allowing the participants to apply their knowledge step-by-step through creating layouts for visual communications pieces like posters and logos.
Tiny impacts such as seeing that they posted their work on Facebook made me smile; I’m glad to have been a part of something that Karkhana is proud to show off.
Design
I also designed communications pieces and collateral for the annual robotics competition hosted by Karkhana, called Yantra.
The output served not only to attract visitors and students to the competition, but also to inspire the team at Karkhana with a different perspective on designing and branding.