NANAWADA MUSEUM
Communication Designer @ Lokus Design Pvt. Ltd.
Nanawada Museum of Swarajya (Freedom), a Pune Municipal Corporation's venture, chronicles Pune's contribution in India's early struggle for independence. The museum serves history with cutting-edge design environments, deploying a hybrid of art-disciplines and technology.
A Sensory Playground
Swaraj Museum has most importantly, chosen to humanise its heroes rather than render them as emblematic deities. It is, therefore, a sensory playground where one feels the struggle, the pain and the thrills among other emotions through interactive and immersive displays.
My Role & Responsibility
I worked as the Lead Communication Designer on a total of 10 rooms out of the 30. This involved building the concept & narrative from scratch to site execution.
1. Concept & Narrative Development: Working with historians, Pandurang Balakawde & Mohan Shete on building the
story and narrative of each freedom fighter.
2. Concept & Experience Design:
3. Art Direction: Creating storyboards, style & colour-boards, defining the mediums of communication like diorama,
illustrations, comics, videos etc. to effectively narrate each freedom fighter's struggle and story.
4. Making Artworks, Illustrations, Videos: Apart from supervising in-house and outsourced artworks, I too created
illustrations, murals and videos for the museum exhibits.
5. Vendor Dockets: Meticulously created vendor dockets explaining the artwork requirements explaining mediums of
communication, dimensions, emotions to capture, colour palette, style references etc.
6. Vendor Correspondence: Collaborated with talented vendors - artists like Manoj Sakale, sculptors, animators, set
designers & illustrators and supervised the outsourced work to them.
7. Site Execution: Once all the artworks were ready, partially supervised the final execution of the artworks on site.
Nanawada Museum inaugurated in June 2019 by the then Maharashtra CM, Devendra Fadnavis.
Media Coverage of the Nanawada Museum by Times of India
The photograph on the right below depicts the room on 'Tribal Uprising' designed by me. The artworks and diorama were created in collaboration with different artists and vendors.
Museum Experience Design
Guided Automated Tour: Audience in groups of 10-15 people are guided through the rooms by timed and automated light and audio narration. The exhibits light up in a sequential order.
Sensory Experience: As each exhibit lights up, the audio narration, music and sound effects for that exhibit play in the background creating a complete sensory experience! Once the narration for the current exhibit gets over, its lights go off and the next exhibit comes to life with light and audio.
Design Process
A Walkthrough of a select few rooms and works out of the 10 rooms out of the 30 that I designed and executed.
To see the rest, please visit Nanawada Museum in Pune :)
Glimpse of Lahuji Vastad Room
Introduction: One of the first rooms that I executed was that of Lahuji Vastad was an activist and a social reformer from Purandhar, Maharashtra. He was very instrumental in guiding and training the young freedom fighters of India during the struggle for independence. This room is dedicated entirely to Lahuji and brings his story to life through a series of illustrations, cut-out installations, videos, dioramas constituting an immersive environment.
Other rooms belonging to other freedom fighters too were designed with the same design thinking process and manner.
Art Direction for Powada Wall Mural (Left): Powada at the entrance of the room. This is a poem paying tribute to Lahuji Vastad. Vastad means gym teacher. Under the pretence of teaching wrestling, Lahuji used to train young freedom fighters in his gym or akhada for warfare with guns etc. Hence, The Powada wall depicts sand at the bottom to create an illusion of an akhada.
Layered Cut-Out Mural done by me (Right): Lahuji Vastad was a multi-faceted man. He was a wrestler, a teacher, a social reformer and a patriot. These different facets or layers of his life are depicted through a layered cut-out mural.
Visual Language Design: (Left Corner) Lahuji Vastad was a wrestling teacher. He was masculine and also a wise teacher. Hence, a metaphor of the Banyan Tree was used as the visual backdrop for the room. The tree was designed to be big with its branches and roots spreading across the room. The hard rough edges of the tree highlighted his rugged self and life while the tree symbolised wisdom and benevolence.
(Right) The tornado represents his emotional state as he witnesses the atrocities of the British on Indians. A GOBO light projection of his silhouette appears on the wall as he takes an oath to pledge his life for India's freedom.
A mural of a Banyan Tree symbolising Lahuji Vastad. Multi coloured lights light it up from the spotlight placed below to depict different emotions of Lahuji Vastad.
Glimpse Of Other Rooms & Exhibits
Chapekar Brothers' Room - This was my most favourite room with respect to ideation and conceptualisation. Story of how the brothers conspired, planned and executed the assassination of W.C. Rand, the British Plague Commissioner of Pune.
Challenges: The story was rather long and the space and the budget to depict it was rather constrained.
Visualisation: The diorama depicts the night where the brothers were hiding amidst the banyan trees waiting for Rand's buggy to kill him. Hence, the night blue light and silhouettes in the wall mural.
Audio Visual Experience: Best interplay of light, sound & visuals! It starts with a pitch dark room - horse buggy is not visible.
(Audio) A horse buggy is heard approaching from a distance. The sound of the hooves get louder as the buggy draws closer. Slowly blue light (indicating night) reveals the horse buggy. The audio narration of the hushed dialogue and discussion between the brothers hiding in the trees is heard. Suddenly a loud gun firing pierces through the room followed by Rand's scream, thus creating a shock effect!
This is how the story of Rand's assassination by the Chapekar Brothers unfolds!
An illustration by me (Right)- A vector illustration of Bahadur Shah Zafar in his Courtroom. This was placed in a cut out frame depicting a courtroom door as if the viewer is standing outside the courtroom and looking in. It was also backlit as shown in the left image.
Art Direction - In-House - Visual Language, Style and Each room had a defined colour palette and textures assigned to it to highlight a certain feeling or emotion. The above picture was an introduction to how the British came to India first through Bengal and eventually took over the whole of India. Thus, the wall background for the room was on the warmer side with textures and designs suggesting a disruptive storm with bits of destruction splattered across.
An illustration by me -The Doctrine of Lapse on printed on canvas and depicted as a scroll to the effect of the 18th century official declarations made on scrolls.
Video Projection of the Tribal Uprising Story on a diorama.
A glimpse of one of the videos I made for the exhibits.
A Pitch Project for R.K.Laxman Museum
