Constellations and dispatches

at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

In December of 2023, I was visiting NID Ahmedabad for a short elective. In my time there, I was involved in the annual Archives Convocation Exhibition which takes place as part of the convocation ceremony. I designed a multimedia timeline panel that displayed items from the NID archives.

For the 2024 edition, the exhibition traced the history of cybernetics and NID’s own place in it. The field is credited with giving birth to a lot of information age concepts, but also to systems and design thinking, on which NID’s own curriculum was holistically built.

My role

Information designer

Timeline

December 2023

🌀 Back to the future

Before I visited the campus, Shreyasi, the archivist at NID sent me the research that informed the exhibition. I began by learning more about the core concepts that made cybernetics. Once I was on campus, I was briefed extensively about the scope, site and schedule for the exhibition.

The team had put together thorough documentation of all the media that would fill the space. One of those documents was the timeline of cybernetics as a discipline, which would become the base for the design of the timeline. It featured seminal and influential books authored by the pioneers of the field (many of which are from the archives and library), notes on NID’s own interactions and films that would play out on the panel.

Cybernetics, on the whole, is about systems and feedbacks. It’s about how things interact and communicate with each other. Many concepts in biology, social studies, information technology (and many other fields) have their roots in cybernetics. A lot of its practitioners were ecological in their thinking, always considering the links and loops between actors in a system.

In a way, it showed how design itself was a practice of cybernetics, where designers must always learn from their context and the people they design for. Feedback is sacred to the practice. Call it a revelation, but it wasn’t hard to see then where design thinking and pedagogy actually came from.

An early rendition of the interactive map that stood as a separate installation in the exhibition. This one featured the connections between all the people and places in the cybernetics scene

⚡️ Connections in a chronology

Building on the same spirit, I tried to first figure out the layers of data in the broader timeline.

There were three broad lanes of information here :

The history of cybernetics as a discipline
Archival objects at NID (books and films that were collected at the Institue)
The geopolitics of the 20th century, within which all these advancements were taking place

Each entry on the timeline was one of four types : a person, publication, institution or convention.

At first, I wondered if we could show the connections between all of these elements. I then began populating the map
In this draft, we can see that the 60s and 70s would get crowded because that’s when cybernetics saw its boom. We decided against showing connections because it was already implied. Also, it would very easily slip into visual clutter.
If some decades saw less activity than others, why not compress and extend the spring of time? This created a lot more space for arrangement.
Before I added more to the timeline, we paused to decide the visual language of the entire exhibition. This meant testing different typefaces, creating colour palettes and taking stock of all the media we were working with.
As the timeline grew dense, we decided to embrace maximum context. The display became a living bibliography. Everything we were mentioning was available in the library or the archives. Viewers could always keep coming back to find new sources to look up.
At first, I wondered if we could show the connections between all of these elements. I then began populating the map
In this draft, we can see that the 60s and 70s would get crowded because that’s when cybernetics saw its boom. We decided against showing connections because it was already implied. Also, it would very easily slip into visual clutter.
If some decades saw less activity than others, why not compress and extend the spring of time? This created a lot more space for arrangement.
Before I added more to the timeline, we paused to decide the visual language of the entire exhibition. This meant testing different typefaces, creating colour palettes and taking stock of all the media we were working with.
As the timeline grew dense, we decided to embrace maximum context. The display became a living bibliography. Everything we were mentioning was available in the library or the archives. Viewers could always keep coming back to find new sources to look up.
At first, I wondered if we could show the connections between all of these elements. I then began populating the map
In this draft, we can see that the 60s and 70s would get crowded because that’s when cybernetics saw its boom. We decided against showing connections because it was already implied. Also, it would very easily slip into visual clutter.
If some decades saw less activity than others, why not compress and extend the spring of time? This created a lot more space for arrangement.
Before I added more to the timeline, we paused to decide the visual language of the entire exhibition. This meant testing different typefaces, creating colour palettes and taking stock of all the media we were working with.
As the timeline grew dense, we decided to embrace maximum context. The display became a living bibliography. Everything we were mentioning was available in the library or the archives. Viewers could always keep coming back to find new sources to look up.
At first, I wondered if we could show the connections between all of these elements. I then began populating the map
In this draft, we can see that the 60s and 70s would get crowded because that’s when cybernetics saw its boom. We decided against showing connections because it was already implied. Also, it would very easily slip into visual clutter.
If some decades saw less activity than others, why not compress and extend the spring of time? This created a lot more space for arrangement.
Before I added more to the timeline, we paused to decide the visual language of the entire exhibition. This meant testing different typefaces, creating colour palettes and taking stock of all the media we were working with.
As the timeline grew dense, we decided to embrace maximum context. The display became a living bibliography. Everything we were mentioning was available in the library or the archives. Viewers could always keep coming back to find new sources to look up.

The final version of the timeline accommodated the tablets that would be placed onto the panel. These would play films from the archive, turning this into an interactive installation. The team also planned seating and audio arrangements for the viewers.

Many thanks to Shreyasi, Tanishka, Mehar, Roe, Unnati, Mihir, Dany, Sneha and Shilpi for putting together such a solid project on a tight timeline and for being the warmest team to work with! ❤️

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