DIY City-Karachi-Manchester 2017

Bostaan

Spoken Stage Performance

Shahmeneh Majid | Zoha Jabbar | Fatin Nawaz

Taimur Numaish-Karachi's 'young mentor' making magic!

Baara Qataar

Bicycle ride around Burnes Garden

We were thrilled to have Critical Mass Karachi visit DIY City at the Burnes Garden

Sheesh Mahal- The Palace of Mirrors

Sitaaron ki Sair- A Celestial Tour

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DIY City, a Karachi–Manchester, hyperlocal guerilla placemaking took its first intervention to Rambagh Quarter in Karachi with several projects in Sobhraj Chetumal Terrace (Purdah Bagh), at Burnes Garden. DIY City is part of an on going collaboration between Karachi's award winning interdisciplinary collective Numaish-Karachi and the Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab), the UK's most active digital innovators. This cross-border experiment aims to bring together local expertise and cutting edge creative tech to reimagine public spaces. DIY City is supported by The British Council Pakistan, Habib University and Karachi Metropolitan Corporation.

Several of the student projects were initially developed during the DIY City-Karachi, Manchester course at Habib University. Computer science, engineering, social development and communication design students collaborated to create prototypes under the mentorship of their professors, Numaish Karachi and (MadLab).

Bara Qataar

Concept and design: Saima Zaidi | Sohail Zuberi

Fabrication: Zeeshan Nafees | Ejaz Ahmed | Muhammad Irfan

Material: Acrylic pipes, plumbing joints, LED lights, jumper wire. Dimensions: 26x26 inches | Height: 8 inches

Bara Qataar, which literally translates into Twelve Lines, is a two players war/strategy game. It is believed to have originated in the Middle East where it is known as Quirkat. In the West it is called Alquerque and is considered the precursor to draughts or checkers. On the streets of Karachi, and elsewhere in Pakistan, it is mostly played by working class men who usually draw the grid on the ground and use pebbles and stones as counters.

This is an interpretation of the Bara Qatar in an attempt to revive the communal aspect of the game and to attract people who may be unfamiliar with it.

Sheesh Mahal

Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666 CE) told his beautiful wife Mumtaz Mahal that he wanted to give her everything. And so, in a spectacular feat of engineering and imagination, he gave her the Sheesh Mahal in the Lahore Fort. It consisted of a white marble pavilion inlaid with thousands of tiny mirrors and a shallow pool outside the structure. At night, the moonlit water would reflect the light of the thousand mirrors, giving her the stars she had demanded.

We wanted put a spin on this historic palatial beauty by using the old animation technology of a zoetrope to build miniature Sheesh Mahals in the hope of transporting you to a similar place of ecstatic wonder. The blinking lights inside help create a hypnotic effect within each of our models—it’s a party at Sheesh Mahal!

Sitaron Ki Sair | A Celestial Tour

In this installation, you can physically interact with the night sky projected onto the intrados or inner vault of the dome of the pergola at the Sobhraj Chetumal Terrace that has been linked to a Kinect motion sensing device. Travel through the galaxies, learn about the stars, planets and constellations with a wave of a hand. Experience a starry night that is otherwise so rare in inner neighbourhoods of our cities that have become cloaked by layers of smog and light pollution.

Bicycle Ride around Burnes Garden

Karachi is so vast that you can perhaps never know it fully in one lifetime. In this project, we use a popular and cost-effective form of transport, bicycles. We set up two of them side by side and connected them to their own strips of LED lights that lead to a screen in front. The bicycles have been procured from the Cycle Market in the vicinity of the Burnes Garden and are thus hyperlocal. In order to be inclusive, we ensured one bicycle was designed for differently abled people. The faster you pedal, the faster the lights will glow. As you hit cover distances, the screen will display images from the areas around the park where you have ‘pedalled’. This way, you can be fixed in one place but discover an entire area.

Saaya | Tag-a-tree Project

Saad Amanullah Khan | Summaiya Zaidi

Public Interest Law Association of Pakistan (PILAP) The Horticulture Society of Pakistan.

Trees are sacred, essential fixtures that feature in our histories, cultures and homes. The visual impact of a tree is often understated, perhaps because its existence is subsumed within the urban concrete jungle. It is only when it has been hacked away for private interests that we notice its absence. Indeed, Karachi’s green cover has shrunk to an alarming 3%, making documenting and preserving this environmental heritage both urgent and necessary.

Bostaan

We live in times when our interaction with screen-based technology has eclipsed our interation with nature. For this installation we asked how we could not only integrate the two but try to heighten the sensation of experiencing a natural surrounding. The Sobhraj Chetumal Terrace lent itself perfectly to what we realised could be made playful interaction with the help of a screen and motion sensors in a Kinect.

Students from the DIY City Karachi-Manchester course undertaken at Habib University — Students from the *DIY City Karachi-Manchester* course undertaken at Habib University