Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Sunil Vallu | sunilvallu@gmail.com

Absolut India

New Media Design | PGDPD
Guide: Dr Jignesh Khakhar
Sponsor: Sapient Corporation, Gurgaon

Keywords
Experience design
Designing interactions
New media
Installation art

The brand Absolut is creative at its core and is a great platform for art. Until recently, the work essentially catered to an international audience and its influences and inspirations lay mainly in the West. And therein lay the challenge: How does one commission an international experience for the Indian context? The resulting ‘curated sounds’ attempts to launch Absolut in India.
Absolut India is an immersive project that relies on using memory to create an experience that is disconnected by time and space and is yet as personal as the memory itself. The installation is an assembly of ‘bottled up’ Indian sounds contained in 12 polyresin matte-finished Absolut bottles. Each bottle, labelled corresponding to the sounds it contains, houses custom electronics to deliver the complete sensorial experience.
The objective of the piece is to embark on an Indian journey that is both unique and personal. Interweaving cultural and emotional complexities, the piece is programmed to be catalytic. Sensory inputs in the form of sound trigger the information necessary for the user’s experience. Having ‘listened in’ on a bottle, the experience turns into an emotional one, often nostalgic, depending on whether the sound is part of the user’s memory. For example, a user may have an emotional response to Chandni Chowk irrespective of whether he/she has visited the place. The success of the project lies in evoking a very personalized Indian journey in different ways.
The project has been an incredible learning and a challenging exercise. It demanded several skills varying from management of logistics to production methods, understanding electronics and aesthetics.