A workshop on ‘Sustaining identity and heritage through design’ at Karachi’s Textile Institute of Pakistan (TIP) brought together 23 art students from all over Pakistan.  The workshop was part of the New Silk Route, a British Council project running in six countries in the Central and South Asia region. The project is an attempt to draw on the region’s strong traditional craft and design heritage. The week long workshop was led by Maki Suzuki and Kajsa Stahl from Abake, a graphic design studio based in London. Students from different educational and economic backgrounds were selected through a national design competition. Although a challenge initially, the group eventually gelled together and enjoyed the opportunity to work with new people.

The workshop brief was to produce a piece of group work: a screen-print that was designed using elements from objects and belongings the students were asked to bring along to the workshop combined with things gathered during then rather colourful day trip around Karachi. The students had to consider how things - objects, symbols, words - convey meaning and represent identity: an individual identity, a group identity, or perhaps even a national identity. The task also pushed the students to think about how one can explore and push notions of heritage and tradition through the presentation of contemporary life, objects and processes.  

The workshop culminated in an exhibition at TIP displaying research materials in category type, experiments in typographic form and screen-printed ‘flags’. The students were asked to act as live ‘captions’ to their work and were very enthusiastic about telling everyone about the week and the work produced.

Marcus Gilbert, Director British Council Karachi presented the students with certificates at the closing ceremony on 16 February 2007 which had a large number of students and the parents, friends and teachers of the participants present to cheer their achievement and to have a look at the exhibition. The ceremony started with the students leading a procession around the campus and entering the auditorium with their banner showing each of the groups designs produced especially for the event. Kashif Afridi, a student at TIP was selected on the basis of his consistent good performance to attend the New Silk Route study tour in London and he promised his colleagues to be a strong communicator, feeding back to the group about his experiences and a good ambassador for the arts project and Pakistan.  Working on their intention to maintain touch with their workshop colleagues, the students have created a network via an online blog.

Saba Shaheen, a workshop participant from TIP writes:

The New Silk Route(NSR)  project helped us interact with design students from all over Pakistan. This was a great experience for participants coming from different disciplines within the field of design or areas like engineering. Such events help create networking among local professionals which can be a useful tool in our future growth and development. We attended a two day conference on design education which gave us an opportunity to interact and share ideas with accomplished designers and artists and relevant professionals in our government institutions. Such opportunities where so many big names are gathered under one roof and are accessible to discuss any ideas we had is a rare privilege and was fully exploited by us. Further benefits of this project were enjoyed in the following week long workshop conducted by two very interesting designers from Abake, a design studio in London. Maki Suzuki and Kajsa Sthal were both inspiring professionals and spending time with them and coming on a common platform through design helped us identify ourselves and each other and achieved the basic theme of the workshop: identity and representation of identity through the language of design and objects. It was a revelation to see how perception of things and thought process of design from two different points (local and foreign) can create interest in the simplest of things. One category of objects that we were asked to bring for the workshop from our environment had purely local origins and were unfamiliar to the UK designers. This exercise was extremely interesting as it made us see those objects in a totally different light. There was freedom to express and explore ideas and the environment was very friendly helping to build teamworking abilities in us. The best feature of this workshop was the incentive of getting selected to represent Pakistan in UK and meet participants from other countries of NSR: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran and the UK. Kashif Afridi from TIP was the lucky and deserving candidate who has won this honour. The residential workshop focused on the group of participants together for five days and visiting various interesting sites and art exhibitions in the city. Even the Karachi participants had never experienced the city in this manner before and developed a new fondness for it. The whole experience of living away form home with friends and colleagues and working from morning till evening was a unique experience. The workshop was very well managed by the British Council and the Textile Institute of Pakistan. The living experience at the beautiful country club and the studio space, materials and processes we employed to execute our design ideas were excellent.