Ran events for a 300 person design fest, the year it went hybrid.
Ishanya is the annual festival of design, art and technology run by students of the Department of Design at IIT Guwahati. It is the largest design fest in the Northeast of India, and it grew out of the department’s own thesis exhibition. The 2022 edition ran four days: twelve keynotes, workshops, competitions and an exhibition.
I was one of two Events Heads. Curating the programme was mine to own; dates, budget, permissions and logistics were shared with my co-head, across a team of thirty inside a department of about three hundred. No one there had run a hybrid edition before, so a fair amount of it was worked out as we went.
One fest, two modes.
Figuring it out first time.
The Department of Design is one of thirteen departments at IIT Guwahati, and its alumni now sit across the Indian design industry. Ishanya started there in 2019 and was on campus; the two editions after it were fully online. 2022 was the return except the audience built over those two years was no longer in Guwahati. Dropping either group meant losing the room, or losing the reach.
So we decided to go the extra mile & kept both. Every talk and workshop had to work for a live auditorium and a remote crowd at the same time, run by students, We brought Airmeet on as the online partner, worked through the logistics, and split the team by what each person was genuinely interested in doing before and during the fest.
The Theme: Undercurrents. We went diving.
A theme has three jobs here: give the programme a spine, give the creatives team a world to draw, and give a speaker a reason to say yes. We built Ishanya 2022 around the unglamorous side of design, which could give our audience of budding designers a reality check. Three pillars came out of it, and every competition, workshop and talk got slotted under one.
A full brand system, built in about eight weeks.
Wordmark, monogram, seven colours, three typefaces, a library of hand cut linocut elements, then hundreds of surfaces built on top. The constraint we set: everything had to hold up on a phone, on a projected livestream, and screenprinted on cloth.
- Dela Gothic is always all caps.
- Pilowlava replaces a set of letters inside Dela Gothic.
- Two letters per word, three if the word is long.
Twelve keynotes, three continents, one timetable.
Curating the lineup was my responsibility. It had to cover the range of interests in our department, hold up for students from other design colleges and for designers watching online, and connect back to the theme. I then worked with each speaker on shaping their talk, and mentored the team through the outreach: cold emails, warm intros via alumni, calls, and slots negotiated across time zones.
The year after, the department elected me convener.
For Ishanya ’23 I moved from running one team to being one of the two people the whole festival reported into: branding, events, sponsorships, institute permissions, and the final call on each.
What I took from it:
> How to hold a deadline without burning out a team.
> To delegate by interest first and strength second, then actually trust the work.
> That the job doesn’t get easier as you move up, it gets wider
What I still use: a network of speakers, sponsors and alumni across the industry. If I don’t know how to build something, I know who to call :)
