The Space Between Stories and Policy

The Charles Correa Foundation (CCF) is a not-for-profit public charitable trust based in Fontainhas, Panaji, dedicated to preserving and advancing the legacy of architect and urbanist Charles Correa while actively engaging with contemporary questions of architecture, urbanism, human settlements, and public life. The Foundation functions as an extension of Correa’s enduring concepts of how cities are built, contested and inhabited.

The Foundation’s office reflects the qualities most associated with Correa’s architectural philosophy: openness, simplicity, and a disciplined responsiveness to context. It is regularly visited by architecture students and researchers seeking access to archives,documentation and institutional memory that continue to inform contemporary urban discourse in physical form.

My experience was structured across two phases under the guidance of Reet Singh Tomar, Academic Fellow at BITS, and the CCF team. My primary contribution focused on the Nagari Education Programme, an initiative currently under development to extend the conversations generated into an educational framework.

Seven Minutes into the Life of a City

Nagari is an annual short film competition, active since 2020, that commissions and curates seven-minute films exploring urban dynamics and crises across India. These films constitute a visual archive of contemporary Indian urbanism, documenting how cities are lived in, negotiated, and transformed.

The city emerges as a central character personifying the consequences of social, environmental, and political decisions. Film functions as a communicative mediator translating intricate spider-web challenges such as housing inadequacy, water access, and displacement which are institutionally resistant to simplification ,and is portrayed as nuanced narratives accessible to wider audiences .

While policy documents communicate these issues with precision, they rarely create immediate and embodied understanding that encourages sustained public engagement and movement. Nagari addresses this through specificity — a face, a street or a lived experience. This commitment transforms systemic issues in everyday realities into legible human experiences, forming emotional engagement before analytical reflection.

This sequencing is a deliberate pedagogical strategy. Each public forum begins with a film screening, establishing a shared point of reference from which discussion can emerge. The film also travels beyond the forum — into community halls, universities, and government offices, carrying the conversation with it and extending dialogues that might remain localised. As a medium, it makes the invisible visible and renders urban questions legible across audiences with vastly different relationships to the subject matter.

Nagari Film Festival main board, Serendipity Arts Festival 2025

From Wireframes to Dialogue

My work involved creating wireframes, user flows, mock-ups, and interactive prototypes for the Education Programme section of the Nagari website, alongside paraphrasing transcripts from past public forums held under the programme.

At first, I approached the project as a straightforward UI/UX task. As I spent more time with the content, the nature of the work began to shift. I realised the website was a means of connecting people to ideas, conversations, and experiences. The interface derived its purpose from the larger ecosystem of research, storytelling, and public dialogue it was designed to support.

The existing website employs a minimal visual language and precise typography, where each design decision has a functional intent. Working within this language revealed a recurring tension between aesthetic integrity and functional clarity. This approach mirrored principles present in Charles Correa’s architecture, where minimalism is a carefully considered response to context, movement, and use.

The forum transcripts introduced another dimension of the project, revealing the diversity of audiences these conversations reach — teachers, urban planners, community organisers, policymakers, and architecture students among them. This shifted my focus from presenting information to understanding who these conversations were for and how access to them could be structured more thoughtfully.

Early research notes that informed the project

The Politics of Design

The most significant insight was recognising that design decisions within this system simultaneously function as policy decisions. Nagari’s public forums operate as structured policy inputs beyond community mixers. Researchers, planners, and filmmakers attend alongside community members, and the conversations that follow, feed into how urban issues are framed and then subsequently addressed at institutional levels.

Within such a system, every design choice carries policy implications. Choosing film over written reports prioritises accessibility, shared understanding and broad circulation over controlled dissemination. The structure of the Education Programme section, what it surfaces first, how it is navigated, whose work it foregrounds influences who participates in these conversations and under what conditions.

Nagari’s distinctive strength lies in its bottom-up model. Conditions are documented, translated through film, and then brought into structured dialogue, producing grounded insight that top-down policy processes frequently overlook by skipping the observation phase. Design becomes the connective tissue between lived realities and institutional response.

Connecting the Dots

Many of the processes I observed at CCF resonated with frameworks introduced during my first year at BITS.

The filmmaking process closely parallels methodologies explored in the Design Methods module, where observation and ethnographic engagement precede intervention. Filmmakers spend considerable time understanding places, documenting conditions and communities before constructing a narrative. This is identical to the design research process of beginning with investigating systems, identifying patterns, and selecting an appropriate communicative medium.

The research anchoring the films also echoed ideas introduced in The Language of Design, a module which provided frameworks for understanding how social, environmental, cultural, and political forces interact across scales. The Nagari films enact this same analytical ambition through image and narrative, demonstrating what systems thinking looks like when translated into a form inclusive to all audiences.

The seven-minute duration of each film was particularly striking. It reminded me of the challenge of academic presentations, where extensive research must be distilled into a concise and coherent narrative without losing complexity. Each frame carries responsibility, balancing evidence and storytelling within a limited timeframe.

The most meaningful shift in perspective was the function of design outputs themselves. Prior to this, I often placed websites and interfaces primarily as end products. At CCF, they emerged as vehicles for access, participation, and the continuation of conversations originating elsewhere. This reframing has direct implications for community-centred design produced by the larger processes and relationships it enables.

Design Beyond the Interface

The experience reinforced the value of meaningful outcomes that emerge from sustained collaboration across disciplines rather than individual authorship.

The Nagari model offers a specific and considered answer to questions design education raises but rarely resolves: how does design contribute to social change, and through what mechanisms? At CCF, the answer arrives through film, dialogue, and an accessible environment for participation. This perspective will continue to shape how I understand the relationship between design practice, community engagement, and the longer processes of policy and change.

These films left a lasting impression on me, offering new ways of seeing and understanding the complexities of urban life.

1.A City within a City — Prachee Bajania and Narendra Mangwani

2.The Many Journeys of Water — Niki Nirvikalpa, Sugantha Priscilla & Prasanth Kumar K

3.Level Up! — Bhargav Prasad, Archanaa Seker & Pavithra Sriram

4.Partnership Below Par-Aman Jajoria and Simran Raswant