These initiatives are in various stages of conceptual development, resource gathering, and partnership building. We welcome collaborators, funders, and provocateurs.

[Details to be added. Placeholder for the Ortenga Initiative — a project currently in conceptual development. Write to us if you would like to learn more or contribute to its shaping.]

A 3-month residential laboratory co-hosted with an Indian craft cluster — perhaps the handloom weavers of Kullu or the pottery communities of Andretta — in which contemporary designers and technologists work alongside master artisans to explore how digital fabrication, material science, and traditional making can genuinely enrich each other (rather than the one displacing the other). Outputs include new products, a documented methodology, and a policy brief on craft-tech integration.

A design research initiative working with communities in climate-vulnerable Himalayan landscapes — flood-affected valley settlements, landslide-prone hillside communities — to develop locally buildable, materially appropriate, and culturally resonant housing prototypes. The Studio operates as a living lab: prototypes are actually built, lived in, and evaluated over two monsoon seasons before being offered as open-source specifications

A digital-physical archive of design knowledge embedded in the building, farming, water management, and textile practices of Himachal Pradesh’s tribal and folk communities — knowledge currently held by practitioners averaging over 65 years of age, with no institutional succession. The Archive is co-designed with community knowledge holders, ensuring they control access, attribution, and use of the material

A one-year embedded fellowship placing mid-career designers within state government departments, municipal bodies, or gram panchayats to work on the design of public services, civic communication, and government-community interfaces. The Fellowship addresses a persistent gap: that design talent rarely reaches the institutions most responsible for everyday quality of life.

A short-format (3-week) annual residency specifically timed to the monsoon season — when the Himalayan landscape is at its most extreme, most beautiful, and most ecologically instructive. Designers, writers, photographers, and scientists share a remote field base and respond, each in their own medium, to the experience of the season. Residency outputs are published annually as a multimedia almanac.

A programme of time-limited, community-initiated public space interventions in Shimla and partner cities — temporary installations, pop-up markets, community furniture, wayfinding reimaginings — that test ideas about how urban space can be more inclusive, playful, and ecologically sensitive. Each intervention is documented and offered as a replicable template for other communities.

A specialised design research initiative focused on India’s primary healthcare infrastructure — the Primary Health Centre, Sub-Centre, and Anganwadi, which together constitute the daily healthcare experience of hundreds of millions of Indians. Working with state health departments, we will research, prototype, and test design interventions that make these spaces more dignified, functional, and healing.

A prize recognising design work — at any scale, in any medium — that demonstrates exceptional empathy, genuine collaboration with communities, and contribution to ecological or social sustainability. Unlike most design prizes, the VST Prize is judged entirely by a community panel — not design professionals — on the criterion of real-world impact on real people’s lives.