Craft Innovation Workshop
Project Brief
Explore Rural India is a joint program between Government of India and UNDP to promote Endogenous Tourism. Explore Rural India hosted its 4th Annual Rural India Craft Mela at Dilli Haat, New Delhi celebrating the conclusive year of the joint GoI & UNDP project. The festival showcased the rural sites that have been nurtured under this initiative and the crafts that represent these regions.
As part of the 5-day festival, Quicksand was approached to conduct a one-day training workshop for participating craftsmen and grassroot organizations from select Explore Rural India sites. The objective of the workshop was to initiate these crafts to principles of design & marketing in a manner that was relevant and achievable for them.
The workshop was designed to help crafts-people understand principles of branding, packaging, innovation and revenue management through a rich visual archive of examples selected from a wide ambit of craft & non-craft initiatives. The other part of the workshop comprised of a half-day immersion into actual retail environments in urban markets like Delhi within which these crafts get sold.
The workshop was one of the most successful trainings under the Explore Rural India initiative and paved the way for a continued dialogue with UNDP and Government of India on how design services could help make the program sustainable while scaling up.
