Tinkering Tinkerer: Gautham Dayal & Vanya Sahi

Gautham and Vanya enjoy facilitating experiences where people (children and adults) can tinker and learn. For the last ten years they have been playing with the idea of “making and learning and learning and making" and run workshops called ‘thinking hands.’ In these workshops, people engage with making an object – a group balophone, a whimsical automata, a carved wooden box, an interactive object that draws patten - and learn through the process of making and talking to each other.

Over the past few years they have been running studios at the Srishti Insitute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. More recently they have been interested in the relationship between this way of learning and vocational education. Besides this bringing together of people with art, design, math, science, thought and playfulness, they enjoy working with wood, paper, wire, cloth, clay, computer code and electronics. A long term interest has been working with wood to make furniture, trying to preserve the form of the tree and working with joinery rather than using fasteners.