BlackOutt design fest- A BlackPages event 💡
BlackOutt design fest- A BlackPages event 💡
October 15+16, 2022 was one of the most important milestones for BlackPages. I will tell you why.
The idea 💡
Over the past few years, Chennai witnessed tremendous growth in the architecture community, with an increasing number of graduates entering the field annually. However, during that time, there are no platforms available for informal knowledge sharing between industry professionals and students.
Additionally, the advent of COVID-19 transformed the learning landscape, with the majority of events and seminars transitioning into digital formats, resulting in limited learning experiences during these sessions. Recognizing this unique opportunity, we conceptualized a one-of-a-kind Design Fest in Namma Chennai called The BlackOutt.
The BlackOutt aimed to foster collaborative learning by organizing a series of intensive workshops led by industry professionals, alongside talks and panel discussions featuring prominent architects. The festival culminated in a design exhibit showcasing the creations of workshop participants.
The underlying theme of the fest revolved around emerging technologies in architecture, while also providing an introduction to other design disciplines. Moreover, the event served as a networking platform, allowing students and graduates to connect with fellow architects and thus strengthening the community.
Event Structure 📝
To balance between giving the most and not overdoing it the team brainstormed on a lot of schedules, event locations, talk topics, and workshop ideas.
After narrowing down the relevant workshops, talks, etc, the next step was sponsorship (the mossst crucial one for sure). With a young team and BlackOutt being our first fest, we had to go meet about 50-100 sponsors and try very hard to convince them. After a few failed attempts we managed to get two prime sponsors for our event.
By chance, we reached out to our college for assistance with finding a location, and to our surprise, they expressed their willingness to host the fest and be the primary sponsors as well. Filled with hope, as a young team, BlackPages hoped we get the required support from our college to host our debut fest.
And then the journey began.
Fest Preparations
So how did the fest go? 🥹
I would love to share some stats here:
1. Total number of registrations (both days) - 450
2. Total number of workshops - 9
3. Number of workshop participants - 210 (excluding regular registrations)
3. Total number of talks - 12
4. Total number of panel discussions hosted - 2
we do have our fair share of lessons hosting the fest, but overall?
We loved it. The Student community loved it. We still cannot believe the scale of the fest we were able to manage to pull together. The comments and valuable feedbacks are something that we value the most until today.
Personally, this has been a total eye-opener for me. From day 1 to day 87, I and my
co-founder went through a loooot of challenges on a daily basis. At places, we had to comprise on a few things, and at places, we had to take a few difficult stands. Not the easiest journey I would say, but a journey worth 1000 lessons with my wonderful team.