Restor(y)ing Cultural Memory

2025

Final Year Project - Design Advocacy & the Community
Branding/Identity, Art Direction, Print & Publication
Creative Conscience Global Award Winner 2025 - Silver
Crowbar Awards Finalist 2025 - Upcoming

Restor(y)ing Cultural Memory seeks to examine the role of participatory re-storytelling through design as a catalyst for cultural restoration and empowerment among the marginalised truck artists operating in Delhi, India.

Integrating ethnographic fieldwork and on-site dialogues with truck artists, the study aims to magnify their lived experiences, unpacking the intersections of systemic exploitation, diluted self-perception, and a colonial constructions of knowledge. On this basis, this research repositions truck artists as active agents restoring a culture rather than passive subjects of external representation.

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Read the full dissertation here

Publication Deliverable

The publication serves as a visual and textual record of the stories, journeys, and lives of truck artists in Delhi, India, with the goal of re-storying a culture that has long been shaped by perspectives outside the lived experiences of a marginalised community.

View the full publication here

Supplementary Print Deliverables

The Transcript Booklet serves as a textual record of semi-structured
interviews with three truck artists based in Delhi, India, conducted
across three key locations. It preserves their stories in their own
words, allowing them to be co-authors and collaborators of their
narratives without external interference.

The Poster Series centres the truck artists as the protagonists of
their own stories, reclaiming authorship over their work and identity.
Having long been undervalued, the posters aim to spotlight them not
just as wage labourers, but as artists who shape the cultural and
aesthetic language of an entire nation.

Video Deliverable

A visual montage of three locations within Delhi, offering glimpses into the truck artists' working environments and everyday realities.

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Khushi Sood

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