DESING
DESING
Regenerative Utopia
Culture
Education
Art
Transdisciplinary lenses
The Mission is regenerative living systems design, integrating local ecologies and global technologies through collaborations and entrepreneurship.
“My lifetime dream project of building sustainable living communities, remedying current urban challenges based on permaculture design ethics, along with the effort of like-minded people, drives my creations on a daily basis.”
About
Waylon J. D’Souza is a transdisciplinary artist and designer with a research-driven practice, collating principles of education, philosophy, and culture to iterate pan-disciplinary experiments in sustainability science.
He has trained in a matrix of symbiotic disciplines including fine arts, animation, aquaponics, permaculture, and industrial design at various institutes.
His creations advance environmental solutions through materially symbolic and visually compelling works. In an ever-expanding space of experimentation, Waylon’s practice moves into varied mediums, forms of expression, and articulations. It is like a kaleidoscope, where the same elements are reorganized eternally to produce new and exciting manifestations. This produces a conceptual underpinning that allows his work to be recognized and understood.
“ With my passion for science and research and my proclivity towards design and art, I mapped out what I had done over the years and saw the interconnectedness of everything. It led me to contemplate deeper. It helped me understand the economics and biology of waste. Art allowed me to take it further. I began to tell stories, express my research, and find original solutions.”
The Art of Awareness
The installations produced from his research and scientific inquiry have been showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival in 2018 & 19, the Changwon Sculpture Biennale in 2020, Mumbai art room in 2019, and various other galleries/venues. They come together to examine hydrology, the life of water, enabling a collation of different vantages – paleontological, climatological, geo-political, biological, anthropological, and mythical, thus mapping interdependence.
He simultaneously created sets and headgear for the late Wendell Rodrick's collection at Lakme fashion week 2011, performed at a UNESCO site in Azerbaijan 2017, and created symbolic and educational light installations for real estate developers and government museums. Stories of the Himalayan glacial melt, climate change, and jellyfish blooms along with international cultural ties and fossil fuel were interwoven.
Whether it is through gesture, bodily performance, research, or practice, the essential truths that are tied to natural systems weave through the layers of different projects. Cornerstone compositions such as these are the signature of the artist’s underlying philosophy to synthesize poignant environmental commentary with experiential art.
At the Story of light festival 2015 and tahe Seesharp festival 2017, microplastics and detrimental urban lighting are addressed along with upcycling workshops based on circular economies were integrated with his studio practice.
The studio offers social and educative models where he works with the collaboration of a spectrum of human and non-human entities like architects, students, educators, musicians, builders, and crafters from urban to forest systems, to manifest the vision of sustainable futures lifestyle design.
With a scholarship to attend the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology 2007, along with graduation from NID 2008, Ahmedabad in industrial design, basic experience in companies like Godrej 2005 and LG electronics, and various other courses in aquaculture and permaculture, Waylon explored biomimicry inspired conceptions to advance water conservation, recycling, and usage.
The designer's syntrophic explorations intersect to develop long-term solutions in landscape architecture with farm to table and waste management models, aquascaping, biomimicry and bioremediation, and upcycling urban detritus into lighting, furniture, and architectural elements, which has been applied in his clients’ commercial & residential projects since 2009.
Solutions to contemporary landscapes
He works as a consultant examining a venture from holistic perspectives with various people and firms from specialized fields to create an integrated design from a structural, economic, aesthetic, cultural and ethical angle.
Using documentation as a tool, he often returns to drawing, photography and painting to express anthropological and contemporary environmental change.