Concept / Art Direction / Graphic Design / Illustration 

Client: Taxi Fabric, Mumbai + See Now Organisation

Taxi Fabric is a platform that gives artists and designers a new canvas to express themselves in a way that not only transforms Mumbai’s taxis into moving art, but also enhances the travel experience for taxi drivers and thousands of locals.

Taxi Fabric was approached by Purpose - See Now, an organization that works to spread awareness around avoidable blindness and make access to quality eyecare a universal reality.

The aim was do a collaborative Taxi to help spread the message that 4 out of 5 individuals who are blind can be cured entirely by corrective surgery.

When the Taxi Fabric Team reached out and explained the brief, I was just as shocked as everyone else, with the knowledge that people could be cured and weren’t aware of it.

I thought it would be great if I could come up with an approach that included the visually impaired so that we could learn from the process and have a better understanding of their experience while attempting to create awareness through this collaboration.

I conducted a workshop with about 10-12 visually impaired children. We gave them drawing stationery, art supplies and a word each. Each of them had to paint that word on paper. Considering their visual impairment, most of their representations of those words were essentially abstract looking paint splotches.

The next step in this process was to take over from the children. I took those abstract painted splotches and drew over the kids’ representations of the words, to create more recognisable and realistic forms of those words.

In doing this exercise my aim was to show the impairment before surgery through their painted splotches, and the drawings that I did over their splotches were symbolic of the improvement in vision that corrective surgery can bring about.

To visually represent the message that every 4 out of 5 visually impaired children could have their sight restored, I placed one paint splotch alongside 4 more of the same splotches with 4 variations of line drawings of each corresponding word.

This collaborative effort sparked a great deal of conversation around avoidable blindness and got a huge response online, with almost 3 million views on the video itself.

This project was a life changing experience and I’m grateful for having been given the opportunity to be part of this process.