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Rise Design Art

Client

Rise Design Lab

Project Date

June-Dec 2018

Rise Design Lab makes high quality cost effective prosthetic legs from cane. Rise Design Art is a sustainable design practice combining specialized engineering and local craft that achieves zero wastage of the non-medical grade cane to create limited edition art.

Founded by Arun Cherian, whose training traverses Mechanical Engineering, Bio-inspired Robotics, Human Engineering developing Exo-skeletal suits at Columbia, Berkeley and Purdue. In India traditional cane furniture prevalent in South India seemed to him as flexible as well as strong. After mechanical testing the cane, he prototyped a pair of prosthetic legs for a 19 yr old boy who went on to train for the TCS 10K run. Rise Design Lab was born. Making high quality cost effective prosthetic legs, that is inherently light weight and flexible, costing a fraction of those in the market. Excelling at the Cybathalon in Zurich, Rise has ventured further to develop a ‘low resource specific digital fabrication technique’ able to digitally scan and fabricate a prosthetic leg in 1 hr in a highly quantitative manner. Now Rise is developing limited edition art pieces at Rise Design Art with the leftover cane from the Lab, supporting an artist, and using this revenue to subsidize the prosthetic legs.

Arun says, 'To me, this journey has been deeply personal and philosophical more than the technical and business challenges. I hope, artists and entrepreneurs, (though both need to be a bit of each other), will try to genuinely address challenges or issues around them by creatively using constraints around them, be it with resources, societal constructs and existing dynamics to holistically solve them. Together we can make a solve challenges around us and make life a little better.'

The Journey of Rise

In an intense engagement with Rise Design Lab for over 6 months, Artsforward developed and executed the complete branding, communication and outreach strategy of Rise Design Art. This was followed by preparing and executing the Inception Exhibit of Rise Design Art at the Bombay Art Society in December 2018.
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