Awaaz Stambh was the standout hackathon output from the Visual Communication department.
The project operates across 22 Indian languages and directly facilitates civic and public innovation. The scope is significant. India has 22 scheduled languages recognised under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, with hundreds more regional dialects and variants. Most civic infrastructure in the country operates in two or three languages at most. An application that can genuinely function across all 22 scheduled languages represents a fundamentally different approach to public-service design.
The design challenge at this scale is not translation. Translation is the simple part.
- Scripts differ radically across Devanagari, Dravidian scripts, Perso-Arabic script, and regional variants. A single interface cannot assume the same reading direction, character width, or line height across all of them.
- Typography choices that work in one script become illegible in another. Font pairing has to account for the tallest ascenders and the deepest descenders simultaneously.
- Iconography that reads as universal in north Indian languages often fails in south Indian ones, and vice versa.
- User flows that assume left-to-right reading cannot be applied uniformly to scripts that behave differently.
Solving for all of this simultaneously is the kind of design problem that professional civic-tech teams at major governments and NGOs grapple with over multi-year projects. That student designers at PID tackled it during a single hackathon, producing a working prototype recognised by the faculty as the hackathon’s standout output, is genuinely notable.
The Awaaz Stambh project maps directly onto the skills that the Communication Design programme builds across six semesters.
Read more: Communication Design at Parul Institute of Design
The Pet Care Community App: Design for the Between-Owners Gap
The second hackathon standout addressed a real but underserved problem. The gap between people who love animals but cannot keep pets full-time, and pet owners who need support networks.
The design brief identified the specific users on both sides.
- Young professionals in rented apartments where pet ownership is restricted.
- Elderly couples whose children have moved abroad and whose homes feel empty, but who cannot commit to a multi-year pet responsibility.
- Travel-heavy working adults who own pets and need reliable short-term care.
- Students who grew up with family pets and miss the daily animal presence in hostel life.
The app concept connects these users through a structured system. A pet owner needing a weekend dogsitter can match with a local pet-lover who would otherwise have no animal contact. A travelling professional can find a verified temporary caregiver. An elderly couple can arrange weekly visits with a local dog without committing to adoption.
“Designing this well is not a matter of building another marketplace app. It is a matter of designing for trust.”
Trust design has specific requirements. Identity verification that does not feel intrusive. Review systems that prevent gaming. Insurance and liability handling. Clear communication around expectations, medical emergencies, and schedule changes. The hackathon team worked through each of these during their sprint, producing a prototype that demonstrated awareness of the real operational complexity rather than just the visual interface.
This kind of project thinking is what distinguishes a product designer from an interface designer. The student team was doing product strategy under time pressure.
Read more: B.Design Product Design at Parul Institute of Design
Cigarette-Waste Circular Design: Turning Litter Into Raw Material
The third hackathon standout addressed one of the most widespread and least-discussed forms of urban litter in India.
Cigarette butts are a complex waste stream. The filters are made from cellulose acetate, a slow-degrading plastic. They contain residual tar and toxic chemicals. They are discarded in enormous quantities across Indian cities and accumulate in drains, water bodies, and public spaces. Municipal waste management systems rarely process them effectively.
The student hackathon project approached this problem as a circular design challenge rather than a waste management problem.
- Collection systems: point-of-disposal design that encourages proper disposal.
- Processing: techniques for separating cellulose acetate from organic contamination.
- Material transformation: converting the cleaned filter material into raw inputs for new products.
- Product outputs: exploring what could be made from the reclaimed material, from insulation to acoustic panels to textile components.
The output is not a finished product. It is a circular-design framework that demonstrates how designers can think about waste streams as unused raw material rather than as disposal problems. This is the same thinking that produces sustainability-focused startups, and it aligns with the broader Make in India and circular economy priorities that government and industry are increasingly investing in.
Read more: Design Business Exhibition At PID.
What These Three Projects Show About Design Education
Three hackathon projects that addressed civic, social, and environmental problems at this level of thoughtfulness do not happen by accident.
They require a curriculum that treats design as problem-solving rather than as decoration. They require faculty who push students toward real-world briefs. And they require an institutional culture that rewards social impact alongside aesthetic refinement.
The Parul Institute of Design achieves each of these through structural decisions.
- Curriculum that includes therapy centre, pediatric clinic, and reformation centre project typologies.
- Workshops like Button Masala with Anuj Sharma that connect students to sustainability-driven practitioners.
- Faculty like Professor Bhaskar Mitra whose AI-panel provocation pushed students to think about India as producer rather than consumer.
- Partnerships with visiting artisans like Manaben that root design thinking in traditional craft ecosystems.
The Awaaz Stambh, pet care app, and cigarette waste projects are products of this institutional structure. They are not one-off creative flashes. They are indicative of what the programme consistently produces.
Read more: VFDF 4.0 at Parul Institute of Design: complete festival guide
The Career Pathways These Projects Open Up
Students who develop the problem-first design habit during their degree enter the job market with a different profile than peers who have built only aesthetic portfolios.
The employer categories that explicitly value social-impact thinking are growing faster than the traditional design recruitment pipeline.
- Civic tech organisations working on government digital infrastructure, from Aadhaar adjacent systems to state-level citizen service platforms, need designers who can think multilingually and empathetically.
- Sustainability-focused design consultancies working with FMCG, packaging, and fashion brands on circular-economy transitions hire designers who have already practised circular thinking.
- Platform companies building for Indian user diversity, from payment systems to e-commerce to content platforms, need designers who understand regional and linguistic variation, not just urban metro English-speaking users.
- NGOs and foundations working on healthcare access, education, and rural development increasingly hire design talent rather than relying solely on subject-matter experts.
- Independent design practices focused on mission-driven work provide a route for founders who want autonomy, with PIERC available as incubation support for PID students pursuing this path.
The hackathon projects at PID operate as portfolio-building exercises that signal to these employer categories that a student already has the relevant thinking. A candidate who can speak to the Awaaz Stambh project in an interview has evidence of multilingual civic design thinking. A candidate who worked on the pet-care app has evidence of trust-design thinking. A candidate who built the cigarette-waste framework has evidence of circular-economy thinking.
Each of these becomes a portfolio anchor that opens doors standard placement preparation does not.
Read more: Exhibitions at Pid, Where 300+ Students Participated
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Awaaz Stambh at Parul Institute of Design?
Awaaz Stambh is a multilingual civic innovation project built during the VFDF 4.0 hackathon at PID. It operates across 22 Indian languages and is designed to facilitate civic and public engagement. It was recognised as a standout hackathon output from the Visual Communication department.
Do design students at PID work on real social problems?
Yes. The three hackathon projects covered in this article (Awaaz Stambh for multilingual civic innovation, the pet care community app, and cigarette-butt circular design) are evidence. The curriculum also includes real project typologies like therapy centres, pediatric clinics, and reformation centres for children during semesters four and five.
What is circular design in the context of the cigarette-waste project?
The circular design uses waste to make something usable. The project of the cigarette butt at the PID hackathon developed a framework that can collect the waste or discarded filters, process them and transform the cellulose acetate material. This supports the recycle, reuse, reduce principles.
How does the PID curriculum support design-for-social-impact thinking?
Through real project briefs that address specific user populations and social contexts, faculty with practice backgrounds in craft and sustainability, workshops by practitioners like Anuj Sharma and visiting artisan Manaben, and an institutional culture that rewards projects addressing real problems. The hackathon format gives students a compressed platform to apply these skills.
What career paths do these hackathon skills open up for design students?
Civic tech and government design projects. Sustainability-focused design consultancies. Product design at platform companies solving real user problems. Circular economy startups. Social impact design roles at NGOs and foundations. Independent design practice focused on mission-driven work. The skills also apply directly to commercial design roles, where user-centred problem-solving is increasingly the differentiator over visual skill alone.
