NCA students showcase innovative ceramics

LAHORE

Students at Department of Ceramics Design, NCA combined inventive design, innovation and earthen material engineering to create aesthetically gratifying yet commercially compelling projects for the 2016 Annual Thesis Exhibition. 

Instead of getting carried away with absolute artistry, the final year students identified real-life problems that concerned a significant number of common Pakistanis. “Any good design solution should work equally well for most people around the globe living in economic, social and environmental conditions that are similar to ours, but the students are encouraged to address issues that concern the very community they live in”, said Head of the Department of Ceramics Design, NCA, Ms Shazia Mirza.

Sania Naveed’s project “Ossifi” where at one end gave a new dimension to production of paver tiles by effectively using otherwise waste material; on the other hand, it provided energy conservation for an industry suffering at the hands of energy outage and depleting resources. The final product of research project is a paver, fabricated out of an admixture product containing a certain proportion of cement, and fine crushed aggregate of various available industrial ceramics waste obtained by crushing the waste to a grain size of ASTM number 14 sieve mesh. This admixture is fabricated into present invention called Ossifi, which has a proven strength of 3,794 PSI.

In addition to popular understanding of the term “Design” as an area of practice dealing with visual aesthetics, our students have pushed the boundaries of the field of ceramics by responding to some existing problems. As a result, three of our students, including Sania, have filed provisional patent applications to legally secure their innovative ceramic products, told Ms Shazia.

Syed Ali Rehan Rizvi was another student whose product can provide the construction industry with an acoustics solution embedded in the construction material itself. There is a need to control echoes and sound reverberations inside auditorium, lecture theatre and even domestic spaces. Unfortunately, the very few design solutions that are available to us in Pakistan offer insufficient if not incorrect remedy. Instead of reducing reverberations without losing the quality of sound, these solutions absorb sound. My project ACCTS (Acoustic Control Ceramic Tile Solutions) offers a permanent acoustic solution in the form of terracotta wall cladding and construction brick whose surfaces are designed to diffuse unwanted sound reverberations inside an architectural space.

Designing and creating a musical instrument is a physically and psychological challenge of the extreme sort. Kulsoom Mehmood, took up this challenge of creating an improved version of a local but now obsolete musical woodwind instrument called Surna. “Neo-Surna” offers increased number of complete and half notes for a richer musical expression, and is designed to provide ease of use for local musicians who are used to woodwind blow instruments having a linear notation system. Neo-Surna has a slightly different timber than original one because the fabrication method is different. Traditional Surna had a simpler mouthpiece that needed complex adjustment during blowing and only very skilled musicians could play it successfully. The mouthpiece in the present invention allows more standardised control; so a musician of medium skill-level can also use it successfully. The form of the present invention is larger and more ergonomically sound than traditional Surna.

Considering the dearth of natural gas in the country and the resulting deforestation for fuel purposes in rural forest areas, reducing the tree chopping is a real problem. 

Yamna Baig, who hails from an area faced by this problem designed a fuel efficient stove, which not only reduces firewood consumption substantially but employs local/ easily available resources to build this stove. 

In her project, Ishe designed fuel-efficient terracotta wood-stove for rural areas of Punjab, in a way that it ensures full combustion of already precious fossil fuel.