The Bamboo project focussed on finding ways to demonstrate bamboo’s versatility and strengths, improve the employment prospects and living standards of bamboo craftsmen. It was meant to demonstrate the versatility of bamboo as a material for building construction and making furniture: for its low cost, easy workability, strength, durability, aesthetics potential and sustainability. The design challenge was to show that a low cost product, be that a small house or furniture set, need not be poor in design and aesthetic quality. The occasion was also to study and understand the life, livelihood, work and struggle of poor tribal bamboo artisan community and think of ways to upgrade their skills, tools, quality of work and productivity. The additional objective was to find ways to replicate the house designs, made through the project, through the on-going public housing projects such as Indira Awas Yojana with a view to create employment prospects for some of the bamboo artisans and, even more importantly, demonstrate well designed bamboo houses on a big enough scale. Bamboo deserves mainstreaming. The scaling up potential and marketability of the furniture sets were also a consideration in the project design.

The other aspects of the project included documenting bamboo work tradition and practises in other regions of the country, involvement of the student community, organizing a regional workshop to bring together professional practitioners and traditional artisans to share information, ideas, knowledge, tools and technology and production of a process film on the project. Improving skills, where and if possible, and creating access to knowledge and technology to the traditional bamboo artisans, mostly poor and fast alienating from the old skill sets on bamboo and giving a new respectability to the versatile yet much neglected and ignored material through creative designs, were the main objectives of the project.