By Sai Kelkar and Raksha Srivastava
Spatial Multiplicities is a competition entry, held by Toyota Logistics Design Group.
Research and Conclusion: Logistics is the movement of materials in the supply chain. The supply chain transforms raw materials into products and gets them to the customers. To study the existing working of logistics in a city, we took the example of how the supply chain works in Mumbai, India. Initially, we started by locating the warehouses, transports and people who deliver products to consumers. We started by documenting big warehouses, small warehouses and the modes of transport companies use to deliver products to the consumers.
Our study concluded with the following points:
- There is no defined flow to getting products to the consumers. The consumers staying away from the warehouses get late delivery of their orders.
- From the secondary research, we understood that among the population in India, nearly 60% of the people have access to the Internet, and the remaining 40% don’t have any access to the Internet. Hence the question arose, how can we offer people facilities other than apps to order a package?
- The vehicular transport used for the purpose of delivery is fixed. This increases road traffic.
- The packages used for delivery are rarely reused. What steps can we take to reuse the boxes?
Design Process: Our process began by understanding that public transport is the method by which people reach the farthest places. Since the cities are getting denser day by day, there is no space for developing more architecture spaces. Hence, the idea is to develop spaces as an extension to the existing public spaces. This also make it possible for the process of packaging to delivery closer to people's daily life, therefore making it more transparent. The developed spaces are designed to be modular, so that they can be increased or reduced according to the needs, and also make them multifunctional. These spaces are made multifunctional since they are a part of the public space and the space can be used for different purposes at different periods of the time in a day. The idea of multiplicity was also used in the case of vehicles, which are used to transport packages from one place to the other.
