The winter school at CEPT University- Living with the highlanders: Lepchas of Sikkim is a travel based program which aims at recording the place called Dzongu, the heartland of the Lepchas. The students were exposed to the life and daily routine of the people living in the high mountains and asked to identify "design systems". The general idea of "architectural documentation" is challenged and participants were forced to look at life. The exercises were broken down into segmented ideas of micro systems and to and forth relation to the larger picture of the design system, which is a house. The students were encouraged to look at micro systems like agriculture, food habits, notion of belonging and folk tales and mythology.
The students visited many settlements in Dzongu, to identify, relate and record these micro systems. Once recorded the students were asked to go back to the original idea of the house form to make a relation from the intangibles to the tangible.
The winter school concluded with a Zine which we printed and distributed among local people in the region.
