This article looks at Conscious Collective 2025, a design-led festival by Godrej Design Lab that brings together craft, climate, and community under the theme 'Reclaiming Cool — Beating the Heat, Together.' Taking place from December 11–14, 2025, at the Godrej Enterprises Group Campus in Vikhroli, Mumbai, the festival combines installations, workshops, and discussions focused on heat-resilient design, material reuse, and equitable access to comfort.
Practicing sustainability today can be summed up to an urgent design brief:
How do we make objects, buildings and cities that repair rather than extract, keep people comfortable without overheating the planet, and that revive handcraft and local materials as part of climate resilience?
The conversation has shifted from abstract ethics to practical techniques — passive cooling, circular-material thinking, craft-based adaptations — and to a more political point: access to cool and comfort is a question of equity as much as engineering. These are the throughlines for a new wave of public programming that combines installations, hands-on workshops, marketplaces, and policy-facing conversations to translate ideas into lived, testable practices.
That is the frame for Conscious Collective, a design-led festival run by Godrej Design Lab that foregrounds craft, climate and community. Now in its third edition, the Collective sets this year’s theme as Reclaiming Cool — Beating the Heat, Together,' and stages a multi-day program of showcases, workshops and conversations aimed at heat-resilient design, inclusive urban comfort and material renewal.
Among the festival’s most striking offerings are showcases like 'Punah 3.0', which reframes waste through material regeneration, and 'Living with the Land / Reweaving the Ecosystem', which threads human comfort through food systems, landscapes and ecological interdependence. Parag Tandel’s twin culinary showcases — 'How To Cook Bombay Duck in Various Ways and Vitamin Sea' — extend that lens into coastal culture, linking climate shifts with long-standing relationships to the sea. The flavour-driven session 'Mahua Matters' expands this lens into forest ecologies, using tasting and storytelling to show how indigenous ingredients carry their own intelligence.
On the workshop front, hands-on sessions such as 'Bonding Over Brick, What’s the Lifecycle of Your Building?', and 'Weave a Mini Charpai' makes material intelligence tangible, turning bricks, natural fibres and everyday waste into tools for cooling and circularity. The conversations anchor these explorations with sessions like 'Designing for a Hotter Future', 'Is the Future of Comfort Collective?', and 'Cooling Cities, Rethinking Futures', each of which pushes the vocabulary of climate resilience beyond engineering into questions of access, equity, and shared infrastructure.
Across the programme, workshops and installations extend these themes through the languages of craft, climate science and speculative thinking. A cluster of dyeing, weaving and clay-based sessions foregrounds slow-making and natural materials as antidotes to extractive production, while food-and-flavour workshops explore resilience through indigenous ingredients and kitchen ecologies. Other hands-on experiences model circular design, turning textile waste, found objects and everyday tools into modest cooling interventions. The conversations widen the lens to consider indigenous building practices, landscape-led planning and community-driven infrastructural futures. Together, these events form a substantial layer of the festival: a set of practices that treat 'cooling' in the age of global warming as a shared, adaptive behaviour shaped by culture, craft and collective imagination.
By bringing architects, craftspeople, researchers, children, cooks, ecologists and neighbourhood communities into the same space, the initiative reframes sustainability as something lived, shared and continuously experimented with. Rather than treating climate resilience as an abstract policy goal, the festival insists on its everydayness — the materials we touch, the food we prepare, and the choices we make.
Conscious Collective will be held from December 11–14, 2025, at the Godrej Enterprises Group Campus in Pirojsha Nagar, Vikhroli, Mumbai.
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