ShramA Q:
A Weekly Learning Challenge

Introducing ShramA Q!

The ShramA Q is designed to strengthen and amplify your knowledge of construction, building materials, and techniques through engaging, practical learning. As you learn and test yourself, your participation also contributes to the ShramA Impact Fund, turning your knowledge into action and creating impact for construction workers.

Open to students, faculty, and participants from architecture, design, civil engineering, and all other disciplines across colleges and institutions.

Individual participation — each participant must register and take the quiz independently.

🏆 Win weekly recognition, digital badges and certificates, with exciting vouchers for overall top scorers!

📅 The first quiz launches on 9 October 2026.

Stay tuned!

Participatory Feedback

What can a design process reveal when it looks beyond drawings, briefs and site boundaries?

What happens when architects engage not only with the people who commission or design a project, but also with those who live, work, move through, care for, maintain and make meaning within its context?

These questions shaped Ethos Foundation’s Participatory Design Feedback Sessions, conducted as part of our Mainstreaming Responsible Design initiative. Across five sessions in five different locations, we worked with architectural practices, communities, students, faculty, volunteers and allied stakeholders to explore how participation can become part of an ongoing design process rather than a consultation added after the major decisions have already been made.

The five sessions brought us into very different settings: a children’s home in Siruganur, a community centre in Kundalampatti, a social well-being centre in Anekal, an integrated plotted township in Hisar, and a proposed Glass Museum in Firozabad. The collaborating practices were HnP Architects, MAWI Design, Da India, Aura Architecture and Node Urban Lab.

The projects differed in scale, purpose, geography and stage of development. This was central to the exercise. We were not looking to apply one universal method across all five contexts. Instead, we wanted to understand how participatory processes could be shaped around the questions, people and conditions of each project.

The sessions were not designed to produce instant design solutions or establish a single model of participation. They were intended to create spaces for listening, observation, mapping, conversation and reflection, and to examine what these forms of engagement might add to architectural practice.

Arcause Writers Collective

Architecture does not end when a building is completed. It continues in documentation, discourse, critique, translation, and public engagement.

The Arcause Writers Collective (AWC) is an initiative under the Ethos Foundation that seeks to build a sustained culture of architectural writing rooted in research, responsibility, and real-world narratives.

In an era where architecture is often reduced to imagery and surface-level appreciation, the Writers Collective attempts to re-centre writing as a critical tool, one that documents labour, material realities, sustainability, regional knowledge systems, accessibility, and the lived experiences embedded within built environments.