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PARTICIPATION
inputs are all the more imperative. The lack of an evolved institutional and financial mechanism to support cross disciplinary partnership and co-development of technologies is finally one of the more crucial challenges to the development of appropriate design and production tools for the changing rural sector and connected environments.
CONCLUSION Notwithstanding the above mentioned challenges in negotiating prevailing winds of change in these remote Himalayan regions, the larger cause of sustainable development and connected explorations towards the same needs to be the driving force for any such endeavor. The participatory framework outlined in the above experiment moves beyond the customary stake-holder engagement that most state driven missions for development have mandatorily requisitioned. The need for an evolving, sustained program of participatory engagement at varying levels of dialogue and partnership is imperative for a socially driven agenda of developmental change. In the case of this program, the creative design and research team has been oscillating between the community and the state allowing for a mediatory, facilitating role to be nurtured through a steady building up of a mutually inclusive relationship across both community and state actors. For the community, at the threshold of taking new decisions related to their aspirations and choices of shaping their built environment, the idea of a technical group discussing and associating themselves through knowledge exchange and co-design of their present and future habitat needs, holds relief and promise specially when the possibility of such an interface is seldom attainable in these remote regions. Through sharing of problems and prospects confronted by the community as well as through formal and informal exchanges related to the same, a mutualism of collective enterprise and contribution is built. Community expectations from the HARP team and the program has traversed through looking for specific design and construction advice to their new problems of tourism building types, structural inputs especially for RCC construction, building facades, retrofitting wet spaces and toilets and internal spatial modifications of houses to tourist home-stays. But more importantly, successive interactions have started orienting the collective architectural discourse towards issues apart from solutions, applied knowledge apart from new information, methods apart from products. The dialogue around architectural production commensurate with local needs and larger concerns, rather than the material production of architecture alone is a strong facet of the program taking shape gradually. The intersection of practice-research-pedagogy that this experiment pursues suggests a move away from the existing, water-tight, knowledge sector domains that we are familiar with. To begin with, the understanding of developmental processes in our societies is by itself a critical pre-requisite, challenging in the process, some of the conventional modes of interpreting or, even by-passing our societal realities. Field based empirical research leading to greater unearthing of prevailing processes of architectural production feeds into the development of a pedagogic and disciplinary approach of addressing issues inherent therein. Far from the design studio, the student (as also the researcher/ practitioner/teacher) grows with the program as it unfolds its layered characteristics of developmental change. While the formal curriculum trains them to address varying complexities of individual design tasks delineated by the studio tutor, the student here becomes the initiator of design dialogue related to necessary architectural production. His ways of seeing the issues of built environment through direct contact and connected interactions with the community allows him to construct a role for himself and delineate his contribution for the community and its future. He becomes the citizen designer. If community capacities are to be strengthened in the shaping of their own habitats,