New Club on Campus – Decore

Among the few positive by-products of quarantine and boredom, was the new club – Decore. We recently talked to one of the Decore heads to find out how the club came to be and much more. 

IIIT has several design teams on campus, but Decore felt that there was still more to explore in digital design. So the club was formed to explore the lesser-known digital design fields and maybe explore non-digital areas later on. They seem to be reasonably successful at that. The club tries to introduce as many new topics as they can during each of their meets. At the same time, they keep in mind that most participants are beginners and try not to overwhelm them with advanced stuff. The activities or concepts are introduced at a fundamental level, not to make the participants feel left out. Recently, the club held an ‘Intro to SPARK AR’ event. The meet aimed to teach the participants to make their own Instagram filters, with no prerequisite skills. It was one of the more successful events hosted by Decore and quite a large scale at that.

Decore has several members today and events that have a good turnout. Initially, it wasn’t easy to get maximum audience outreach. With five UG2 people as founders, reaching out to the other senior batches was quite tricky in itself without the online semester adding to it. It took a full month of hard work, continuously reaching out to anyone and everyone and holding recruitments to bring Decore to where it is today in the college. UG1 was most enthusiastic in all aspects like events and club recruitments. However, the other UG and PG batches are also involved in club activities.

While considering Decore and its success, it would be inappropriate not to mention ‘Shadows of Cipher,’ which was an online event based on steganography basics using photoshop skills. Any prior skill needed was taught before the event.

Considering every club activity has been online till now, it would be interesting to know if they could manage offline.

According to the coordinators, they are confident. They plan to move to more physical forms of design, something unheard of in IIIT, focusing on ideas like costume design/fashion and location recreation/interior designing to help them achieve so. Apart from this, the club has many fun events to look forward to in the future; Freshers’ Intro video 2020, a week-long social media contest, short film contest, VFX tricks and club recruitment for the newly arrived half of UG1, to name a few. A design fest/design weekend, as an annual event of the club, might also be on the cards.

The emergence of new clubs helps the college culture evolve and, at the same time, introduce people to interests that they didn’t even know they had. The emergence of a club amid lockdown is a promising indication of changing tides in the college and that people are more open to pursuing new interests. Decore has put up constant work in the past few months, and it serves as a perfect testament to the fact that they are indeed a club keen on revitalizing the design culture on campus. Also, if the last months have been any indication, it is no doubt that Decore would soon be one of the most exciting clubs on campus.