futures
Kokum is a small, sour, cooling fruit from India's west coast. Despite its medicinal and nutritional significance, it remains largely absent from global supermarket aisles — rarely appearing by name, seldom cultivated at export scale. In Konkan homes, though, it lives vividly: dried rinds tucked into steel dabbas, sherbet glasses sweating on tiled ledges, children warned not to spill its stains on white uniforms.
On shelves and menus it dissolves into "red drink," generic "kokum flavour," or the broader visual language of sourness, where cranberry and hibiscus stand in for it. The fruit is present, but its name, origin, labour, and seasonality remain invisible.
Fruit Futures steps into that gap. It treats kokum as a campaign client and my grandmother's house in Goa as a memory container and campaign architecture — asking what it would mean to design attention around the fruit itself
On shelves and menus it dissolves into "red drink," generic "kokum flavour," or the broader visual language of sourness, where cranberry and hibiscus stand in for it. The fruit is present, but its name, origin, labour, and seasonality remain invisible.
Fruit Futures steps into that gap. It treats kokum as a campaign client and my grandmother's house in Goa as a memory container and campaign architecture — asking what it would mean to design attention around the fruit itself
“Kokum is intimate and specific inside houses like my grandmother's, yet almost anonymous and interchangeable in commercial circulation.”
“The whole project follows the six stages of making kokum sherbet. Each stage is both a method and a chapter”
“Rather than a product line, the project imagines five linked futures for kokum, each anchored in a different room of my grandmother's house in Goa, India”
films
method
The argument, at its broadest: campaign tools can be redirected from selling toward re-attuning. The same visual apparatus that usually launches products can instead help viewers notice the ingredients, ecologies, and histories already around them.
Kokum is one fruit in one region — but the method suggests a wider possibility for design: not only to package futures, but to slow down how they are imagined.