Two Speeds of Bengaluru

The metaphor

A city associated with rapid computation, whose physical connections keep choking.

The brief in Metaphor (is Beautiful) was to begin with a metaphor and expand it into a story. I chose the contrast between Bengaluru’s image as the Silicon Valley of India and the experience of moving through its roads. A circuit board could hold those two speeds together.

The moodboard brought together circuit boards, components, dense networks and thermal imagery. Traces suggested roads, chips suggested neighbourhoods, and heat offered a way to show pressure building at junctions.

Tracing the city

Building the map, one layer at a time.

I worked over a map of Bengaluru, adding roads and marking junctions, then connecting the ring roads, then identifying neighbourhoods. The lines accumulated before I began simplifying them into a circuit.

The schematic

From geography to schematic.

With the connections in place, I reduced the street map to nodes and paths. Neighbourhoods became blocks, junctions became connection points, and the roads straightened into circuit-like traces around Majestic.

What didn’t work

A failed attempt in KiCad.

I tried building the schematic as a real circuit-board layout in KiCad. The attempt failed, leaving an unfinished layout and a 3D preview warning about a malformed board outline. The metaphor moved on screen instead.

On screen

4.4GHz vs 4.4 km/h.

The first draft is a board you can move around. Named roads and junctions sit where they would on a component layout, with Majestic as the central chip, and a single switch moves the whole map between silicon and traffic load.

Heat Vision

A thermal scan of the junctions.

Heat Vision dims the board and turns the cursor into a lens, as if testing a circuit for hot spots. Moving it along the roads reveals the load beneath, with a coordinate readout beside it.

It is a concept prototype, not a live traffic feed.

The project

The metaphor continues on screen.

Pan across the board and scan the junctions.