Teaching is a political act. The classroom — its furniture, its light, its arrangement of bodies in space — encodes a set of assumptions about the relationship between knowledge and authority. A classroom of rows facing a blackboard says something fundamentally different about learning than a circle of chairs facing each other, or a workshop table around which children and teachers work side by side. The Museum of Grey Sunshine (MOGS) was an exhibition designed to make those assumptions visible — to show India’s educators, through spatial and experiential means, what a different kind of teaching environment might look and feel like.

MOGS was a collaborative project between the Museum of Solutions design team, led by Tanvi Jindal, and the Teach For India Foundation, led by Shaheen Mistri. Bricolage Bombay contributed the experiential design, spatial layout, exhibit design, and graphic design for the installation. The result was a travelling pop-up exhibition — first mounted at the American School in Bandra, then taken across India — that communicated the importance of ethical, collaborative, child-centred teaching practices through a series of immersive galleries.

Each gallery within MOGS presented a spatial argument. One showed the extreme: a recreation of India’s most overcrowded and under-resourced classroom environments, raw in their honesty about the conditions in which millions of Indian children learn. Another showed the possible: environments where furniture, light, materials, and spatial organisation actively support curiosity, collaboration, and the dignity of every child in the room. The contrast between these spaces was not illustrated — it was inhabited. Visitors physically moved through the difference, experiencing it in their bodies rather than absorbing it as text.

The exhibition’s graphic design, produced by Bricolage Bombay, was designed to be legible across wildly different educational and cultural contexts, using visual languages accessible to both urban educators in Mumbai and teachers in rural Rajasthan. MOGS toured successfully across multiple Indian cities, generating significant conversations about the built environments of Indian public education — a subject that rarely receives the design attention it deserves. For Bricolage Bombay, MOGS was proof that architecture and design can participate directly in social and political discourse.