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Team India Art n Design (dot) com strives to present select gems from the vast fabric of design - with the sole aim to inspire, impact and trigger that elusive quality of breaking new ground! We bring you a recap of our most popular stories that have left a trail of comments and discussions; garnered compliments and generally endorsed the impact of design in 2016! Get your share of inspiration here...

In what may feel like a flashback to the porn wars of the '60s, a new study investigates the link between a country's relative gender equality and the degree of female "empowerment" in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and (yikes) 54th on the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women "from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation." Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is "bound and dominated" by "leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs" or "whether she has a natural looking body." Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of "empowered women" and less of "disempowered women." It turned out the former was true, but, contradictory as it may sound, the latter was not. "While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types -- conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman -- there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women," the researchers explain. In other words, Norwegian porn showed more signs of female empowerment, but X-rated images in all three countries equally depicted women in demeaning positions and scenarios. This, the researchers surmise, "suggests that empowerment and disempowerment within pornography are potentially different constructs." So, gender equality is accompanied by sexual interest in a broader range of beauty types but not a decrease in porn's infantilization of females, use of dominating fetish gear on women or any of the other characteristics th

Creative Group weaves a sustainable narrative with the Gems International School at Kochi, pronounced with fluid spaces, carved volumes, percolating environs and panoramic views to the riverfront. Check it out here

Evoking whimsy, wistfulness and enchantment, La Rotonde by Studio MHNA is a great little chimeric gem of a restaurant tucked along the Mediterranean in Nice, France.

Who says small spaces can't make big impacts? Designer #MamoruMaeda of #SEMBA, Vietnam activates Ho Chi Minh City's bustling downtown area with this 3.7 sq. m. gem!

Jewellery designer Meet Kamdar Avlani's latest creation - Gaea - is a Zambian Emerald Pear Cabochon ring inspired from Vedic scriptures on cosmology. The designer is known for weaving interesting corollaries into jewels extraordinaire for style-conscious divas.