• PhD in Interaction Design
• Master in Design in Industrial Design,
• Bachelors in Architecture

• Participatory Design
• Community led Design
• Human Centered Design
• Collective Speculative Design
• Histories & Futures of Society & Technology
• Community health & wellbeing
• Health Informatics
• Digital Health
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design Research

At SMI, I teach across Undergraduate Technical, Undergraduate Professional, Postgraduate and PhD programs. I focus on enabling the learners to situate their creative-critical explorations within the specific and broader socio-cultural and material, historic and emerging contexts shaped by digital technology.

• Insights to Concepts (UGPP – HCD): Design, despite best intentions brings about harms, typically termed, and dismissed as unintended consequences of design. But as Nassim Parvin and Anne Pollock argue, these harms are not unintended, but unanticipated. It is the lack of anticipation by the designers of consequences that brings about these harms irrespective of the intentions; everybody wants to do good. How does one go about anticipating potential implications of consequences of one’s idea very early in the design process? Often when there is not enough data to make decisions, and one does not want to slow down the creative process in the name of a “bias to action”. How can one bring in the critique of an idea, and yet be generative in developing the details and contours of its possibilities? How can critique be the means to anticipate harms, much before an idea takes shape materially? In this studio, we will explore how to weave tightly the critical and the creative in early design process. We will do this through engaging with one of the many possible enabling structures, drawing from Speculative & Critical design methods.
• Experimenting with Interactivity (UGPP – HCD): Interactivity is the quality of an interaction that is reciprocal and responsive. Exploring interactivity of Human-computational relationship is the focus. Taking an experimentative approach, the studio will facilitating learning through tinkering of computational materials – sensors, code, etc., to understand the expected and unexpected action-feedback-response loops between humans and computation.
•  Seeking Begumpura: Learning from Utopian Actions in the Here & Now. (UGPP-General Studies). In this unit, we will collectively read, engage with and compile a working repository of both historic and current utopian actions in the here and now, located within the Indian subcontinent. We will together annotate the repository with our observations, questions, curiosities, and connections. The hope is that such a working repository will enable us and others to rethink and reimagine what it means to speculate as designers. As we do this, we will also learn to work with tools and workflows of reading, referencing and annotating, notably, Zotero, Notero, and Notion, and Hypothesis.
•  Histories of Human & Digital (PG-Seminar): The goal of the seminar- studio is to: Understand how specific digital technological imaginations have evolved with and in the Indian political geography through mapping specific histories of digital technological artifacts, processes and practices.The mapping will focus on unpacking the specific social, economic, political, and cultural contexts within which specific digital technological artifacts, processes and practices were imagined, as well as the assumptions such imaginations render about human ‘users’ or otherwise. What sort of humanness the designers imagined when imagining the artifact?
• Research Methodology – Practice Based Research (PhD Core Course): Artifacts have politics. So do the practices of shaping artifacts. They hold knowledges of multiple forms and values; their validity and value under constant discourse and debate. Practice based research has evolved as an established discipline where the practices of making things—in any form—become the central mode of knowledge production. In this course we will together explore what does it mean to engage in a practice based research, and see if and how we can imagine our individual research as practice based.

I am a member of Aruvu Collaboratory, a collective of collectives, enabling me to be part of a larger community of practitioners working with grassroots collectives and organisations to enable place-based community-led research. My recent and ongoing work explores community owned alternative infrastructures for localized, distributed and participatory design for community care and well-being in the form of the Channapatna Health Library, funded by the Association of Progressive Communication, International Telecommunication Union, Google Research and the Numun Fund.