AT A GLANCE
Siddhi Gupta
Area of Practice: Design Research, Visual Communication, Creative Education, Writing and Design for Access.
OVERVIEW
Siddhi works at the intersection of visual communication, craft and education. Situated in formal and informal learning spaces, she looks at communication design as a tool for creating awareness, facilitating conversation and nudging engagement. This manifests itself as worksheets, lesson plans, animations, games, installations, workshops, campaigns, information design, presentations and publications. Fuelled by the love to tell stories, Siddhi’s work is committed to education. She believes that education today happens as much in classrooms as it happens on social media and at the metro station. Her work activates these places and channels to create access to information and increase stakeholder participation. A trained dancer, amateur gardener and experimental cook, Siddhi visits Delhi to be with her dog, Sufi, every chance she gets.
EDUCATION
MA in Visual Communication, Royal College of Arts, London, B.Des in Communication Design, NIFT, Delhi
WORK EXPERIENCE
Partner, Design and Communication Lead at Justice Adda
Design Director, Femlab
Senior Project Scientist, Department of Design, IIT Delhi
Visual Arts Expert, Nalandaway Foundation
Games for Change Fellow, UNESCO MGIEP
Design Consultant, Asian Heritage Foundation
Design Intern, Dastkar – Society of Crafts & Craftspeople
Trainee – Maya Digital Studios
Co-Anchor of the working group on Crafts Education, Creative Dignity
Volunteer in the Learnings Team, V&A Museum
Volunteer, House of Illustration
Delivered courses at NID Ahmedabad, RCA, University of Creative Arts (UK), Mirambika
INTEREST AREAS
Siddhi has previously written about art and design education for various publications which include the Journal of Illustration, Teachers Plus and NSEAD’s monthly magazine AD. She has also presented this in classrooms and at confereneces internationally. She looks at art education from the lens of a communication designer and writes about what it means for a practitioner to participate and collaborate in this space. This research recaliberates how we look at crafts and folk art and makes a case for looking at craftspeople as knowledge holders beyond creative practitioners. Siddhi is also interested in storytelling as a research area and has written about it as an approach for collboartion and as a tool for evoking empathy. Education and learning are key themes and her latest publications look at education paradigms pre and post covid, and how digital creativity is learnt by Gen Z in India. She is currently nurturing her interest in how the digital is imagined by different creative practitioners.
CURRENT PRACTICE AT SRISHTI
Siddhi currently teaches in the Visual Communication and Creative Education spaces at SMI, which overlap for her in many ways. Her courses are anchored in storytelling and user experience with a focus on context specificity. Introducing relevant local and global contemporary practices is an important part of her offered courses. Like her own creative practice, her courses encourage community engagement, which often means working outside the classroom. The courses facilitate intensive mapping, making and researching individually and collaboratively and are forgrounded in exploration and experimentation.
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Textbook Workbook Playbook: 7th Semester Pre Thesis Project for VCSB
This pre-thesis project responded to the need for a textbook of the Visual Arts program offered by Delhi Government’s Dr. B R Ambedkar Schools of Specialized Excellence (SoSE) for Performing and Visual Arts. The Grade IX and X learner became the user and the traditional learning environment the ecosystem for the project. Immersing and mapping the needs and roles played by the different stakeholders-government, school, teacher, student, family, community, art world-the project set out to create physical object that facilitates curriculum delivery. There are deviations, stories, activities, prompts, references, and above all visuals that hope to create a usable textbook, workbook, playbook for visual arts education. -
Barter Party: Illustration 2nd Year GADP (Illustration)
Through a unique barter system the illustration students of BVoc captured the journeys of commuters at the Cubbon Metro Station, offering their sketches as currency in exchange for drawings by the commuters. These drawings activated a unique map of the metro station that stretched to include the contours of Bangalore. Each drawing on the map was created by the commuters who got a drawing in exchange by the students. -
Creative Intelligence and Imaginaries: Workshop for BVocThis workshop built on our understanding of infrastructures around creativity such as copyright, commons, bias, originality and so on. Through regular debates and action research students got a glimpse into power dynamics around ‘Creativity’ as they exist today.
CREATIVE PRACTICE & OUTREACH
As a communication design student in her undergrad and masters, Siddhi’s thesis was situated in the K12 art education landscape, working with curriculum design, teacher training, and developing tools for facilitation. Over the years, this inquiry has led to collaborations and conversations with over 500 school teachers across India. But, the scope of education is much broader for Siddhi that goes beyond the classroom. She has translated existing curriculum into web based platforms and audio visual material, created strategies for making academic research accessible for new audiences and developed workshops and experiences to ensure stakeholder participation. As an avid note-taker, she has taken sketchnotes for a number of conferences and events internationally. She sees this as an exercise in education too, as it makes knowledge visible and creates a new medium for people to engage with at the event. Siddhi is currently Partner and Design and Communications Lead at JusticeAdda, which is a legal design consultancy that exists to make law more accessible. In their recent projects, they have created a legal studies toolkit that highlights how we interact with the law in our day to day and a web based based platform that demystifies AI. She is also the Design Director at Femlab, which is a researcher activist cooperative that takes a worker-centered and feminist approach in the design and deployment of new media tools to align the future of work with human dignity, creativity, and pleasure. Her key contribution at Femlab involves developing contextual and innovative methods and tools to conduct ethnographic research. Beyond this, she also takes the lead on developing audience facing communications, such as the website, campaigns, etc. Her recent work here develops innovative methods to diversify the Creative Commons and looks at mapping as a tool for making knowledge visible.
