AT A GLANCE
Vineeta Rath
Area of Practice:
Deep Experience Design & Experimental Pedagogy
OVERVIEW
My core commitment is to seed today’s young minds with thoughtful questions and empower them with critical, meaningful tools to imagine worlds that nurture a richer co-evolution of us humans, as an integral, symbiotic, and even valuable part of this rotating blue dot!
As a design educator, facilitator, and researcher, my pedagogical practice focuses on bringing a somaesthetic sensibility into the design classroom. Through pedagogic interventions, I work to cultivate an awareness of bodily sensations, movements, and feelings within young practitioners of art, design, and technology, to enable them to create more meaningful experiences, services, and products. I do this through ‘SomaSense’, a TransDisciplinary Research Space that I bring to SMI, and through leading the Post Graduate Master of Arts in Experience Design Program, drawing from phenomenological approaches to support a deeper, more embodied learning in experience design.
My broader professional journey and practice earlier have been an incessant exploration of people and their complex, dynamic relationships with the world around them: people and spaces as an architect, people and objects as an industrial designer, people and interfaces as a usability analyst, and people and matters of interactions, interactivity, and lived experiences as a user experience designer and design strategist.
And now, over the last 7+ years as a design educator and learning facilitator, I have been engaging in the deeply exciting space of pedagogy where I, alongside my students, actively study, question, and collectively speculate on how to more consciously understand and craft for experiences toward more wholesome and humane futures.
EDUCATION
- Certified Usability Analyst, Human Factors International, 2014 – Monsoon Course on HCI 2012, IDC, IIT Bombay, 2012
- Master in Design in Industrial Design, IDC, IIT Bombay, 2009-2011
- Bachelor in Architecture, CET Bhubaneswar, 2003 – 2008
WORK EXPERIENCE
- Head of Studies (MA in Experience Design), Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology – July 2018 – Present
- Course Leader, User Interface and Interaction Engineering (BVoc) – Jul 2018 – Jul 2019
- Full-time Faculty Member, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology – July 2017 – Present
- Design Consultant, BRND Studio, Colaba, Mumbai, India – May 2017 – Jul 2017
- Lead UX Strategist, Dhobistation, Navi Mumbai, India – Dec 2016 – May 2017
- Senior Human Factors Specialist, Human Factors International, Johannesburg, South Africa and Mumbai, India – Jul 2014 – Dec 2016
- Design Associate, D’Source India, IDC, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India – Aug 2011 – Jul 2014
- Design Intern, Samsung Art & Design Institute, Seoul, South Korea – Jul 2010 – Aug 2010
- Design Intern, 3M India Limited, Innovation Center, Electronics City, Bangalore, India – May 2010 to Jun 2010
- Design Collaborator, IDC IITB + Samsung, IDC, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India – Dec 2009 – Feb 2010
- Project Associate, VISION 2030, Dept. of Architecture and Regional Planning, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India – Aug 2008 – May 2009
- Freelance Architect, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India – Jun 2005 – Jul 2008
- Trainee Architect, Architects’ Collective, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India – Jun 2007 – Dec 2007
INTEREST AREAS
As a philomath engaged in transdisciplinary, practice-based research, I draw on a wide range of fields to inform my work. These include Somaesthetics, Deep Experience Design, Interaction Design, Collective Speculative Design, Pedagogical Design, Embodied Mathematics, Psychology, and Studies on the Nature of Ideas and Evolution, among others. This diverse foundation supports a more interconnected and holistic approach, allowing me to integrate insights from various disciplines, enriching my research and teaching practice.
CURRENT PRACTICE AT SRISHTI
Bringing a somaesthetic sensibility into the design classroom through experimental pedagogic design.
TEACHING PORTFOLIO
- Human-Material (Re)Configurations: Unpacking Interactions and Experiences (PG-EX): What is the material of an experience? How does it manifest through everyday human-object and human-system interactions and the (re)configurations that occur in these interactive relationships? How do we begin to engage with and articulate the complexities of physically embodied, socially situated experiences for the experiencer in context, and go beyond the commodified notions of a ‘user’ with ‘behaviours’? How do we design for interactivity that is meaningfully informed by research and design practices beyond the conventional approaches that seem to remain trapped within the mind-body dichotomies of a Western, Cartesian reasoning? In this studio, we zoom-in to investigate, through ethnographic research approaches, research-through-design, participatory research, etc. what makes for an authentic holistic experience, as well as critically and speculative make to understand what makes for an interaction to be pliable, desirable, pleasurable, or engaging within a context. The focus is to learn how to iteratively envision and shape material interactions for fostering meaningful experiences.
- SomaSense – A TransDisciplinary Research Space (PG – Open for students enrolled in both MA and MDes Programs)
SomaSense is an exploration space envisioned to bring together individuals who are unafraid to ask uncomfortable and honest questions about how we live, operate, imagine, experience, and define ourselves as ‘humans’. Our starting point has been the sentient and purposive human body – the ‘soma’, and how this soma in many ways defines how we perceive, engage with, modify, or even craft, ground up, the environments that are around us. We want to critically ponder on the aspects of human experience that may go amiss when we
inadvertently forget to acknowledge the very existence, or needs of this soma, this ‘tool of tools’ that we inhabit.
Therefore, at SomaSense, we go both inwards and outwards in order to inform our designerly and artistic practices. Inwards, to re-connect with our own individual somas through activities that may encourage body consciousness, and outwards, to recognise the intricacies and complexities of our varied soma-based relationships in the world. - Some other courses I teach:
- Design Research (MA EX; UGPP – HCD)
- Interaction Design in Practice (MA EX)
- Facilitating Collective Speculations (UGPP – HCD)
- Sketching Interactions (UGPP – HCD)
- Fundamentals of HCD (UGPP – HCD)
CREATIVE PRACTICE & OUTREACH
- Exploring creative learning facilitation approaches that encourage genuine curiosity, and deeper understanding, and sense-making.
