Background
I am an Industrial designer and Postdoctoral Researcher with wide ranging interests from futures, sustainability, technology, ecology, politics and culture. I enjoy exploring the intersections of designing for long-term sustainability and seriously playing with radically hopeful futures just because one can. Of course in the context of climate breakdown it is also pertinent that Design as a discipline and designers pursue a transformative praxis and articulate the necessary response to the catastrophic climate dystopias of the everyday now that is unfolding upon the majority world. To this end, my research focus applies a systematic, generative, Research by/through Design inquiry exploring alternative, concrete utopias articulated through Speculative Industrial Design propositions, by the making and fabricated artifacts, design fictions, exhibitions and research publications.
My professional trajectory has been through many paths, some less travelled than others. I was trained as a Civil Engineer (Bachelors) at Calicut University, India after which I pursued a Masters in Industrial Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. Over the next few years I was working professionally in India across multiple disciplines as an industrial designer, communication designer and UX designer. I then proceeded to pursue an MA in Industrial Design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Norway. I joined the four year PhD program and successfully defended my PhD thesis in 2023 titled, ReFuturing Studies: Rehumanizing Futures through/by Design.
I intend to develop this body of work and explore the many what-if scenarios, generatively of course, where Industrial Design can be a potent propositional tool to open the possibilties of refuturing and rehumanizing systems, structures and materialities that defuture and dehumanize now manifest rather glaringly in the material and ecological consequences of climate breakdown that our designed culture of the few has brought onto the many and which collectively further entrench the unsustainability of everyday life. In this essence my research focus is to look at designing for alternative nows by reclaiming and radically reimagining the present such that the future is completely different when we arrive in it.