*This is my story. If you’re looking for work-experience, you’ll find it here*
I grew up all around India, moving with / between my parents, and studying in more than 7 different schools. My parents loved being on the road and, for the first 15 years of my life, I found myself in the backseat of their car far too often.
Me, with my mum & dad; some time around 2004.
Owing to parentally-coerced-road-travel, a significant amount of my childhood was spent peering out of the backseat window, looking at people and visual objects from afar. Perhaps this childhood fascination is what ultimately led me to design, after a failed 14-year-long pursuit of becoming a professional athlete.
Training at BoulderBox, Delhi.
At 18, I managed to get into the Indian Institute of Art & Design, a small (relatively new) college based in New Delhi, scarcely armed with a few fierce practitioners & pedagogs. While I complained, cribbed and sought better environments consistently during my time there, it is now (at 23) that I realise the nurturing effect that the small, intimate environment had on me.
I grew up to become an extremely ‘invested’ designer – fascinated by the systems, frameworks and thinking patterns that govern it all. Throughout the course, my ‘disciplinary interest’ kept changing but what remained consistent was my love & aptitude for creative-problem solving.
Working at the Indian Institute of Art & Design, New Delhi.
By the end of my four years there, I became fascinated with the idea of using ‘design’ as the connecting thread between different academic disciplines. This led me to join the Xperimenters programme at Science Gallery Bengaluru where I had a blast doing things with art, design, science and technology. I knew, and still know with utmost certainty, that the work I did as part of that programme is what I want to do with the rest of my life.
However, it is very difficult to find an economically feasible space for that practice in the ‘real’ world. At the moment, I work as a design researcher during the day and keep my computational experiments for the night; consistently attempting to merge the two worlds someday.