I made the topic relative to my students own culture. As we went through my presentation we discussed more examples.

Interviewing locals in the ancient city.

Design & Culture: Assignment 2

Brief: Imagine an office with no elevators, green spaces, and music rooms. Employers are realizing their employees are more productive if more flexibility is given and more extras are provided. Companies will be designing employee friendly workspaces. The keyboard will be obsolete. The healthiest you will be supported and scheduled breaks will be encouraged. Maybe you will choose to meditate, take a walk, workout in the gym, jam out in the music room, bond with your baby, or go for snack and a healthy juice. A balanced family life will be a priority for employers, weekends off, on campus daycares, and holidays are the norm. Mobility is encouraged. Goodbye personal cubical, hello office living rooms and hot-desks. Shared workspace is the norm. You may even in a virtual meeting from the comfort of your home or from a beautiful lush park.  Now I want you to use your imagination to design future office products that meet these seemingly utopian office environments. This is not the office as we know it today.

Design Theory - 15 Masters Students 

Joie. By Vivek Jagdhane

Mayer, Saloni, and Alefiya choose words, illustrated them then pulled apart there semiotic meanings.

Students made up logos of descriptives.

It was so hard to pick which team to highlight here all the teams did an amazing job! Most of these students are not from  Ahmedabad and are Hindus, so going into a predominantly Muslim neighborhood for them was a bit intimidating. They met the challenge beautifully and learning more about what being Indian is as they explored their ancient culture first hand.

On the field they drew sketches, asked questions, got lost, ate local snacks, and observed their neighborhood. When they returned to the classroom they created a display of their findings.

This is part of a sample of one of five presentations I created for semiotics.

Ergonomics Class Project - 

Grow. By, Priyal Patel 

120 Students Class!!! Not all pictured.

Finding old family businesses.

Ergonomics - Juniors - 120 Students

Design Research, Subham  

First, I described the basic principles.

Not giving up! 

In Ergonomics students were asked to choose an extreme sport, identify the main injuries, and design a product to prevent harm.

Team 11: Rohit Kalange, Saumitra Pandey, Sharvavi Dame, Bhavika Malik, Anusha Iver, Shashwat Das, Suhail Khan, Simran Gori

2019 - 2020 Associate Professor, UID - Karnavati University - India

LOOP. By, Roy  

What Is Ergonomics?
Ergonomics is the science of finding the best fit between the demands of your life and your environment.
Did you ever get a backache from lifting too many heavy boxes? These are examples of injuries caused by poor ergonomics. Pain or more serious health problems can develop if poor ergonomics are present. Hundreds of thousands of injuries are reported every year. Many of these could be prevented with proper ergonomics. 

The basics of ergonomics:

  • Increased comfort
  • Reduced injury
  • Ease of using product (cognitive ergonomics)
  • Higher productivity

Poor ergonomics, on the other hand, can lead to painful injuries.

Team 2 - Mirzapur: Sakshi Jamgaonkar, Sneha S, Paramesh Krishnan, Rahul, Hareesh, Zahra Burhani, Vamshi Patla, Swapnil, Chaitanya S

Technical Complex Product - Future Office Product Needs - 97 Students

For me to teach Semiotics I had to break the topic into really simple ideas.

I gave five separate lectures that encouraged conversation. 

After each lecturers I gave the students smile projects to practice the ideas.

Image who your specific target audience will be in five years from now? CMF is a lot more than just choosing pretty colors , finishes, and materials. Every color has meaning, some have historical context, and associations. This is true also for textures and finishes. Neo Deco is a current trend but you can't understand this trend without understanding where it originated and why. A CMF designer needs to understand trends, which fabrics and material are appropriate, and so much more.  Sometime designing for one person is easier than designing for the masses but when you design for one you design for many that are similar. So, below it a sample of questions I asked my student to grapple with as they identified their person in current day and them in 2025. In this class I taught them how to photograph collaged objects. We discussed current trends and then looked to the future.

Pick one specific person or family. From a specific region or place in the world.

Where do they live?
How old are they?
What is their income bracket? How much money do the make?
What is important to them?
What brands do they buy?
What emotions are they grappling with?
What will be the future CMF palettes for this group?
What going on socially and economically in 2025?
What going on environmentally?
Show maps of where they are from and where they travel.
How do they entertain themselves?
How do they get from A to Z?
What else?

Field Tests were advised, went bowling.

Collages & Working Hard 

Graphically told the story.

Field Trip - Science City

At the end of each presentation I gave the daily assignment. The student's had the afternoon to work through their ideas.

I was so lucky that Abid Bilal, NID graduate, co-taught this course with me!

Teamwork: Parth, Shatakshi, Shitij, & Hitesh  

Design & Culture Studies 2 - Foundation - 96 Students

Bhutan Inspired Interior, CMF Course: Jayendra Singh Tomar + Akash Kulange

Mofy. By, Shradhasuman Bhutan ( not pictured) 

CMF Design - 13 Students

During lockdown in India I graded these well thought out projects.

Happy Moment 

Zayee, Alefiya and Akash graphically desecting words, objects and their meanings.

In the field study, walled city.

Design Evolution - Foundation - 96 Students

AHMeDABAD Design Week - Top Talents from all Over the world

This course is to help you create empathic insights. We are teaching you to question everything and take nothing at face value. We want you to explore the world outside and open your eyes. We want you to look for the threads that show how culture is changing. Culture is not only ancient traditions. It is also modern habits and mass society using technology. Culture is also defined by what we buy, how we use it, and how we dispose of it. We are also in a culture that we have the possibility of unlimited spending power. How has that changed our lives? How has individuals attention span changed modern culture? How different are our communication methods verse our parents and grandparents? These are big questions!

Culture is constantly changing and evolving. As an American, with a totally different perspective, I hear so many people complain India culture is eroding and changing? Which forces me to ask: which Indian culture, what social community, which economical group, which demographic, and where specifically? We need to identify the specifics so then we can recognize how things have changed. It’s not so simple! It’s our job as designers to analyze people lives, cultures, societies, and communities to create comprehensive research that allow insights to emerge. Only then can we create truly innovation design solutions that can improve individuals comfort, happiness, and mental peace.

Drawings. By, Marilyn  

Each group presented their work.

Then the students constructed creative color wheels.

DinDin. By, Devika

Semiotics - Juniors - 120 students

Each group had approximately 8 students.

*Tallying the Treasure Hunts results, each team participated.

I co-taught this class with a professor that lives and breathes ergonomics, Somnath Gangopadhyay.

He gave the ergonomic lectures and I led the students projects.

  • First I mixed up the two classrooms and then broke all students into groups of eight.
  • Each picked an extreme sport that they would like to learn about.
  • Then they learned about their sport and did design research 
  • They looked for the top injuries in their sport
  • Their teams were responsible to create a presentation booklet, poster & final product.

Japan CMF Project - Krupa Kotadia, Neha Banerjee, Saloni Patel

The winning prize was a class pizza party!

Then we started playing with color.

I introduced the design periods and the students researched and presented the designers of the 20th century.

*Crazy fact: This class was just i bit longer than a week!!!

2025 Trend Prediction - Tokyo

Then we added photographs to decipher different design principles.

Then the students explored the concepts with India ink and paint brush.

Gorgeous Map of Unesco Ahmadabad Neighborhood.

Amazing week of speakers! We were privileged to have Surya Vanka formerly from Microsoft lead us in a workshop.

Sketching architecture.

Create Treasure Hunt of your assigning neighborhood for fellow student’s teams.
- Identify 10 things for others to find, places, objects they need to find, collect, document or draw in your specific neighborhood. 
- Remember you are Industrial Designers! Focus on Design and things that are useful for designers.
- Tools, materials, useful resources, things that inspire you!
- Few treasure hunt points could be an historic place or place of interest
- Maybe you ask them to try and document a local delicacy & talk to owner and find out one secret detail about his life. 
- Have them find a specific locals that’s always there. Have them ask that person a question that provides insight to pol life.
- Have fun! Force your fellow students to be inquisitive! And learn!

- Create one page graphic layout of your treasure hunt. Print out 12 copies of your treasure hunt. Winning team gets a prize.

I am so thankful for each and everyone I worked with! What a great group of talented gentlemen from all over India!

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about - Rumi

UID - Product Design & Automotive & TransPortation DesiGN

Ashwin Model Making 

Student's Work