My journey — From Design to Education and beyond.

In my second year of college, I was working on a project to get design thinking to children. Curio was a hybrid of a book and a toolkit which aimed at inculcating design thinking by creating a hands-on experience. Each page was a different material, and had a different activity associated with it.Curio gave me a peep into a different kind of design altogether. And I knew I had found my niche’.

Curio : Colour changing dodecahedron

I joined a start-up soon after I finished working on Curio. Bazinga Box wanted to holistically develop a child in their formative years. Our team of 5 started working out of a living room in Pune — brainstorming names and planning the future. My role primarily included product development and design, building a prototype for beta-testing. My time spent talking to children, parents, teachers, testing activities, instructions helped me understand how people perceive learning very differently.

Universe in my plate : An activity in the prototype made for Bazinga Box.

Curio and Bazinga Box made me want to explore the broader domain of education. Going beyond products, I wanted to immerse myself in a more system oriented project. I joined QUEST Alliance, Bangalore as an intern last summer. Anandshala wanted to help children learn through self expression in a fun and engaging environment. The program was scaling up and my role included exploratory research, framework development and system design for the same. QUEST helped me take a deep dive into the space of education, visiting government schools in Bihar, understanding the challenges of resource deficient environments on education. I proposed and detailed out four systems, articulating system guidelines for operationalising the model. Three of the systems I worked on are now in the implementation stage.

Anandshala Program : Samastipur, Bihar (India)

Last year I worked on another research and system design project which reimagined learning for the future. This project was experimental and broad based, and I used the openness to redefine the fundamentals of learning and education. The process involved a lot of introspection, often questioning my own experiences while learning.

Why do we need to educate our children?

I always thought my story started with Curio, but it started much before that. I volunteered for The Neighbourhood Project in class 11, an after school program for teaching children from underprivileged backgrounds. It was the first time I was teaching a group of students, and the encouraging smiles I got was the only thing that made the task more enjoyable.

I come from a family of 3 generation of educators, who would have never imagined me getting into education after pursuing design. It’s funny how things come back full circle.