How I got here
I’m from Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, and I started with architecture at NIT Hamirpur. I have done some really awesome projects when I was still working as an architect, tropical bamboo houses, high end homes, luxury interiors, computational explorations and more. If you've been to Bengaluru Airport's Terminal 1, and happened to see Bira's Taproom which was made out of an aerobridge, yup!….I was part of it. I don’t practice it anymore, but it still shows up in how I think: structure, space, the small details that hold a whole thing together.
After that I spent a few years at startups in Bengaluru, doing brand identity, illustration, motion and 3D. I have been always interested in why things work more than in how they look. So I made a tough decision to quit my job after 5 years of working in the industry came to IDC IIT Bombay in hopes of growing into someone who understands a tiny bit more about design and today I admit that I'm glad to have taken the chance.
What I’ve been up to lately
This summer I interned at Adobe Express, rethinking Generative Webpages as a mobile-first experience. I focussed on understanding what AI-assisted creation should feel like on a mobile, and built a prototype using Claude code.
At IDC I’ve had the liberty to experiment on projects like Zuzu, a game that nudges students out of passive loops, YatriSetu, system design for confused commuters at Mumbai bus stops, PaperJam, which turns your sketches into instruments you can actually play instantly, VR games, understanding qualitative research and a couple of AI experiments. These days I've been working on understanding "The problem of Abundance" for the generation that holds an enormous amount of memories in a mobile.
How I work
I spend time thinking critically on what the goal is and what I think is a good way to do it, so for that I talk to people, make things, break them, and ask whether they deserve to exist at all. I also don’t like the word “users,” so you if you find it on the site, I'm truly sorry. I usually start with asking a lot of questions and trying to understand what’s actually causing the problem before jumping into solutioning, although I come up with some really interesting ideas pretty quickly. I like mapping how things connect, finding where the flow breaks, and testing the weak spots before users hit them.
These days I have been using a lottt of AI tools for the process of designing something. I have come to a conclusion that it just sucks the joy of creating something when it gives you something and you just happen to accept it the way it is. I don't do that. It is pretty good at building something but not so good at many things. It has definitely helped me build and test things really quickly but I decide what's the output is going to be.
When I’m not designing
Video games, board games, any game, I'm up for it. But yeah music, treks, painting, anime, movies, badminton, football, hunting for good food, cooking or trying a new creative hobby, not always successfully.
