Hi!
Welcome to my undergraduate thesis blog. This will be a “work dump” for the next 4 months as I navigate through my final project as part of the Bachelor’s Programme in Communication Design at IIAD, Delhi.
This particular post sheds some light on who I am, what I plan to do for the next 4 months, the purpose and structure (if there exists one) of this blog and provide some context, in general, for you to better understand me and my project.
I’m Arjun, a final year visual design student at IIAD, Delhi (India). While I came to the institute in 2018 wanting to originally become a graphic designer, my academic program has tossed me across disciplines, forcing me to look at the intersection of various individual disciplines. However, I’m extremely passionate about technology and the way people use technology in their lives and, also, how it is and can impact design.
So, I’m essentially an “HCI-geek-designing-digital-experiences-who-also-messes-around-with code-and-typography-on-the-side-and-interested-in-HCI-academia”. For moments when I need to allude a little more confidence with regards to what I’m doing with my life (such as in a job interview), I simply call myself a digital product designer.
You can check out some of my work and experiments to get a little (visual) clarity (?).
In December 2021, I was selected as one of the 4 candidates at the Science Gallery Bengaluru for their Xperimenters programme. My thesis, therefore, will include all the work I do as an Xperimenter at the SGB till April 2022.
The Xperimenters are a group of 4 individuals between the ages of 18-28 who get the opportunity to interact with leading experts working in diverse disciplinary fields and, in return, strive to improve public engagement of the SGB. You can read more about the program & mentors here.
In the months leading up to this opportunity, I’d been fascinated with the emerging intersection of science, technology, design & art. With the growing convergence of these fields in the modern interdisciplinary world, I’ve realised that the traditional paradigm of the isolated “designer” is not meant for me. After my third year as a visual design student, I’d grown out of the traditional silo of a UX-UI designer / Graphic Designer / Product Designer and all the relevant name-tags and desired to define something more for myself by the end of my final year. The Xperimenters programme at the SGB allowed for the same: an interdisciplinary approach working at the intersection of many diverse fields that can help me redefine who I’d like to be as a design practitioner.
I cannot possibly predict the nature of my final outcome as of right now. All I know is that I’m an extremely curious and experimental individual, well trained in the processes of design, with a self-fed fascination for technology and a burning desire for knowing & wanting more.
Work done at institutions such as the MIT Media Lab, NYU Tisch, Centre for User Oriented IT Design at KTH Stockholm, among others, have continued to inspire me for years. I wish to be in academic environments like these in the future and push the boundaries of human-computer interaction.
Individuals such as Pranav Mistry, Martijn Van den Broeck and Neri Oxman, among others, have been my multidisciplinary design heroes for the last couple of years.