The History of Product Design in India
Prof Uday Athavankar wears many hats as an architect, industrial designer, game designer and cognitive scientist. In this interview, he takes the audience across the Indian design scene from his days as an architect fresh out of JJ School of Architecture and his experiences both at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago as an industrial designer and as design faculty at IDC, IIT Bombay.
He also spends his time researching the connections between language, design decisions and cognitive science. In this interview, he talks about the courses he takes in product semantics and object-culture relationship and their impact on industrial design, especially in an Indian context.
He also talks about the projects like the postbox redesign, the India specific low-cost ATM for NCR (President's award) undertaken as a faculty in the Industrial Design Centre in IIT Bombay, the design insights he gathered from them and their relevance in how he functions today. His projects now deal with culture-specific localization of products and systems that support the usage of products. He has also helped structure the course of Game Design in many design schools.
He has come full circle to architecture with recent undertaking and research in the field of affordable housing. He concludes the interview by talking about the evolution of design and designers from the 70's until now.
Interview of Prof U. A. Athavankar - Length and Breadth
Interview of Prof U. A. Athavankar - Projects and Products
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Prof U. A. Athavankar's write up - pdf
