About

Advocating for users to inform design, business, technology and policy decisions towards a more equitable world.

I seek to empower diverse user voices by bringing them onto the desks of key decision makers bringing equity, representation and access to products, services and policies.

I practice currently as a design and User experience researcher; and bring in a holistic approach from my experience in branding strategy, service & curation and writing.

My ancestral roots originate from Kutch, Gujarat, while I was born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh and grew up across the country, having stayed in Chennai, Nagpur, Raipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi, and Pune. These constantly evolving surroundings around me led to a fascination with culture and it’s nuances from multidisciplinary lenses.

Rooted in research and expressed through words and visuals, my work ranges in the diverse areas of strategy, research, and branding. I have worked across domains of lifestyle, luxury, crafts, business, technology and policies working with organizations, brands, businesses, and institutions.

An alumnus of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Gandhinagar, I was the recipient of the merit award and the innovative graduation project award. I have facilitated, and curated several experiential design workshops and often dabble in creative writing and visual art.

I am skilled at discovering and brainstorming ideas, observing transition, fleshing out ways to bring out insight, forming connections and articulating those into actionable directions.

Current: Principal UX Researcher, PeepalDesign

I advice global and Indian fortune 500 companies on innovation and user needs through end-to-end design research from crafting proposals, identifying and deploying apt research methodologies, further following through the process of fieldwork, extracting actionable, sticky insights that spark thoughts for interventions.

I also mentor, guide and coach junior researchers to develop their skills in UX research and progress in their UXR careers. This includes increasing efficiency and quality levels of the team as a whole by developing and iterating on standard operating procedures, defining quality standards, promoting best practices, and creating better frameworks and systems for cross-team collaboration and feedback.

Selected features list

Publications & Papers

• Authored & presented a paper, titled ‘Culturally inclined games: A way to trigger quest for understanding ethnic identities’ (Jan 2021) at the international conference: Designing for Children with focus on ‘Play and Learn’ hosted by IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay, India — based on my co-creative collaboration with the terracotta craft community of Gundiyali
• Co-authored, Craft Experiential Tourism toolkit (to be published soon) a ready-reckoner for evolving craft clusters in India to craft experiential tourism hubs. This toolkit has been used as a framework for the project: Celebrating Clay: generating new forms of craft tourism with the terracotta craft cluster of Gundiyali, Kutch, India as a part of the Crafting Futures project by the British Council (2020)
  (Co-authored with: Rishav Jain(Senior Researcher, Design Innovation and Craft Resource Center, CEPT University, Programme Chair: Masters in Interior Architecture, CEPT University), Jay Thakkar(Executive Director, Design Innovation and Craft Resource Center, CEPT University, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design, CEPT University) and Radha Devpura(Research Assistant, Design Innovation and Craft Resource Center, CEPT University))
• Featured on Ahmedabad Mirror (2017), part of ‘Shoot at heritage site’ on how to photograph heritage, when Ahmedabad was declared one of the UNESCO world heritage cities.
• Co-authored, “Handmade and the Faith: Tibetan Buddhism” (2017) — part of NIFT’s initiatives to document craft practices and traditions.

Awards / Recognitions

• Awarded the prestigious NIFT Innovative Graduation Project Award (2018) for my work to brand “Project Otenga” as a multimodal space as a community collective, cafe and design lab.
• Awarded the Meritorious student award (2018) for my work to brand “Project Otenga” as a multimodal space as a community collective, cafe and design lab.
• Won the ‘next big fashion forecaster’ conducted by ‘The Fashion Forecaster India’ for a trend forecast ‘Timeless’ which was produced keeping in mind the timeless handmade traditional crafts of India, specifically Khadi — linking its past and redefining it for the current contexts

Exhibitions

• Design fellow for the Craft CoLABorative Fellowship (2018–19) which involved extensive craft innovation and ethnographic study with the terracotta craft community of Gundiyali, Kutch. Further, exhibited for “Ekatra: spinning the wheel together” at the Kanoria Gallery for Arts, Ahmedabad (2019). Co-created two product systems that gamified cultural knowledge in tangible interactive forms with the craft community.
• Performed a human-puppet show as a part of India Street Project at the Conflictorium, Ahmedabad (2017)

Workshops / Talks

• Facilitated and presented a session on “Design Thinking for Uncertain Times (2020)” at the Gujarat Technological University
• Facilitated a four day workshop for foundation programme students at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar on Creative Writing “Compel, Create, Write (2018)”

Digital features

• Crafts & Summer Nostalgia
• Happy Faces Foundation
• 108 Knots
• Invisible Illness
• Mental health and addictions community

Curation(s)

• Curated, ‘Chamba Kitni k dur (2019)’ about the folk music traditions and cultural food in Himachal Pradesh (at Project Otenga cafe, Ahmedabad)
• Curated an experiential event, ‘Six strings and a mouthful (2018)’ based on the art movement of romanticism which included gastronomical delights synchronized with poetry and classical guitar music in collaboration with Aditya Gandhi. (At Project Otenga Cafe)
• Curated a three-week public participatory event, Spatial Detox (2018) exploring themes of spaces, mental health and mindfulness (at Project Otenga Cafe)