Teaching & Making Together

Workshops, studios, and experiments in collaborative learning- what does it mean to teach design as a situated, political practice?

Teaching, for me, has never been separate from the rest of the practice. The questions that show up in research and design- about power, about whose knowledge counts, about what tools do to the people who use them- are the same questions that shape how I think about a classroom or a workshop.

At Srishti Manipal, co-teaching a semester-long studio on gathering spaces meant asking students to learn from markets, parks, and street corners before reaching for design methods. The course used place-based research- site visits, mapping, crafting- to teach observation and reflection as creative practices in their own right. Alongside structured courses, I developed a deck of 101 prompt cards for aspiring designers, grouping the traits a designer should cultivate- observation, listening, critical thinking, storytelling- into exercises that could be picked up by anyone, not just those with art school training.

But the most important teaching has happened outside institutions. In Mirzapur, working with young women from rural Uttar Pradesh, the challenge was not curriculum design but access- how to make tools available to communities whose primary modes are oral and visual, and whose relationship to technology is shaped by constraints of language, literacy, and connectivity. The Kishori Film Festival gave 11th-grade participants the means to make and screen their own films using reconfigured devices. Jingle Tales let participants claim ownership of a Raspberry Pi by customising its boot-up sound- a small act of technical agency that opened into larger questions about who technology belongs to.

The Imposter Among Us brought these concerns into a different register: a curated reading list and panel examining how platforms manufacture “truth” and “ignorance,” asking what media literacy means when the platforms themselves are designed to erode it.

What connects these projects is a conviction that learning happens when people are trusted with real tools and real questions- not simplified versions designed to protect them from complexity.