Series on design teachers in India:

Professor Uday Athvankar

  Biography
  Works

  Biography

He is a man with many hats as an architecture, industrial designer, game designer and cognitive science

He was a student of the JJ School of Architecture, then went on to complete his studies in Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago as an industrial designer

He has worked as an architect for four years before switching to Industrial Design and is committed to research the connections between language design, design decisions and cognitive science

His projects deal with culture-specific localization of products and systems that support usage of products

He joined IDC as a faculty on 1st Jan, 1970 and had joined because it allowed him to teach as well as practice design

He saw IDC as the Indian version of Bauhaus in the making

He has been managing his time for more than 38 years between design education, design research and design consulting for companies

He believes that for a teacher to qualify to teach must be a good practicing designer

He has shown great interest in the role of mental imagery and visualization in the design process and early creative thinking

His expertise is in ‘People watching’ research(Ethno studies) and converting insights into new product ideas

His interests are in frugal design and has focused on areas like innovation in affordable housing and designing purposeful frugal games to support education

His focus is on areas like Product semantics; role of mental imagery; Spatial intelligence and Visual thinking and Design thinking

He prefers a cognitive and theoretical approach to subjects of product semantics and concept of identity

He has partaken in projects like the postbox redesigning, the India specific low cost ATM for NCR, which received the President's award, undertaken as a faculty in the Industrial Design Centre in IIT Bombay. The design insights he gathered from them and its relevance has helped him in his current works. His projects now deal with culture-specific localization of products and systems that support the usage of products. He has also helped structure many courses of Game Design in some of the design schools.

  Works:

Other interests of his include product semantics and concepts of identity and prefers a cognitive and theoretical approach to these subjects. He has even written many papers on product semantics and communications, role of mentality in the design process as well as design education. Although he has written many papers, he has always considered his need to write arose from the necessity to communicate what and how they design through popular publications during the 70’s. He has come full circle with architecture with his recent undertaking and research in the field of affordable housing.