Faculty – JKLU Design

Meet the Faculty of Institute of Design

Prof. A. Balasubramaniam

Director, Institute of Design

Bala is an alumnus of NID, Ahmedabad, and has taught across major design institutes in the country, including NID, NIFT, and the School of Planning & Architecture (SPA), New Delhi.

He is the founding Director of the Institute of Design at JKLU. He is also the President of ADI (Association of Designers of India) for the term 2022-24.

He was the Dean of IILM School of Design in Gurgaon from 2007 to 2010 and has also been a member of the Academic Board for several design institutes, including SPA, New Delhi and Nirma University. He is a regular jury member at NID, NIFT and other places. Bala has been a Design Consultant to Oxfam, where he helped Indian artisans develop products for the European market. He was instrumental in setting up the Prototype Initiative for Design Excellence (PRIDE), the design division at NSIC for the Government of India Initiative. He holds the unique experience of creating one of the first programmes in Design based on digital delivery.

He has designed market-leading products as diverse as tractors and torches for Eveready, Eicher, Usha, Hero Motors, Bajaj, NIF and UNDP. He writes on the subject of Design in leading magazines and newspapers and on his blog.

Dr. Devanuj K. Balkrishan

Dean, Institute of Design

A designer with qualifications in three different domains of design namely, Architecture from IIT, Roorkee, Product Design from IIT, Delhi and Human-Computer Interaction from IIT, Bombay. He is trained to work on human problems related to habitat or usability.

Regardless of the domains, his work follows four phases:

Analysis: Developing a coherent understanding of the users’ context along physical, social, cultural, technological and political dimension
Exploration: Creatively exploring the solution space
Design: Prototyping solutions, and
Evaluation: Iteratively evaluating the competing solutions with respect to original design goals.

He is a noted scholar who has developed approaches to train computers for recognising human handwriting at Tata Consultancy Services. Currently, he is working on understanding and predicting digital technology usage in rural and low-literate contexts in India from a design oriented approach.

For the last three years, he has been on the program committee of the Indian conference on Human Computer Interaction (India-HCI). During his PhD, he developed an inclination towards social sciences and statistics, that reflects strongly in his thesis. Additionally, he is a student-practitioner of traditional Advaita, Vedanta philosophy. He is also an engineer who not only studied at India’s premier technical institutes, but has worked in the country’s largest IT Company in a role that required high proficiency in mathematics and programming. Last but not the least, he also identifies as an artist who has acquired many creative skills, both through academic discipline and outside it. This includes poetry, film making, and music composition.

Faculty Members

Anirudha Biswas

Industrial Designer; Product Designer, Mentor, Pearl Academy

Suranjana Satwalekar

Exhibition Designer; Senior Faculty - NID Ahmedabad; Founder - Satwalekar Design Studio; Alum - NID Ahmedabad, St. Stephens, DU

Shivatmika Lala

Animation Film Design; NID, Ahmedabad; Diploma in Stop motion animation, Barreira Arte y Diseño, Valencia, Spain

Dhruv Saxena

Professional Diploma in Craft Design from Indian Institute of Crafts & Design, Jaipur; Master in Product Design from DOMUS ACADEMY, NABA University, Milan, North Italy.