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.
Prof. 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
Suranjana Satwalekar
Exhibition Designer; Senior Faculty - NID Ahmedabad; Founder - Satwalekar Design Studio; Alum - NID Ahmedabad, St. Stephens, DU
Amitanshu R. Shrivastav
Product Designer; B.Des. from IICD, Jaipur; Founder & Designer at Amitansh Thinking Studio
Shivatmika Lala
Animation Film Design; NID, Ahmedabad; Diploma in Stop motion animation, Barreira Arte y Diseño, Valencia, Spain
Abhishek Meena
Furniture design; Industrial design; Design execution; B.Des. from NID, Ahmedabad; Founder – Sacca Design
Visiting Faculty
Kshitiz Anand
Associate Vice President, Paytm. Indiana University, Bloomington.
Saurabh Deb
Chief Designer UX , Samsung. NID Ahmedabad.
Manish Iyer
Senior Industrial Designer from NID, Co-founder and Chief Designer – Designworth
Chandni Rajendran
Product Design Manager – Aspire; Ex- Quicksand Design Studio; Founder, Tactopus; Alum – IIT Bombay
Saurabh Suman
Senior Product Designer     Sumo Logic ; IIT Bombay
Akash Alegaonkar
Award-winning Transportation Designer; Member, Faculty Development Programme, IIT Guwahati.
Shailan Parker
Senior Photographer; Senior Faculty – NID Ahmedabad.
Sunali Aggarwal
M.Des, NID Ahmedabad. Co-founder of Mobikwik
Kaustuv Majumdar
Industrial Designer and architect, Geis and Bartner, Germany
Mahendra Patel
Mentor Professor, DY Patil International University; Former Visiting Faculty, IDC School of Design, IIT Mumbai.
Rasagy Sharma
Product Designer, Sundial; Visiting Faculty – NID; M.Des. – NID Ahmedabad.
Karthikeyan P.
Senior Interaction Designer; Alum – IIT Bombay
Gaurav Juyal
Learning Experience Designer, Byjus; Former Host – Art Attack; Founding Faculty – Institute of Design, JKLU
Abhishek Biswas
Product Designer
Mamta Mantri
PhD. University of Mumbai; Research and Interpretation Expert.
Ambika Joshi
Director & Co-founder at Ajaibgarh; Project Manager – Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal; Creative Coder; Alum – NIFT
Jury Members
Aditi Dhar
Founder & Director, Vitasta Design; Industrial & Product Designer, NID, Ahmedabad
Abhishek Shrivastava
Asst. Professor of Interaction Design, Institute of Design, IIT Guwahati; M.Des, NID Ahmedabad; PhD IIT Bombay
Amaltas Khan
Industrial Designer, Head of Department, Product Design, NID, Andhra Pradesh; Former Design Consultant, WoodKart
Anubha Kakroo
Sr. Lead Experience Designer – Airtel; Professor of Design; Alumnus – SPA Delhi, Brunel University London.