Gaurav Singh

M56 is a design collective started by three friends, Prakhar, Swati, and Gaurav (me), in Bangalore in 2015. We met during our postgraduate studies at the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology in 2013. We had distinct personalities and aims, but our thinking often lined up, and over those two years the bond grew until building a collective felt obvious. That's how M56 began.

Here's a short introduction to the three of us, our interests, and our work, written in the third person.

Prakhar Ojha has always been drawn to stories, first in movies and games, then more widely as his curiosity grew. Somewhere along the way he noticed that not all stories land the same: some leave you empty, others make you want to build something. That's what pulled him toward design, and toward human-centered work in particular, looking past the surface to what people actually need. It led him to psychology and ethnography, to understand how people think and feel. Today he's an experience and interaction designer who builds products that tell a good story and make people's lives a little better. Learn more

Swati Sharma has always been curious and set on understanding how the world works. As a child she practised her artwork for hours, and science drew her in for the same reason: it let her look at the hidden workings of things. She studied engineering but found the teaching too narrow for what she wanted, so she went on to a postgraduate degree that let her follow her range of interests. For Swati, design is about improving things, making something better than what exists today. With a background in Electronic, Instrumentation and Control Engineering and a postgraduate degree in Innovation and Experience Design, she's set on pushing what's possible in healthcare, sustainability, and more. Her interests run from flora and fauna to life beyond Earth to how we teach. Learn more

Gaurav Singh is a researcher who works on algorithms, using mathematics as his language to decode and design. He's loved science and maths since childhood, and early exposure to computers only deepened it; programming, in particular, felt like a new superpower. He takes the world to be unavoidably complex, and thinks design isn't about dodging that complexity but working through it, until it reads as simplicity. With a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and a postgraduate degree in Innovation and Experience Design, he started out as an independent full-stack programmer and has since moved toward research in computer science and mathematics. He teaches Interaction Design and Programming at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore, and runs Mathscapes, a CS and maths research lab. His interests span human-computer interaction, prime numbers, lossless data compression, artificial intelligence, automata, and dynamic programming. Learn more