Yearly Note 2017: Back to Srishti
In 2017 Srishti asked me back, this time as full-time faculty in the human-centered design department, the same space I had graduated from. I said yes mostly for one reason: the chance to work on Dr. Naveen's ReRide project.
Full-time teaching didn't start the way I wanted. I was first assigned classes well outside what I knew, and only through a run of cancellations and reassignments did I end up where I belonged, teaching two interaction design units, one for master's students and one for undergraduates. In the master's course on electronic prototyping, co-taught with Dr. Naveen Bagalkot, we used electronics as a way to sketch interactions. Some students had to scramble to pick up programming and the basics, but they still reached high-quality prototypes by the end. My standing challenge, I realised, was meeting students wherever their prior knowledge actually was.
The undergraduate course with Riyaz was about coaxing out interest in the technical side of design: real components, Arduino, sensors, video enactment. Some students dropped, some treated it casually, but the room was a good one to be in. The Topcoder workshop we ran even won cash prizes for a few of the student designs.
Then ReRide. We took it to Interact 2017 at IIT Bombay, and after a string of problems the team pulled together in the final days into a working proof of concept. We never got the real-world pilot we wanted, but we had something that ran, something you could demo. That's the lesson that stuck: for a designer, there's no substitute for a physical, working thing.