Homecoming - From Engineer to Designer and back

My fascination with technology began when I was 4 years old, my parents took me to a hospital when my mother was pregnant with my baby sister. Seeing the baby inside my mother's stomach on the ultrasound machine's monitor was somewhat of a magical moment for me. I kept pestering my father with questions about how that machine worked, luckily he's a biomedical engineer so it wasn't hard for him, though I'm sure explaining it to a 4 yr old had its challenges. From that moment, I wanted to know how to make those magical machines.

I grew up with an engineering family. Everyone was an engineer. Most of my family functions were spent trading tips on passing my subjects.

I started my career as an Electronics and Telecommunication engineer but I'll always have an inclination toward Industrial Design. This led me to join FabLab Vigyan Ashram, where I initially joined purely so that I could explore the machines at the lab. Vigyan Ashram is much more than just a lab, it's a research center based on implementing rural technology. It taps onto the community of the local farmers to teach them the scientific methods of farming at the same time, trying to understand the tacit knowledge of the farmers who know only the language of experience and not numbers. My experience of working and living in Pabal, which is a typical indian village, gave me insights into a very different part of India which was just 40 miles from home. Pabal was a very different reality for my clear lack of development about various aspects of life was eye-opening such as infrastructure problems, lacking medical facilities, and connectivity issues. It made me very grateful for the life that I have. Vigyan Ashram was a great learning experience where I had to learn how to be resourceful, patient, and develop a greater understanding of the context. It was also the place where I completed my FabAcademy.This was also one of the best and most useful courses that I've ever done.

For the past 2 years, I had been working in Barcelona ,in taking the next logical step towards pushing HelloHealth towards the public domain by designing STEM toys for students to learn about their own body functioning through embodied design. After the institution I was collaborating with ghosted me, I started working as a freelancer, collaborated with friends in Barcelona, we designed Concord. We got selected for a couple of design weeks across Europe. This opened up my worldview tremendously, collaborating with creative technologists, videographers, architects, and graphic designers.

Currently, I'm working at GS Lab. To learn about electronics hardware design.