Anirudha Joshi on being a designer, learning by doing, and developing community

Anirudha Joshi is a lecturer, teaching interaction design in the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in India. Anirudha discusses his career path from engineering, to working in design, to coming back to university to teach and later doing his PhD. Many of his stories point to his particular ‘self-taught’ learning style, of learning first by doing then building on that learning in whatever way he needs. He also talks about developing HCI capacity and community in India and the particular challenges, as well as design in an Indian context, and what we can learn from India.  At a personal level, Anirudha also reflects on what he learnt from a recent sabbatical - how he is shaping his research to focus on making an impact in education in India, building up a collaborative lab culture, and making healthy life choices.“I’m happy to always be in a position where I feel like I don’t know enough about this.”“Good work happens from good people but a lot of it is just simple things…like having a regular lab meetings, having feedback sessions, having an atmosphere.”“Although we have residual time, it is not as productive as scheduled time.”Overview (times approximate) - you can also download a full transcript:02:00 On being a designer in an engineering school14:15 The importance of learning by doing and feedback21:50 Doing his PhD23:20 Growing HCI in India34:20 How he learns things by himself40:30 Doing/teaching design in India52:15 Reflecting on his insights from sabbatical01:04:20 Wrap upIn more detail, he talks about…[On being a designer in an engineering school]02:00 Anirudha talks about being in a design school surrounded by engineers and being in the oldest design school in one of the IITs; doing his undergraduate in electrical engineer, and realizing he didn’t want to do this; then discovered design and making educational videos – around 1992-93 after his Masters, and at the time that multimedia was coming to the fore. Practicing until 1998. Ahead of curve in industry e.g., making websites, multimedia content, before many others started. But saturated fairly quickly.05:25 Thought so much cool stuff that happens in academia in this area. Then decided to go back to do teaching. When all the confluence was happening with psychology, design etc. coming in. So design education has always been predominantly about self-discovery – developing own design sensibility, just trying things out e.g., drawing horizontal lines for a hundred pages to develop a certain sensibility to shape and form and colour. A skill and also brings attention to detail. More recent times, last 20 years, a whole thoughtfulness of research. Comes from Bauhaus.08:10 Second German design school, Ulm, that brought in whole intellectual angle, social angle, methods and so on. Also brought in rigor and quantitative methods. Now a much wider canvas for designers. And this got him into academics. Compares this to being in industry with its short timeframes in one place and here he is 20 years in academia.09:40 PhD at IIT Bombay, from Computer Science, so completely different. PhD about integrating HCI with software engineering, looking at design process and integrating process into software development. A very slow journey but interesting as never really attended a course on any of this until much longer after he needed it. An interesting way of learning things.12:00 Being self taught? On the one hand all the courses he has taught, whatever he learnt he learnt on his own. Then thinks he needs to find out more about them if he wants to teach them. Challenged

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