As an Academic Fellow at BITS Design School, I sat between faculty and students. My role was to translate pedagogical frameworks into studio activities, support module research and curriculum planning, facilitate classroom sessions, mentor students through studio exercises, and coordinate collaborative learning experiences with visiting practitioners and institutions. I didn’t teach from the front. I worked in the studio, in the critiques, in the fieldwork, in the messy moments where theory met practice.
From that position, between faculty vision and student experience, I saw why the Transformation Design module was not just important for transdisciplinary design education. It was essential.
What the Transformation Design Module Is
Transformation Design is a project based module led by Khushboo Jogani at BITS Design School and ran for a duration of 5 weeks. It builds on the pre-requisite knowledge where students worked with real communities through cultural mapping, collaboration and context-sensitive design.
In Transformation Design, students take that learning to the next level. They join project groups and explore a real-world challenge shared by an industry collaborator. Each group is guided by a mentor, meets weekly with project partners, and works across disciplines to map, reflect, reframe, and propose directions for change.
The module was about understanding systems: the invisible webs of relationships, values, power structures, and flows that shaped how things worked (or didn’t) in the world around us.
The culminating moment for the module was the Design Colloquium, a day-long event where every project team presents their final Transformation Design Proposal to invited experts and institutional partners. It wasn’t a competition but a collective learning space.
As an Academic Fellow, I assisted Vijay Palaparty in the Transformation Design module’s research, studio facilitation, and critique sessions, supporting students as they applied systems thinking and collaborative design approaches to real-world contexts. Along with the academic fellows and selected students, I also served as a panelist for the Design Colloquium discussion on Transformation Design and developed the visual communication for the event.
What Students Brought to the Panel: Fieldwork Moments, Bias Reflections, and Hopeful Pivots
For the panel discussion on Transformation Design, the students came prepared with three things:
One story from fieldwork — a moment of clarity, contradiction, or failure.
One reflection on bias, ownership, or constraint.
One hopeful pivot they’re imagining for their project.
These weren’t decorative. They were the raw material of the entire discussion. And from where I stood, they revealed what Transformation Design actually teaches: how to work in systems that are already alive, already constrained, and already held by people who have their own answers.
Segment 1: Participatory vs. Extractive Design
Each student shared a fieldwork moment where they realized: “Oh wow, we don’t have the answers, but the community does.”
That’s a radical shift for a designer trained to be an expert. For this segment, I shared one example of how I helped students avoid extractive tendencies or navigate biases. I guided a team to stop treating a community as a “data source” and start treating them as co-authors. This helped students recognize their own biases—about poverty, about rural areas, about what counts as valid knowledge.
This is what Transformation Design teaches: participatory design is not a checkbox. It’s the method by which designers cut through complexity. When communities hold the answers, design becomes negotiation, not imposition.
Segment 2: From Community Spaces to Everyday Behaviours
Students brought one story showing how a small behaviour reveals a larger system issue.
For this segment, I connected it to systemic framing. I was asked: “How do you guide students to see the forest and the tree?” The answer is iterative: start with the person, then trace the system back. Transformation Design trains students to balance macro and micro.
Segment 3: Co-creation & The Ethics of Intervention
Students brought one insight about co-design that surprised them.
One student noted that co-creation isn’t just “asking people what they want.” It’s negotiating authorship: “Who holds the pen in our project?” Who decides what gets designed, for whom, and what gets shared publicly?
For this segment, I shared one reflection on when I consciously stepped back instead of intervening. That’s a hard choice for a mentor. But it’s essential for co-creation. If the mentor always intervenes, students never learn to negotiate ambiguity, failure, and pivoting on their own. This is where Transformation Design becomes transdisciplinary. It’s not just about design. It’s about governance, policy, economics, culture, and ethics. Design becomes a tool for systemic change, not just object-making.
Segment 4: Idealism vs. Pragmatism
Students shared how their “dream version” of the project shifted once they hit constraints and ambiguity.
The prompt given was: “What’s the most beautiful failure you’ve had so far?” The answer wasn’t a disaster. It was a moment where a proposal looked elegant on paper but failed in the field, forcing a pivot that was more grounded, more ethical, and more promising.
For this segment, I shared how I guided pivots without killing ambition. The most beautiful failure becomes a learning moment, not a defeat. It’s where vision meets reality, and the design becomes more grounded.
Transformation Design teaches students to balance visionary ideas with real-world constraints, to design when outcomes are unpredictable, and to use failure and pivoting to bridge the gap between vision and outcomes.
Segment 5: Ethics, Agency, Impact
Students came prepared with “Who holds the pen in our project?” — a reflection on ownership, decision-making, authorship.
That question was the ethical core of the entire panel. Designers are not neutral. They shape behaviours, narratives, and systems. The question is: who decides what is designed and for whom?
For this segment, I reflected on the responsibility of designers in shaping behaviours and narratives, and on navigating political systems and context-based complexities.
Why Students’ Point of View Must Shape the Transformation Design Curriculum
From my position between faculty and students, one thing is undeniable: the most powerful insights came from students’ lived experiences as learners. Not from faculty lectures. Not from case studies. From fieldwork moments of contradiction, failure, and surprise. That’s why students’ point of view must shape how the Transformation Design curriculum evolves.
Traditional curriculum design is top-down: faculty design, students execute. But Transformation Design is different. It’s emergent. It’s co-created. It’s shaped by the messy, ambiguous, unpredictable realities of live projects.
Students’ experiences reveal what the Transformation Design module needs to teach:
How to navigate bias: recognize your own biases and come on the same page with communities.
How to negotiate authorship: learn who holds the pen, and how to share decision-making.
How to pivot without killing ambition: turn failure into learning, vision into reality.
How to balance macro and micro: see the forest and the tree.
How to engage ethically: learn when to intervene, and when to step back.
These are not abstract skills. They’re lived skills. Shaped by fieldwork, failure, surprise. And they must be embedded in the Transformation Design curriculum.
Transformation Design Is Not a Module. It’s a New Paradigm.
From where I stand, as an Academic Fellow and as a panelist who contributed to conversations around design practice, systems thinking, and the role of design in enabling social and environmental change, Transformation Design is not just another module.
It’s a new paradigm for transdisciplinary design education. It trains designers who can:
Work across disciplines: design, research, policy, economics, culture, ethics.
Navigate complexity: systems that are messy, constrained, alive with people.
Engage ethically: with communities who have their own answers, who hold the pen.
Pivot without killing ambition: turn failure into learning, vision into reality.
See the forest and the tree: balance macro and micro.
And it trains designers who understand that the most powerful insights come not from polished final proposals, but from fieldwork moments of contradiction, failure, and surprise.
That’s why it’s the students’ point of view that must hold importance in shaping the curriculum. Because they’re the ones living it. Learning it. Shaping it.