Made in winter 2023 for VIS 135 — Design Research Methods — during my senior year. The project was a photographic series examining the over-sexualization of the sari by the Western gaze and the act of reclaiming it. All photographs are my own. The images are embedded throughout — the text on them is part of the work. View Project The sari is not a costume. It is not exotic. It is not an invitation. It is, at its most literal, a length of unstitched fabric — somewhere between

After my HighEcology concept was selected to move forward, I developed the final project with a partner (name redacted for privacy) for VIS 162, spring 2022. Where the solo pitch was impressionistic, this one was grounded in actual climate data for San Diego County. The stakes got more concrete — and so did the proposals. Get it? Concrete! The solo pitch started with a feeling — the texture of a future city, its bees and holograms and repurposed concrete. The final project st

Written in May 2022 for LTCS 130 — Transnational Feminisms — during my junior year. I signed up for the course to fulfill a graduation requirement. I made a poetry book for the final project instead of writing a paper, drawing from Grace Cho's memoir Tastes Like War and from my own life as a first-generation Indian-American. The "book" has three poems — one about familial pressure and the cost of questioning your own history, one about emotional residue and hidden bruises, an

Speculative design courses produce a lot of ideas that never go anywhere. That is not a failure of the form — it is the point. The value is in the generating, the articulating, the moment of writing something down and discovering whether it has enough internal logic to survive a sentence. Some of these went further than others. All of them are mine (some inspired from external sources), and here they are.

What follows is the manifesto written to accompany the typography pieces — preserved exactly as written, in full self-important glory. The typography pieces are embedded throughout. "The educated imaginator" thanks you for your time. Philosophy and science are often justifications utilized by the supposedly powerful in order to maintain their grasp over society. In 1869, when Darwin proposed the idea of “survival of the fittest,” in which organisms most adjusted to their env

Spring 2022, junior year. VIS 133A. The project was called "Bird Capitalism." I did not choose that name. On Bird Capitalism, Reductio Ad Absurdum, and the Virtue of the Grey There is a particular kind of academic frustration that comes not from a hard problem but from a constrained one — where the intellectual territory is genuinely interesting and the framing keeps pulling you back toward the obvious. That was the experience of this project, start to finish, and also, event

History, as it is typically rendered — in textbooks, in museums, in the kinds of educational experiences that pass for immersion — is almost always one-sided. The winners write it. The losers' versions survive, if they survive at all, in oral traditions, in suppressed texts, in the stubborn persistence of mythology that refuses to be entirely rationalized away. MyRth's proposition was that VR and AR technology, combined with AI trained on the full range of surviving accounts.

A speculative design concept pitched in spring 2022 for VIS 161 — a class dedicated to imagining things that don't exist yet. This one didn't keep me up at night, which is ironic. The premise started simply enough: what if you didn't have to waste your sleep? Not in the grim productivity-hack sense — not a supplement stack or a sleep tracker or another optimization protocol for the already over-optimized. Something stranger and more interesting than that. The concept was this

The solo concept pitch I developed for VIS 162 — a speculative futures and sustainability course — during my junior year, spring 2022. My idea was selected to move forward into a team final project, which became its own iteration. This is where it started -- and honestly, I think the idea has real viability. An overwhelming feeling of closeness. Everywhere I walk, it permeates, oozing saturated colors and blue screens amidst an occasional chirp from a passerby. The air feels

In spring 2022, during my junior year, I joined a standalone innovation sprint program that partnered student teams with the San Diego Zoo. We got free zoo access for the entire quarter — which was, honestly, reason enough. This is the project I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did. Seven Feeders for a Langur (An Innovation Sprint at the San Diego Zoo) I am, by training, a business and design student. I think in systems and aesthetics, in stakeholder value and visual hiera