Creativity Synergist
roopali pankaj
A multi-disciplinary industrial designer & alumnus of IDC IIT BOMBAY, having more than 20 years of experience in diverse design fields from the design of FMCG to appliances design, interior design, exhibition design, user research, and communication design.
As a design educator, she has been igniting creativity in young students. She is an avid reader, experimenting with 21st Century skillsets like Design Thinking and Creativity.
Her other interests are Calligraphy, Painting, Travelling, and Writing books. She is the author of the book "Curious to Creative'.
My Story
Why we are passionate about what we do!
I would like to share here, what inspired me to work with young children and start this venture "roopalipankaj" which guides young minds on how they could nurture creative potential.
Before that my brief professional journey below.
Alma Mater
Worked for
Professional Organisations
Worked for
Educational Institutes
My Design Journey
Showing excellent progress in academics as well as drawing and painting, as per the current trend, I was advised to follow Architecture as a profession. I was not much aware of what it is to be an architect. Yet, merely the thought of not having to sacrifice my drawing and painting skills completely allured me to opt for this over-engineering undergraduate program. This was my first formal introduction to the design process. With my then limited understanding, I knew it was a unique process that we used to design indoor and outdoor spaces.
Gradually while I was doing my postgraduate studies in industrial design, with a little mature understanding about design process I could relate the importance of same process in distinctly different contexts. No matter what kind of product I am designing, a retail store display unit, a toy, an electronic gadget, following a similar design process always assured an effective end product. The solution got evolved and refined as I used to progress through various stages.
Another advantage of being at IDC, IIT BOMBAY was interaction with interdisciplinary students. I could see work of other students ranging from design of a calender, a web application, an interactive museum, a film etc. This is where I discovered the potential of design process. I fell in love with it. During the presentations it was magical to see the whole process and insightful journey of an idea into a final product. Working as a research assistant with professors gave an exposure to observe role of design process in research as well as consultancy projects.
alma mater: IDC IIT BOMBAY
Pic Courtesy: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1491193226phpScTzAI.jpg
I am fortunate to get to practice a wide variety of projects in my professional career. It was sometimes a challenge to make the client understand the importance of following the steps in the design process to reach to the final solution, as they used to think some stages were unnecessary. But after seeing the end result and contribution of the process in the final outcome, they used to get convinced of its importance.
Same process different contexts
The design process follows stages. It starts with research understanding the user’s needs, product, market. Having finalised the focus next stage is to explore as many ideas and develop few having great potential. Make quick prototypes, test them and improve the design based on test feedback. Make refinements for final implementation of the final solution. During my professional experience depending on the type of project the time spent for each stage would vary. For user research-oriented projects, it first stages was very vital. There were few projects like developing a product idea based on a patent technology where ideation stage was the focus. In one project client wanted to come up with an economical solution for a pump of a face cream dispenser. In that case prototyping and testing played a vital role. Certainly, with practice over few decades, the design process becomes way of thinking. It gets applied in other spheres of life as well like the way I plan vacation or weekly meals or a social project contribution.
I applied the similar approach to come up with series of artworks for my exhibitions. My love for calligraphy and 3 dimensional forms led me to explore 3-dimensionality in letterforms. It was a unique experience for the visitors. They not only appreciated final artworks but also got very excited to learn about the thinking and process behind it.
Interaction with students
Over a decade’s experience as design educator has given me a different perspective to look at the design process. Here my role was to mentor students throughout their design projects. I always emphasised on making students aware about the importance of following each stage of design process than merely focusing only on the end outcome. With the excitement of working on a new project, their own design, initially students tend to jumping on finalising the first ever solution that comes to their mind. Or sometimes they found it unnecessary to do talk to people about a simple product because they believed that they knew everything about that product. But as they follow the process, they themselves get surprised seeing the final outcome. They express that they never believed that they could come up with such an innovative solution. During this journey as educator, I observed role of correct mindset to be able to understand, appreciate and implement the process effectively. Students who were open to explore more, for them it was easy to follow the process. Students with rigid mindset, struggled to go beyond first few ideas even though they had the potential to do the same. Pondering over this made me observe any relationship between the open mindset and the childhood environment or upbringing. I observed that those students who have been exploring their own thoughts with different mediums, they were open to explore fast and more options. They were not afraid of failure. It was easy for them to accept critical feedback during the testing of prototype by the users. Children who liked travelling they were good in interacting with people, these children were doing good at the research stage.
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Exploration mindset
This made me think about how was my attitude and mindset when I was a student, learning and implementing design process. I reflected on how my childhood activities had contributed in development of that mindset. As a child I loved expressing my thoughts thorough various mediums. I loved to explore different medium. The paintings that I used to do, were from my own observations and imagination. I never liked copying any design from the reference. I remember my own designs of festive rangoli. I used to have a theme as per the occasion and make my rangoli design accordingly. Our Diwali Lantern also, always had a different design, not like whatever was available in the market. I am blessed with four sisters. We used to make our own toys and games. We used to make our own dolls and their clothing with rags. Soon me and my elder sister were stitching our own dresses when we were just 13 and 15 years old. Our parents always encouraged our explorations by providing us with all necessary tools and materials. I remember, if we get stuck as we thought we need something and are not able to go ahead without that, my mother always guided us to find a solution with available resources, and go ahead with it. It happened many a times that we didn’t know how to execute a particular pattern for a dress as we had not undergone any formal training in it. We had learnt it by reading a book that one used to get while buying a sewing machine. We used to make small scale patterns from it and try it on our dolls. We learnt all of it by doing. There were occasions where we failed to get the design we wanted to achieve, but we kept on trying until we could achieve what we wanted. We used to open gadgets at out home, clean it up at put it back. All these activities developed us to persevere, to be resourceful, to have openness for various possibilities. This helped a lot while doing models for my architectural school projects. During ideation coming up with variety of ideas was not tough for me. Having such a conducive environment at young age played a vital role in developing complementary attitudes for design process execution.
Interaction with people
It is not only about developing a positive attitude, working on limitations can also be done in childhood. I was a very shy girl. I would open up only within a known circle. My mother always pushed me to interact with people whenever there was an opportunity. But I never worked on that. I remember feedback from one of my mentors during professional training. He said that I did very well in my own project but that is only 50 percent of the learning. The other 50 percent could have been just by interacting with other people in the studio and learning more about how they are working on the same. This was one of the limitations which I know I had, yet I never took any concrete efforts to overcome it. Over a period of time, I worked relentlessly to overcome it.
The childhood impact
Thus, childhood plays a key role in developing correct attitude, mindset and skillsets. Being aware of this fact, I have tried to provide a nurturing environment for my son to encourage his explorations. These explorations need not always be in the art or craft fields. It could be in so many different areas. It keeps changing, as a parent when we see to it that it is a constructive exploration, we should encourage it further. My son was fascinated with numbers, cars, stories, gears… Each child has his unique fascinations, if they are encouraged to follow it constructively, they come up with wonderful ideas.
I have also observed this in case of my friends in creative profession. As they are aware about this, their children experience this freedom of exploring, resulting in development of fearless explorers. There is no fear of failing. They know how to learn from mistakes. Such explorations lead to learning by doing.
I have observed that not all parents are aware about this. Some of them are aware but feel that they are not working in any creative field and hence are not very sure of how to go about it. The art sessions I have conducted with young children from age 5 to 15, I realised tremendous potential every child has. They are full of ideas and need to know ways in which they can express those. They can definitely get guidance from experts at they grow, but their parents can help them broaden their perspectives, explore their ideas at very young age.
This new venture, "roopalipankaj" is my humble effort to make parents aware of the importance of the ‘creative problem-solving' process and how they can nurture a complementary mindset in their children to come up with innovative solutions.
Vision
To have a world where people come up with solutions to problems in all spheres of life using their creative potential.
Mission
To help 1 million young minds to develop their potential and mindset as a creative problem solver by using Design Thinking process.
Our Specialized Team
We are a group of passionate, creative, enthusiastic minds with more than 20 years of experience in Art, Creativity, Design Thinking, and Calligraphy.
