Patil, M.

Mugdha Patil is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering exploring design practice and pedagogy and its interaction with AI in its various forms and using this knowledge to inform speculative world-building of digital societies through. post-capitalist, decolonial lenses.

Mugdha is a designer and researcher from India, combining public pedagogy, politics, data, and speculative thinking to design for equitable futures that celebrate our collective humanity. Her work seeks to find the friction points in peoples’ lives where design, digital society, politics, and culture collide. She is currently a Marie Sklodowska- Curie PhD fellow based at the TU Delft and the Digital Life Centre at HvA, working within the DCODE Network. Her project is focussed on identifying the post-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed for future collaboration across different disciplines and sectors in the field of design, with focus on prototyping new professional roles and developing speculative job profiles. In this project, they explore how the iterative deployment of small teams with different disciplinary background in real-world settings (“prototeams”) which enables us to speculate, situate and understand the emerging and future needs of responsible and inclusive design practices.

Academic Background

Mugdha's design journey began with a fascination for understanding objects and how their design alters the surroundings around them. She completed my undergraduate degree in Furniture & Interior Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India but soon realised she was more interested in designing systems rather than objects. In a quest to better understand how individuals and society function and how these dualities shape the design of the systems we occupy, she pursued graduate studies in Design Innovation and Citizenship at the Glasgow School of Art to understand how individuals and society function and how these dualities shape the design and politics of the systems they occupy. Her background and interest in Anthropology and Psychology have allowed her to transfer her knowledge of human behavior to understand human tendencies & the social avenues they are afforded based on their gender, race, sex, age, citizenship, or disabilities, often through powerful stories, insights, and speculative world-building. The manifestation of these factors in design, combined with public pedagogy and futures thinking is an example of the work that she does and is interested in. She has also worked at Quicksand Studios in Bangalore as a Design Researcher.