Keynote Speakers
Keynote Speakers
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Welcome to the SiDE Project by IIT Delhi & TU Delft
Prof. Soumitri Varadrajan*
Professor
RMIT Melbourne
Social Innovation
Industrial Design
*will join online
Keynote A | 10:00, Day 1
Capstone Projects in Sustainability as Passion Projects
Keynote A | 10:00, Day 1
Capstone Projects in Sustainability as Passion Projects
Capstone projects in industrial design focusing on sustainability encourage students to embark on deeply personal, transformative journeys. By prioritizing self-discovery over traditional knowledge delivery, these projects become passion-driven inquiries. This paper examines three such projects. The first student, inspired by climate protests, explored narratives of climate justice across rural and urban Australia. The second, after a career break, reflected on ecosystem restoration and the designer’s role in environmental renewal. The third, combining engineering and design, pursued carbon capture as a means of integrating sustainability with technological innovation.These projects transcend transactional design practices and reject savior-complex narratives, positioning students as reflective contributors to global sustainability discourse. They demonstrate how self-driven, future-oriented design pedagogy fosters a deeper connection to sustainability, enabling students to craft meaningful, situated contributions to their field and their identity as designers.
Dr. Rebecca Reubens
Founder, Rhizome and Independent Academic
Sustainability,
Craft, Design
Keynote B | 10:40, Day 1
Designing Sustainability with more than good intentions
Keynote B | 10:40, Day 1
Designing Sustainability with more than good intentions
Most designers are taught to work in an industrial model which is underpinned by overconsumption and consumer culture, and which calls for resource-intensive and hyper-optimized manufacture. In sharp contrast, sustainability begs for the exploration of obverse ideas, such as mindful and reduced consumption and frugality. Designers are caught between the ‘industrial’ underpinning of their design education and practice, and what the emerging landscape of sustainability asks them to consider.
The still-crystallizing science of sustainability means information and knowledge of sustainability is still unfolding. The urgent sustainability crisis demands that designers address this situation immediately. This situation is compounded by the fact that sustainability is just entering design curricula - most current design educators have not studied sustainability formally during their own education. Most designers do not learn about sustainability through their mainstream design education, professional practice or professional peer-exchange platforms.
The absence of an accepted sustainable design approach means that designers self-learn or wing it when it comes to sustainability. This is against the backdrop of a business landscape that demands sustainable design, and the fact that design shapes production to consumption systems and therefore sustainability.
This keynote offers a reference point for what ‘sustainability’ means. It proposes a sustainability-checklist developed for UNIDO as a scaffolding for sustainable design. It invites designers to use and adapt the checklist, towards improving it collaboratively. It challenges designers to step out of the value-agnostic role the industrial paradigm allots to them, and to become sustainability design activists. It asks that design shapes the sustainability of the world with more than good intentions – it advocates that design does so with knowledge, information, and collaboration.
Prof. Lalit Kumar Das
Distinguished Design Academic
Former Faculty IIT Delhi
Industrial Design
Keynote C | 11:00, Day 2
Embracing the Paradox: Why Sustainable Development Is Both Challenging and Achievable
Keynote C | 11:00, Day 2
Embracing the Paradox: Why Sustainable Development Is Both Challenging and Achievable
Sustainable development presents a paradox: it demands overcoming complex environmental, economic, and social challenges while offering a clear pathway to a thriving, equitable future. The hurdles include entrenched linear systems of extraction and consumption, cultural inertia, and competing interests that hinder global cooperation. Yet, the same human creativity that led to these issues can also drive solutions.
Ultimately, sustainability revolves around the judicious use of material, energy, information, space, and time. It is about cultivating care—for the planet, for future generations, and facilitating everyone growth. Inspired by nature’s principles of cyclic processes, renewable energy, and resource recycling, we can transform human systems to align with ecological stability. Advances in renewable energy, circular economies, and regenerative agriculture demonstrate that sustainable development is not only necessary but entirely feasible.
It is inevitable that we create a road-map for this transition. All products and services should transition towards sustainability and all industries and human habitations move towards a circular economy. A time frame of 5 years is reasonable. In this time frame companies should start offering products with 5-10 years warranty. Industries can start offering factory refurbished used products and rental/subscription services. Civic, government bodies and industry will facilitate waste segregation and collection. Once leveraged with open source talent, IPR and AI the targets can be easily achieved. Design education and design projects can play a significant role in facilitating this road map.
By embracing systemic, innovative approaches and nurturing a culture of shared responsibility, we can address the sustainability challenge with purpose and resolve. This path leads to a resilient and harmonious future where humanity thrives in balance with nature. Sustainable development is not merely a necessity; it is a profoundly achievable and defining opportunity that demands our collective will and action.
Dr. Suptendu P. Biswas
Architect & Urban Designer VSPB Architects New Delhi
Architecture
Urban Design
Keynote D | 11:45, Day 2
Sustainability in Urban Thinking -- mediating landscape, architecture and the city
Keynote D | 11:45, Day 2
Sustainability in Urban Thinking -- mediating landscape, architecture and the city
Sustainability is about giving back what has been taken from the ‘mother’ earth -- that is the essence. Therefore, any intervention, whether it is in the cities or elsewhere, always tends to alter the existing situation. The idea is: how to reduce the adversity of such an impact. So, nuances of ‘balance’, ‘co-existence’ and ‘equity’ become critical, which depend on operations like, mapping, tracing, layering and reading at the working level. Of late, the SDGs identified by the UN have become the benchmark for any policy or project initiative. Post-Covid, concerns for climate are being expressed everywhere. However, one may also trace the ways of making urban interventions in harmony with its ‘context’ even before the discussions on sustainable development began.
This talk, taking clues from established methodologies, city reading and realized projects, will discuss a way to design/plan large-scale interventions to mediate between landscape, architecture and city beyond the imagined built-unbuilt binaries.
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