Software designer and new media artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
I have spent over a decade designing and building complex, data-dense software for people doing serious things like air traffic control, satellite tasking, manufacturing, healthcare, and cybersecurity. My art practice runs parallel but attempts to tease out the mundane and curious parts of these seemingly dry worlds. It spans data visualization, motion studies, cartography, computational drawing, and physical objects. A lot of my work starts with custom tooling; the process often being the work as much as the output.
Designing for a diverse range of industries has allowed me to learn a little bit about a lot of things. Since I am not burdened by details, I have the luxury of creating high-level parallels across different industries and their workflows. An elevated expression of this approach is called Rhizomatic thinking, provided to us by the french philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who defines the Rhizome as an assemblage that allows connections between any of its constituent elements, regardless of any predefined ordering, structure, or entry point. Continuously drawing these parallels also helps one begin to see the artful in the mundane. Just like the Monobloc chair or the Bic pen, the ubiquity and simplicity of the designed object tells a fascinating story about its inception. Thousands of examples exist in things we take from granted every day, like airplanes, Google Maps, or shipping, all of which are great fodder for creative inquiry, in my opinion.
Some recurring preoccupations: the subtle ways software co-authors our decisions, emergent qualities buried in opaque algorithms, found media as raw material, the mundane as subject, the computer as instrument rather than tool, sports as art, cartography, biased data visualization, humor. I love reading the first half of every Wikipedia article, constantly questioning how something was made, or why it was there in the first place. If I had to put it in a pretentious way, I'd probably call it 'systems archeology'. (knowing full well that the term epistemeology exists, which feels too heavy for what I do).
Ultimately, I just make things for fun. Hope you enjoy it!
Work
Design Lead, Palantir • 2019—2026
Led product design across Foundry (enterprise data OS) and Apollo (software deployment platform) — designed workflows around data integration, access control, vulnerability management, devops, and visualization. Also helped manage a product design org of ~40 people across multiple product lines, and worked directly with various Fortune 500 companies to help them make sense of their data.
Designer, Formlabs • 2016—2019
Wide-ranging design work across hardware interfaces, installations, technical documentation, web, and trade show. Contributed to an installation at the MIT Media Lab and Times Square. Felt like design grad school.
B.Arch, B. Art, Rhode Island School of Design • 2011—2016
Computational drawing, parametric fabrication, sculpture, typography, web-based work. I probably learned everything except how to design a real building.
- Grew up in Ahmedabad, India to architect parents, spent a lot of time in or around construction sites, woodshops, and ammonia plotters (real blueprints) as a child.
- Traveled to a dozen countries all over Asia to play international junior tennis. The most interesting ones were Brunei, Syria, and Jordan.
- Spent a summer in Newport, RI as an on-set assistant on a movie starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix.
- Professional critic, hard to decouple critique from criticism in daily life, much to my wife's chagrin.
- Typically the most technical guy around art people, and most creative guy around tech people. I enjoy living on the seams.
- Guest critic for a variety of design and CAD classes at RISD, Parsons, & NYU ITP.
- I also occasionally do stand-up at small open mics arond Brooklyn.