I fervently believe in research as a necessity for good design, and I teach it that way.
Being a student in an art & design school, that was the moment for me, that was when I began to develop a lot of self-confidence and really come into my own.
I wanted to be anything but a designer. I was not willing to enroll into fashion school. It is just because that was the last resort and there was nothing else, I had to do it!
There are now college degrees in game design and interactive media, so if I were starting now, I would probably do that. When I started, you had to break into design from QA or programming or art, but it's really not true anymore.
There's a big difference between decorators and designers and the training is very different.
Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.
We want people to realize you are at a design school, not a land grant college. The way we look says a great deal about who we are.
Victor Papenack, who was teaching design, had his students making radios for a penny each that could be shipped to Third World people.
I'm experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there's little risk in that.
We have lots to learn in India when it comes to design, and that includes me! I'm constantly learning; that never stops.
That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.
The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.
I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.
After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn't really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging.
I used to sit in bed at night and flip through design-school catalogs. I found out that Parsons accepted a small number of high school juniors, so I applied my sophomore year and got in.
I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.
Design in India is as important as Make in India.
So many young designers are focused on styling rather than materials now. We have to change that.
I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.
I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.
The thing about Parsons compared to the other schools is that it really teaches you how to be a designer, whereas some of the other schools teach you to sketch or teach you the technical skills. But the curriculum at Parsons when I was there was how do you put a collection together, as well as all the technical stuff. It's the best training.
There are just so many young designers now.
I believe that to further strategic growth and development via design, we need to have a set of public design policies.
I knew since the age of four that I wanted to be a clothing designer. I read an article in LIFE magazine about two young ladies that graduated from Parsons School of Design, and when they graduated they went to Paris and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor opened a boutique for them. So I thought, "Oh, I just have to go to Parsons, that's all."
I went to Parsons, and I interned with Ronen when I was at Parsons. We started our own company since then.
