I Am Amar Mohindra

I want to reshape how people move through the world. I want to bridge emerging interactive materiality practices with design for mobility and travel systems.

Professional Identity

I am an aspiring interaction designer dedicated to bettering mobility systems and their surrounding environments. I am driven by a passion for equitable access to mobility and the transformative power of travel. I blend materiality-driven approaches for open exploration in the early phases of design and user-centred systemic approaches to contextualise my exploration. I leverage my background in product development to execute projects scalably. I balance fundamental exploratory research with functional goals by grounding my projects in real-life contexts, though integrating these differing perspectives into a cohesive process is a challenge.

I enjoy making. By "making," I mean the process of creating, testing, and realising my design ideas. It is how I best express myself in executing my vision. I use making throughout my process: ideation, testing, and realisation. I combine my creative approach with strong digital fabrication skills to prototype. My work on magnetic soft robotics demonstrated how material-driven research can lead to new possibilities not achievable through traditional engineering methods.

I enjoy designing large-scale systems while retaining an empathetic, human-scale understanding of contexts. I aim to empathise with users and seek out first-person embodied experiences when designing. While interning at Mijksenaar, I dedicated many hours to experiencing travellers’ realities in railway stations before designing wayfinding systems.

My multicultural background and language skills enable me to connect deeply with people from various cultures, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment. I value feedback and incorporate diverse viewpoints to enhance my designs. Engaging with multiple stakeholders and interdisciplinary teams enriches my projects. I seek connections to grow and learn through others’ expertise, working best when inspired by co-designers and actively seeking collaboration even when working independently. This approach integrates diverse expertise and maintains high motivation and creativity. Thriving in dynamic environments, my professional journey is guided by a commitment to challenge the status quo and combine my passions for mobility and interactive materiality.

Vision

Today, I find myself in a world where travel is not a simple act of exploration but a complex web of bureaucratic hurdles. A legacy of colonialism has left citizens of 'undesirable' places like me, restricted from freely experiencing the world. I was forced to navigate a maze of personal and financial documents just to secure a brief visit to the EU for six days – a process that was not only time-consuming but also deeply frustrating. Why should my right to see the world be any less than anyone else's? Are we not all human, deserving of the same opportunities to explore and learn?

On the other hand, there are those from the imperial core, who often have the rights and means to travel but choose not to – does exploration not appeal to them? My (Dutch) girlfriend's grandparents were such people – their fear of 'strange foreigners' was deeply ingrained. Meeting me shattered many of their preconceived notions and sparked a shift in their beliefs on 'brown' foreigners. This personal encounter with diversity humanised me in their eyes, and I believe it has the power to do the same for others. If people expose themselves to more of the world, they will begin to understand and appreciate its diversity, leading to a more inclusive and empathetic society.

These cases exemplify why access to mobility is of immense importance to me. Not wanting to change the world is a statement of the privileged – I must create change. But how do you make people want to move and move well (Project 2 – Natural Wayfinding)?  Mobility has trended towards two extremes in the last decades: blind efficiency – lower costs; more exclusivity – higher costs [7]. Adults trade meaningful experiences for cost; for a child, the journey is everything [1]– I believe the experience matters (Internship).

Simultaneously, we are seeing a rise in the ubiquity of embedded systems, and screens are the most common interface [5] – ocular-centric information will become overwhelming. As computers become a part of our environment, we must interact more seamlessly with them. As early as the 90s, designers proposed a vision for such interaction design [3]. Practices of good urban design proposed by Jan Gehl [2] say cities must be designed prioritising the multisensory embodied experience. A street must not just let traffic flow but also consider a pedestrian's tactile, kinaesthetic, and auditory experience.

My understanding of working with large-urban-scale design, alongside Tangible and Shape-Change user interface design [4], is how I want to design for mobility. Taking interactive and shape-changing materials out of labs and contextualising them demonstrates that an 'impossible' tangible multisensory future is achievable.

 [1]Michael Bond. 2021. Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. Pan Macmillan, London.
[2]Jan Gehl. 2011. Life Between Buildings.
[3]Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer. 1997. Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. ACM. Retrieved from https://trackr-media.tangiblemedia.org/publishedmedia/Papers/331-Tangible%20Bits%20Towards%20Seamless/Published/PDF
[4]Elvin Karana, Bahar Barati, Valentina Rognoli, and van. 2015. Material Driven Design (MDD): A Method to Design for Material Experiences. International Journal of Design; Vol 9, No 2 (2015) 9, 2 (2015). Retrieved 2015 from https://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1965
[5]Bruce Montgomery. 2022. Interface Design for Embedded and Real-Time Systems. (January 2022), 133–171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-251-7_65 
[6]Sara Paiva, Mohd Ahad, Gautami Tripathi, Noushaba Feroz, and Gabriella Casalino. 2021. Enabling Technologies for Urban Smart Mobility: Recent Trends, Opportunities and Challenges. Sensors 21, 6 (March 2021), 2143. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s21062143     
[7]Victoria Transport Policy Institute. 2022. Transportation Cost and Benefit Analysis II -Travel Time Costs 5.2 Travel Time and Speed. Retrieved from https://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0502.pdf