Ritwik Dey is an Interaction Designer. For “Designers as ChangeMakers”, he talks about the sad state of the Indian education system and his struggle with it. He comes from an engineering background and talks about his growth as a designer and his love for information design and data visualization. Amongst other things he talks about his two projects – Mumbai Voices and EMCounter. Both the projects are based on data collection and cater to the needs to the emerging nations. Ritwik works at the digital ad agency R/GA and spends his spare time being a photographer.

Shweta Mudgal is an architect previously working with L&T in Mumbai and SOM in New York City on the Mumbai International Airport. Shweta acquired her BArch in Mumbai and her MArch from Southern California University of Architecture (SciArc).

For the second part of the Designwala feature – ‘Designers as Changemakers‘, Shweta talks about architecture as a profession in India, primarily in Mumbai where she grew up and went to architecture school. Among other things, Shweta brings up the roles that the Indian architects are playing which are primarily elitest. She talks about the divide between urban development projects that aim at creating a better city for all its inhabitants and the commercial architecture specifically aimed at the upper middle class and the rich. She outlines reasons regarding why the architects are building what they are building and how this could change in the future.