Dr. Shilpa Das is Principal Faculty, Interdisciplinary Design Studies. She designed and has been heading NID’s PhD Programme since 2017 and Science and Liberal Arts Studies at NID since 2004. An alumnus of JNU New Delhi (MA), Gujarat University (MPhil), and TISS Mumbai (PhD), she has work experience of 30 years in the education, publishing, and voluntary sectors.

Shilpa has been the Founding Co-Editor of The Trellis, a research publication and a magazine, D/signed at NID. She is the editor, author and creative visualizer of the book “50 Years of the National Institute of Design: 1961-2011” (2013); and co-editor of the book, “Indian Crafts in a Globalizing World” (2017). She has several published research papers in journals, chapters in books, and school textbooks. She has been editorial consultant to Collins Cobuild Dictionaries, UK and to the Gujarat State Textbook Board, Gandhinagar.  She is co-editor of a special issue on Human Centred Design in Global Health for the journal, Global Health: Science and Practice and Reviewer for The Design Journal, Taylor and Francis.

Select courses she teaches are Aesthetics; History of Design; History of Art; History of Objects; Indian Story Telling Traditions; Design for Disability; Cultural Studies; Form, Emotion, Culture; Disability Studies; and Craft Documentation. She has been Visiting Faculty at Marist College, New York; HTW Berlin, Germany; SWIT, Melbourne, Australia; HSLU, Lucerne, Switzerland; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; School of Architecture CEPT, Ahmedabad; IIT Bombay among others. She has been awarded research grants with Konstfack University, Sweden and Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship; Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, and Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland.

Her notable projects have been for the Indian Navy, Department of Health and Family Welfare; Ministry of Women and Child Development, Department of Telecommunications, and Department of Posts and Telegraph, Government of India.

She was on the Board of Advisors to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2018 on using human-centered design (HCD) in global health; and, in 2019-20 on the Core Project on women’s sexual/reproductive health in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. She has been on the Advisory Board of the Swiss Graduate Network of Use-Inspired Research in Design, Switzerland since 2018. She serves widely on international juries, PhD Defences and scientific committees.

At NID, she co-convened an international conference on Indian Crafts in India, “Indian Crafts: The Future in A Globalising World” in 2004 and convened “Insight 2018”, an international conference on design research in 2018.