Shortly before graduating, I was at the Makerspace where I was working my research thesis from earlier, Makers Asylum. For the Maker Market they had set up, I had decided to prototype ‘Wasted Opportunity’ where I was met by an outstanding strange man.

Avinash Kumar is the founder of a human centred design agency known as Quicksand. He played my game and asked me to join him and his studio as a designer. I was immediately drafted for a project on Augmented Reality with an NGO known as Quest Alliance. In a nutshell to set the context, I proceeded to work on a project to leverage Augmented Reality for training ITI (Industrial training institute) students for emerging green jobs, like Electric Vehicle repair and Solar Technician.

ITIs are government establishments to bring labour intensive industrial training to rural spaces for students who drop out of school to pursue an industrial trade. This would involve Electrical and so but now involves Robotics and Motorized Vehicles. Basically they've come far and are pushing further. What was interesting to me was the use of Experiential Realities to do so.

We travelled to GandÈhinagar, Chennai, Tiruchirapalli and more to perform research on these ITI spaces. This field research is what opened my eyes to the way repair culture is taught in local communities, by government job workers. I was experiencing an experiential reality for myself.