The story so far..¶
Hello and welcome to my Fabricademy journey !
I am a product designer, educator and maker.
After working in the industry for several years doing product design and engineering, I now teach at the Somaiya School of Design, where I am one of the founding faculty. My teaching spans Material Exploration, Digital Fabrication, Coding and electronics, and Design Foundations such as Product Semantics, Interaction, and Data Visualization. I co-lead the Tangible Products specialisation, where I guide Lighting and Furniture design.
My practice, my learning, and hence my teaching, is usually intensely exploratory and I try to bring in a large component of play.
My Interests¶
My interests, personal as well as teaching, range or intersect across the shifting sands of :
- Material play - making, building with paper, clay, wood, concrete, resin, glass and metal, and craftsmanship of any kind
- Digital play - procedural generation, quirky webpages, bots, data art, new media
- Closing the circle between the material and the digital - digital fabrication, plotter art
, 3d scanning, interactive electronics
- Traditional crafts, and their interaction with modern technology
Beyond my obvious affinities with Design and Fabrication, I have also been studying (somewhat sporadically)
- history : in terms of prehistory, protohistory, Big History, and with an interest in the British Raj, himalayan explorations and cartography
- culinary anthropology : the study of how food and society shape each other, through the lenses of culture and history, geography and climate, economics, caste and religion, diaspora, politics, production and supply, and everything else, and with deep dives into Indian food traditions - desserts, alcohols, etc
- futuring techniques and speculation
Apart from the above approaches, some areas that I am deeply interested in
- Knotwork and weaving
- Origami, Kirigami, folds and pleats
- Math and/in Nature as well as Math based art
- Photography, Star gazing, light and optics
- Geometry, especially Islamic Geometric Art
- Mythology
- Language studies and scripts
I have travelled multiple times by bicycle and foot through Ladakh, a region of the Himalayas, as well as Gujarat, in western India. This slow, local travel has given me a profound appreciation of the land and it's people. It has seeded or been fed by, for example, my interest in the history and geography of the Himalayan region, it's cartography and geology, the Buddhism and Tibetan art, and so on, and it is often difficult to say whether I travel there because these interest me, or these interest me because I travel there, but I am deeply moved and hold the region very close to my heart.
Similarly, through the Somaiya School of Design and the Somaiya Kala Vidya, I have had the privilege of meeting and being taught by the local craftspeople of Kutch, part of the desert region of Western India. This has led to a renewed interest in the fabric and textile arts, printing, dyeing, weaving and so on.
I read a lot of science fiction, graphic novels, and poetry. Occasionally, I write some.
I am currently rebuilding my rock collection.
Projects I am fond/proud of¶
3D Printed braces for Clubfoot Therapy
I worked on 3D printed braces for babies born with club-foot syndrome. The existing devices that were used to correct the misalignment of the foot were physically uncomfortable, and visually looked like medieval torture devices, so parents were taking them off either out of worry or very often out of embarassment when in public or having visitors at home, causing relapses and nullifying the therapy.
I was part of a team that was working on 3D printed braces that could be made to custom measurements of each baby, and a new version with increasingly corrected angles could be shipped out every few weeks. The doctors found it did the job but most importantly, the parents loved it as it looked like a fancy sock or a cast, and not raising as many eyebrows and difficult questions. This was a brilliant project combining empathy, design, and digital fabrication. My role was to create a workflow that would generate the brace stl based on a few key measurements.
Vera Molnar was a pioneer of generative art, being prolific since the 60s. She wrote code that would run plotters and move pens to draw based on the algorithms she created. As a woman, and an artist, in tech, in the 60s, she was a trailblazer in many ways. I am a huge fan, and in an ongoing effort to study her and her work, I began by recreating a lot of her pieces in modern code, mainly p5.js, and plotting them using my plotter.
Why Fabricademy¶
I have been fascinated with what materials and processes can do since a long while. The general instruction in my material and fabrication classes is always
"What can this material or process do that nothing else can, and how far can you push it to do things it has never before done ?"
In the past few years, I have started to dig into both electronics and coding with the same approach. I am also comfortable, though I would not consider myself an expert, in the common "hard" materials. Thirdly, I have always been someone close to nature, whether through my pets and plants, or the trekking and travelling. Also, as a designer and student of history, I am conscious of some of the ailments that modern civilisation suffers, and in turn inflicts on the natural world.
Given all that, it was the obvious next step to sign up for Fabricademy, in order to explore soft materials and electronics and their intersection.
I am looking forward to three major directions :
- work with soft and bio materials, which are completely new to me, and are a leap forward in sustainability
- work with wearable and skin electronics, which takes electronics skills and application to a whole new level
- move beyond high-skill to high-concept, and be able to make statements and tell stories with my work
I also want to deep dive into Paper as a material. As advised by Anastasia, I will try to do every week as far as possible with some element of paper. However, there may be modules where such a connection will be impossible or very light. I also do not want to make that a limitation.
I will also try to have or maybe let evolve an overall theme to the weekly exercises, as well as the final project. Let us see what comes up.
Find me across cyberspace¶
Fab sites¶
Jesal Mehta Fab23 : My FabAcademy website
RIIDL FabLab Fab24 : Lab page for Fab24
RIIDL FabLab Fab25 : Lab page for Fab25 - fun page, check it out
Personal Website and Portfolio¶
The Cabinet of Curiosities : General sandbox for me to play in, showcase the digital projects, setup adhoc pages and so on
Creative Coding Visuals on Behance
Older work¶
Many Makings¶
A longer history of journey. This was an earlier draft but I am choosing to leave it here nonetheless.
License to Play¶
Ever since I was a kid, I have been making and doing things. I have always played with paper, clay, strings, plaster, etc. I studied Mechanical Engineering and then eventually Industrial Design. Design added a whole new dimension to my ability as well as approach to making. It also gave me, in some sense, not just a license to play but also the ability to articulate why this play was meaningful and important.
Making goes Digital¶
Digital Fabrication was just emerging onto the scene as I graduated from my Design course. Being part of the local makerspace in Mumbai, Maker's Asylum, I had my first brush wth 3D Printing and Lasercutting. The 3D printing was so buggy back then that I dismissed it summarily with an oh-no-way. However, I got into lasercutting in a big way, prototyping for my work, playing with materials as well as vector work, and for a while, led their Lasercutting section (a volunteer position) while also doing training sessions, workshops, and hackathon mentoring.
As I started work in the Lighting industry, electronics - which was my doom during engineering studies - became familiar, and more practical. I developed great soldering skills since I'd be working with the folks on the factory floor, showing them operations for a new product, or learning their workflows to optimise assembly.
While I was aware of the Arduino due to my friends at Maker's Asylum, I only really got into it when I started teaching Physical Computing. I had had various kinds of exposure to coding all the way from primary school, and I finally went breadboard-and-jumpers on the Arduino.
In 2019, after reading a blog post by a Dutch artist who built his own Clay 3D printer, my interest in 3D printing rose again (for the third time.) I asked friends for reviews and advice, and finally got myself a Prusa MK3S+ Kit, that I assembled by myself. Doing this also gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to troubleshoot it, a factor that had caused me to abandon the idea earlier.
Playing with Code¶
While I had exposure to coding, databases, etc through my school as well as engineering studies, and I always loved it, I discovered Processing relatively late. I had been looking for ways to plot mathematical equations, but I did not want to go back to MatLab, and using MS Excel as a simulator had it's limitations. But in 2018, during a lull in my practice, I finally decided to check out this thing I had been hearing about, and then ran absolutely wild with it. Since then, I have played with Processing and p5.js, doing math-art, interaction, visual effects, typography, as well as bringing it out of the screen to lasercutting, plotting, 3D printing, and more. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Teaching¶
I have been teaching almost fulltime since 2018, and have had the honor of being founding faculty at two of Mumbai's design schools; formerly at NMIMS School of Design, and currently at the Somaiya School of Design.
When I was taking workshops at Maker's Asylum, I realised the best way for me to sit myself down and learn and figure something, was to teach a workshop on it. Having that external accountability worked for me, and I'd launch workshops on whatever skill or area I wanted to explore that month - lasercut jewellery, origami lamps, stencilling, and more.
I took a similar path in my formal teaching, taking up areas I was already very interested and somewhat good at, and using the opportunity to deep dive into it. This has led me to being able to take up multiple verticals - Materials and Fabrication, Technology, the aesthetic and semantic nuances of Design, as well as Lighting and Furniture design.
The Fab chronicles¶
I graduated from the Fabacedemy program in 2023, and attended Fab23 in Bhutan. The program was quite a journey in itself, pushing my skillsets as well as other abilities - workflows and time management, yes, but also confidence in myself, in asking for help, reaching out and connecting to people, and so much more.
I came back from Fab23 and raised 3 proposals : - That FabAcademy should be a student program, not just a faculty program. - That Fabricademy be the next program the design school starts. - That the school should develop and streamline labs, and specifically a Paper Lab.
I am very happy to say that in the intervening 2 years, we have run 2 cohorts of FabAcademy with our students, and that the school is a also a node for Fabricademy with me being the second cohort after my colleagues Gunjan and Shefali. The Paper Lab is third in the list and it may be time now to start pushing for it. Who knows where that will lead.
I met the Fab community at Fab25 in Czechia as well, and it was a warm homecoming of sorts - catching up with people from last time as well as making new friends. I am truly in awe and in love with the community and continually inspired by them.