Kiran Bir Sethi

Kiran Bir Sethi
Born	Kiran Bir (1966-04-08) 8 April 1966 Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Residence	Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Citizenship	Indian
Alma mater	Bishop Cotton Girls' School National Institute of Design
Occupation	Director, The Riverside School, Ahmedabad Director, Design for Change
Spouse(s)	Geet Sethi

Kiran Bir Sethi (born 8 April 1966) is an Indian designer, educationist, education reformer, and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of The Riverside School, Ahmedabad, India and of Design for Change. She also initiated the aProCh movement. Born in Bangalore, India, Sethi comes from a family of designers. With a degree in visual communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she began her career designing restaurants, and later, writing for newspapers. While she had always been interested in design thinking and designing experiences, it was when her children started going to school that Sethi recognised her true calling. Dismayed by the unfriendly and rigid atmosphere in schools, she set up The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, followed by aProCh, and finally Design for Change.

Early life

Born and brought up in Bangalore, Sethi's parents had a significant influence on her life. Her mother, Asha Bir was one of her earliest role models and her father, Raghbir Singh Bir ignited her then nascent interest in design. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of technology, he was a notable industrial designer who had designed the first indigenous lathe machine in India. Sethi is the youngest of three children and had originally aspired to become a cardiac surgeon. A chance visit to the National Institute of Design campus to visit her sister, who had also studied there, changed her path. She fell in love with the place and decided to appear for the entrance exam even before she had finished school. Her application was accepted and Sethi eventually graduated with a degree in Visual communication.^[1][2][3]

Career

Design

Sethi wanted to work with designing the customer experience after graduating college. Her stint at designing restaurants went beyond designing the interiors and sourcing material to food presentation, entertainment, even communication design in terms of the language used to interact with customers.^[1]

Riverside

Sethi founded The Riverside School, Ahmedabad in 2001. Stemming from her desire to provide a more varied and rounded education for her own children, Riverside's approach to learning is embedded in common sense. The students learn how to apply their education in the real world through experimental methods of pedagogy, continuously ongoing research and documentation, understanding the reality of disparity and social and economic differences, working in professional settings, cultivating relationships with the community and maintaining a high academic standard evaluated through standardised testing. The school has grown steadily from 27 students and 7 teachers in 2001 to 374 students and 56 teachers students in 2013.^[4]

aProCh

While encouraging the Riverside students to engage more actively in Ahmedabad's civic life, Sethi realised how unfriendly city spaces and the public sphere were to children. They were unwelcome and nearly invisible in the complex spectrum of city life. This led to the creation of aProCh (a Protagonist in every Child), a multi-faceted initiative to establish the interest and importance of children in the city's functioning. In partnership with the city municipal corporation, city police, news agencies and business and design universities in Ahmedabad, aProCh attempts to organise cities to create secure and nurturing environments and spaces for children.^[2][5]

Design for Change

Sethi started Design for Change in 2009.^[6][7]

Awards and Other recognition

Sethi became an Ashoka Fellow in 2008. Her initiative – Design for Change was the winner of the most prestigious design award, INDEX – Design to Improve Life Award, in Copenhagen, Denmark in September 2011 and she was a recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation Innovation award in 2012. She won the Patricia Blunt Koldyke Fellowship 2013 in Social Entrepreneurship.^[1]

Sethi has also been invited to speak at a number of summits and conferences including TED, the M.I. Symposium, i4P Society, and Ashoka.^[8][9]

Personal life

Sethi lives in Ahmedabad with her husband, world billiards champion Geet Sethi and their two children, Raag, a musical prodigy, and Jazz.^[10]

References