MS-HCI · Indiana University · Product Designer
Hi, I'm
Rhea.
From pretty early on in my career I believed that designers are everywhere, and what that means to me is that you don't stop being a designer when you close your laptop. You don't stop observing, noticing friction, asking why things are the way they are. Being a designer is a personality trait. It's how I move through the world, not just how I work in it.
Things I've
been part of.
Hover over each to learn the story behind it.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
The details are not the details. They make the design.
The making of
a designer.
Three chapters that shaped how I design, research, and think.
Srishti was beautifully chaotic, and exactly what I needed. My degree was genuinely transdisciplinary. I didn't just learn to design interfaces. I designed through the lens of transport design, public space, filmmaking, game design, fabric, and code. The variety wasn't random; it cemented something that became core to how I work: design is everywhere. Not just on screens, not just in products, everywhere. I left with a portfolio and a philosophy.
Indiana pushed me into research properly: how to ask better questions, conduct rigorous qualitative studies, and communicate design decisions to people from completely different disciplines. But equally valuable was everything outside the classroom: building and shipping live projects with AI tools, winning a hackathon, attending CES, spending time in the SETH Lab doing deep qualitative work. I came in knowing how to design. I left knowing how to think.
A semester in France changed how I see scale. I worked on a partnership project with Accenture, explored transport design across different cities, and navigated a culture and language completely outside my comfort zone. Collaborating with people from entirely different backgrounds, genuinely being out of my depth, accelerated my growth in ways a classroom never could. I came back with a more global lens, a sharper ability to adapt, and a deep belief that the best design thinking happens when you're somewhere unfamiliar.
Beyond
design.
I crochet, I travel, I take photos of things that probably no one else finds interesting. I believe the best designers are curious about everything, not just interfaces.
