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.
Click any card to learn the full story.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them, and zero in on the best solution.
Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your customers and their reactions.
The making of
a designer.
Three chapters that shaped how I design, research, and think.
Download Resume ↗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.
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.
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.
Beyond
design.
I crochet, travel, take photos of everything that I find interesting because I truly believe that design is everywhere and therefore inspiration and learning is everywhere. I believe that the best designers are curious about everything.
