What an absolute stunner of a week we’ve had. The Inspiration Week, as we termed it, was just that and some. The idea behind this week was to broaden the minds of our students and inspire them. We invited achievers from various walks of life to our campus to share their inspirations and motivations with our students, thereby stirring creative thoughts and ideas in their minds. Our aim was to make them realise that creativity and inspiration can come to different people in different ways. And that they should be open enough to realise that, for example car and product designers have used nature and people and their own experiences to come up with extraordinary designs. We wanted our students to realise that creativity has no boundaries and that apart from polishing their own craft, they should explore other aspects of their personality to keep producing fresh and contemporary designs.

During the Inspiration Week we had a singer, cartoonist, film maker, and some leading designers. The sessions left the students mesmerized and asking for more. So keen and inspired were our students that they have already started inquiring when are we holding this event again. We wrapped up the week with students filling the walls with graffiti. Given below are profiles of those who graced our campus during the electrifying Inspiration Week:

James Woudhuysen
James Woudhuysen is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. A St Paul’s School scholar and physics graduate, he has a knack of registering trends before other people, and offering counter-intuitive proposals on what to do about those trends.

Prasad Boradkar
Prasad Boradkar is an assistant professor in the School of Design at Arizona State University in Tempe. He holds degrees in industrial design and mechanical engineering, and has held positions at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands as well as ITT Technical Institute in California. At ASU, Prasad teaches studio, design history, and materials & processes at the undergraduate level, and a graduate course on design and cultural studies. The central objective of his research activities is to perform critical cultural analyses of objects, thereby expanding their accepted meanings in industrial design discourse.

Ashish Deshpande
Ashish Deshpande is the founder director & principal designer of Elephant Strategy + Design. He’s an Industrial Design Graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and specialized in Product Design.

Raju Sutar
Raju Sutar graduated G. D. Art (Drawing and Painting) from Abhinav Kala Mahavidyala, Pune specializing in portrait painting in the year 1992. He has held several art exhibitions, and drawing and painting workshops. Presently, he is a curator at Waves Art Gallery, which in the last four years has come to represent quality art and has caught the attention of collectors, artists and patrons. In being associated with respected names such as Shergil, Subramanyam, Husain and Souza among others, the gallery has also become a sustainable platform for young artists.

Ashok Panwalkar
Ashok Panwalkar, Founder & Creative Director of 3F Design has to his credit a Post Graduation in Industrial Design from IIT Powai and a long innings of 27 years at Philips Design ( Design division of Global Philips Electronics company). Now with 3F Design he applies his creative capability, diverse design experience & sense of humor to create interesting Fun Accessories for home & beyond. Leveraging on his professional experience, passion for design & urge to give something uncommon to the people he decided to launch new range of unusual products for people to bring fun & humour in their respective Spaces. He’s trying to address the issues of the mounting stress, in today’s date by designing Home accessories which he calls ‘Fun Accessories’.

Aparna Panshikar
Having been born in a family renowned for its passion and achievements in various forms of performing arts, Aparna had an early introduction to Indian (Hindusthani) Classical music. Her first Guru, late Pandit Bhaskarbua Joshi was a direct disciple of the late Pandit Ramkrishnabua Vaze, who was a well-known and leading singer from the Gwalior gharana. The Gwalior gharana is considered to be the source from which all the other gharanas of Hindusthani Classical music have evolved. Aparna is currently training under her mother, Smt. Meera Panshikar who is a direct disciple of Padma Vibhushan Ganasaraswati Smt. Kishori Amonkar.

Vaijnath Dulange
A graduate of G. D. Art, Mumbai, Vaijnath Dulange, is a well-known cartoonist, and has worked as an artist with Ajanta, Marathawada, Lokmat, Tarun Bharat and several other Newspapers. Over the past 18 years, he has been contributing to the cartoon column “Kay Sangata” published in the daily Sakal. He has also given several lectures and demonstrations on Cartooning and held workshops on cartooning all over Maharashtra.

Omkar Barve
Omkar Barve was chief assistant with film maker Umesh Kulkarni on his two acclaimed movies, Vihir and Deool.