The DRS is pleased to announce the appointment of our newest Fellow, Professor Amaresh Chakrabarti. Amaresh Chakrabarti is a senior professor and currently holds the chair of the Department of Design and Manufacturing at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineering Designers, UK, and a Fellow of the Design Society. His honours include ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award (2025); IISc’s Alumni-Award for Research-Excellence in Science & Engineering for outstanding contribution to engineering (2022); ‘Careers360 Faculty Research Award 2018’ for being the 'Most Outstanding Researcher' in Decision Sciences in India (2018); UK Morgans-Grampian Manufacturing Industry Achievements Competition Commendation Award (1994); Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Doctoral Fellowship for University of Cambridge, UK (1987); Overseas Research Students (ORS) Award by Committee of Vice-Chancellors, UK (1987), etc. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘AI EDAM’ (Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing) of Cambridge University Press. He is the founding President of ‘DeScIn’ – India’s peer Academy for Design Sciences.
Amaresh Chakrabarti has a holistic vision of education of design and manufacturing, where these together: embrace functionality, usability, aesthetics, economy and ecology; drive innovation at all levels; enrich and are enriched by research into them; are taught synergistically; and are inculcated at all levels including those in K12. In 2001, he established IdeasLab – India’s first ‘design observatory’ for experimental design research, initiated IISc’s Masters’ and PhD programmes in smart manufacturing, and helped transform its existing Master’s in Design programme, infusing Industry X.0. To integrate design thinking in school education, his team developed a design thinking methodology called ‘IISC’ design thinking (‘IISC’ stands for Identify-Ideate-Select-Consolidate), gamified it into a patented ‘DBox’ toolkit, and developed necessary pedagogy for training schoolchildren in design thinking (2019). He also co-developed India’s first indigenously designed ‘Smart Factory’. To democratize India’s design-education, he developed an innovative curriculum and a hybrid delivery model, and initiated a Centre of Excellence in design, for training, in five years, forty thousand students and professionals into fundamentals of design, prototyping, business and Industry-4.0. He is the founding chair of ICoRD – the International Conference Series on Research into Design.
Prof Chakrabarti has made fundamental contributions to functional reasoning, design synthesis, creativity, sustainability, informatics, design research methodology, and Industry X.0. DRM – a methodology for design research he co-developed with Prof Lucienne Blessing (2009) is taught in several universities. He developed world’s first automated configuration synthesis tool ‘FuncSION’ (1991, 1994). He also developed ‘Idea-Inspire’ – world’s first computational tool for inspiring ideation in bio-inspired design (2005). He also developed the SAPPhIRE’ model of causality - a rich representation of the functioning of technical or biological systems(2005). In addition to being used as the basis for Idea-Inspire, the model has been used widely, in developing measures for novelty, modelling design processes, structuring in-flight maintenance manuals, and capturing maintenance knowledge.
Speaking on about his appointment, Professor Chakrabarti said,
‘I look forward to contributing to the DRS by supporting practice of greater methodological rigour in carrying out design research, and forging greater connect with manufacturing.’
Publications
Bhaumik, R, Bhatt, A, Kumari, MC, Menon, Raghu S, and Chakrabarti, A (2019). A Gamified Model of Design Thinking for Fostering Learning in Children, A Chakrabarti (ed.), Research into Design for a Connected World, Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies 134, 235-245, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5977-4_1023-1035
Blessing, LTM, and Chakrabarti, A (2009). DRM, a Design Research Methodology, Springer Nature
Chakrabarti, A (1991). Designing by Functions, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, UK
Chakrabarti A, and Bligh, TP (1994). Functional Synthesis of Solution-Concepts in Mechanical Conceptual Design. Part I: Knowledge Representation, Research in Engineering Design, Vol 6, No 3, pp-127-141
Chakrabarti, A, Sarkar, P, Leelavathamma, B, Nataraju, BS (2005) A Functional Representation for Aiding Biomimetic and Artificial Inspiration of New Ideas, AI EDAM 19(2): 113-132