Dear DAAD Selection Committee,
In the house I grew up in, rice was never cooked for twenty minutes. It was cooked for three whistles. My mother could count the pressure cooker's progress while doing three other things. I was already a design student before I understood it as an interface: audio feedback for someone whose eyes and hands were busy elsewhere. Nobody thanked the cooker for its cleverness. How do we learn to value what we cannot see?
My parents associated science and engineering with security, and worried that design could not hold up a life. I understand their doubt: design is hardest to see exactly when it works. My generation spoke in missed calls: one ring meant “I have reached”, two meant “come down, I am outside”. People built that language around a constraint. It is still the most honest definition of user experience I know.
At NIFT Bhubaneswar, Fashion Communication gave me visual design, UI and UX, and creative strategy. My IT minor taught me Java, ecommerce systems and backend development. I wanted to understand what happens behind an interface, and to speak to an engineer without needing a translator.
A semester with autistic children at a special school taught me that observation comes before invention. We tested an AR application with the children and their teachers; many first ideas did not survive the first visit. For an IKEA assembly prototype, I asked people on Reddit where they had given up. Help was needed at step 23, not step one. In Unity, I combined visual overlays, haptic feedback and audio confirmation at the points where people got stuck. Perhaps that last idea came from a pressure cooker.
My zine, They Have a Name Too, introduced neighbours to dogs who had lived in our housing society for thirteen years. A name, a temperament, likes and dislikes; then an AR portrait and a voice. Frightened neighbours could meet the dogs first at home, on their own terms. Within days, people who had shooed them away were stopping to read. Design had changed the behaviour of people I passed every morning.
Germany draws me for two connected reasons. The word Einfühlung, “feeling into”, began there: interaction design asks us to feel our way into both a person and the object in their hands. Germany also treats craft as a profession, through training, the Meisterbrief and traditions such as the Walz. I want to learn how a maker's skill becomes legible and valued. In a sense, this master's is my own Walz.
My first choice is User Experience Design at TH Ingolstadt, particularly Prof. Andreas Riener's work on stress and cognitive overload. I want to answer my IKEA project's question with sensors, controlled user studies and a usability lab: how does a system recognise when a person is about to give up? I am also applying to Design for Digital Futures at TH Nürnberg, where I have been in contact with Prof. Moritz Schwind, and Interactive Media Systems at TH Augsburg.
The research question I want to carry began with Prada's Kolhapuri-inspired sandals. We defend our crafts loudly online and bargain them down quietly at the counter. I do not think this is hypocrisy. I think it is a design failure. A price tag shows rupees, never hours. When I helped Pipli appliqué artisans list their work online, there was room for a photograph and a price, but not the days of stitching behind each piece.
The moment of bargaining is the craft buyer's step 23. Imagine a tag that shows hours of making, or a scan that lets the artisan introduce the piece in their own voice. Not to shame anyone out of negotiating, but to make the cost of making visible. I plan to begin at Dilli Haat, observing conversations about price and timing pieces with the makers' permission; develop a tested system in Germany; then return to India to build these layers with craft clusters.
I currently create campaigns for eight D2C brands at a marketing agency. It has taught me speed, discipline and the language of clients. The DAAD scholarship would let me devote the coming years to the language I do not yet speak well. We value what we cannot see when someone designs the moment in which it becomes visible: a whistle, a dog's name, a tag that reveals a day of someone's life. Learning to design those moments is why I want to study in Germany. Making them where they are most missing is why I will come back.
With warm regards,
Komal Sharan
