Sem 10
Design Dissertation

Prasad Khanolkar

The Design Dissertation presentations for the academic year 2025–26 were held in April 2026, marking the culmination of an intensive six-month design research process undertaken by the graduating cohort at SEA. Each dissertation advanced a distinct spatial argument, situating architectural design within ongoing transformations in urban life, environments, and socio-economic structures in different geographies.

Across the two days, the work coalesced around a set of interrelated thematic inquiries. First, several projects examined extended and reconfigured urban fields—from recreation and parks to industrial landscapes and commercial edges—exploring how conventional boundaries of use and access can be opened up to accommodate more inclusive and dynamic forms of public life. Second, a group of dissertations engaged with tactical interventions within existing institutions, reworking abandoned, regulated, or highly conditioned spaces through new forms of occupation, sensory strategies, and plural public claims.

A third line of inquiry foregrounded care, behaviour, and lived experience, investigating how architecture can respond to diverse bodily, cognitive, and social conditions—from autism care to healing environments—while shaping everyday practices in shared spaces.

Parallel to this, many projects addressed adaptability and changing modes of habitation, proposing flexible housing systems, co-living models, and live–work continuums that respond to processes such as redevelopment, migration, and shifts in domestic and economic life.

On the second day, the discussions extended into emerging spatial modalities and design processes, including explorations of memory, belonging, coexistence, and human–AI collaboration. Questions of mobility and transient inhabitation were explored through infrastructures for pilgrims, migrants, and digital nomads. Another set of projects examined collective life within intense logics of redevelopment, rethinking vertical housing, shared spaces, and neighbourhood formations.

Together, the dissertations reflect a sustained engagement with the ongoing changes shaping contemporary habitats, asking how architectural design can actively participate in and reframe these transformations to enable more responsive and diverse forms of living.

Ananya Khandagale

Parth Kocharekar

Nidhi Bhoir