Specialisation Studies
Product Design
Siddhesh Kadam and Milind Mahale

Jiya Bhandari

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“But Why?”



"Why?"



There was silence around the table.



"Why this material?"



Someone began answering. "Because it's durable."



"But many materials are durable."



Another pause.



"Okay... then why this form?"

A few of us laughed. By this point in the course, we knew exactly where this was going. No matter what answer you gave, another “why”  was waiting.

That, in many ways, became the soundtrack of our Product Design studio.

We would spend hours making prototypes, laser-cutting parts, testing materials, refining details, and finally place our work on the discussion table, convinced we had figured it out. Within minutes, one simple question would unravel everything we thought we knew.

"But why?"

At first, it felt intimidating. Sometimes even frustrating. We thought we had to defend our ideas, almost as if there was a correct answer hidden somewhere. But gradually, the question stopped feeling like criticism and started feeling like curiosity. It wasn't asking us to prove ourselves, it was asking us to understand our own decisions.

One discussion that has stayed with me began with something as ordinary as choosing a material.

"If this object were made in wood instead of acrylic, what changes?"



"The weight," someone answered.



"Only the weight?"



"The texture."



"The way it feels."



"The way it's made."



"The way it ages."



"The way light passes through it."

The list kept growing.

What began as a discussion about materials slowly became a conversation about experience. We realised that a material isn't simply what an object is made of- it shapes how we interact with it, how we understand it, and even how we remember it.

These conversations rarely belonged to just one person's project.  Someone would be discussing a hinge, and suddenly another person would rethink the opening mechanism of their own object. Someone else's failed prototype would unexpectedly solve a problem you had been struggling with for days. You could spend ten minutes listening to a desk critique that had nothing to do with your project and walk back with three new ideas.

The studio became less about individual desks and more about a shared workspace where everyone was learning from everyone else's experiments.

There was also something refreshing about failure becoming visible.

Our tables were never filled only with polished models. They held broken acrylic pieces, rejected laser cuts, material samples, masking tape, rough mock-ups, sketches with crossed-out ideas and mechanisms that almost worked. Looking back, those imperfect fragments probably tell the story of the studio more honestly than the final products do.

One conversation I remember clearly happened when someone picked up another student's prototype.

"Don't hold it like that."



"Why?"



"Because that's not how it's supposed to be used."



"But how would I know that?"

The room fell quiet for a moment. That simple exchange shifted the discussion completely. If an object needs instructions before someone can use it, is the design communicating well enough? Instead of correcting the user, maybe the object itself needed to change.

It was a reminder that as designers, we often become too familiar with our own ideas. We know every hidden joint, every intended movement and every small detail because we made them. But the person using the object for the first time doesn't have that knowledge. The object has to communicate on its own.

Coming from architecture, I was used to thinking at the scale of buildings and spaces. Product Design demanded a different kind of attention. Suddenly, a two-millimetre gap mattered. The thickness of a sheet mattered. The sound a lid made when it closed mattered. A tiny detail could completely change someone's experience of using an object.

By the end of the semester, everyone had designed something different. The outcomes varied, but the conversations often circled back to the same questions.

Those questions have stayed with me long after the studio ended. I now find myself unconsciously turning everyday objects over to understand how they are assembled, noticing joints, wondering why one material was chosen over another, or thinking about how a small design decision changes the way something is used.

Perhaps that is the most valuable thing I am taking away from this course.

Not a single product, prototype or model.

But a habit of asking why—again and again—until every design decision has a reason to exist. Sometimes, the most meaningful learning doesn't come from finding the right answer. It comes from learning to ask better questions.