Chakradhar Saswade

Chakradhar Saswade

Responsibilities

Discipline Lead, Information Design

Discipline Faculty, Information Design


Chakradhar teaches theory and practice of Visual Semiotics, Aesthetics and Design Fundamentals in NID.

He has his doctoral research experience in photographic arts as a UGC-JRF scholar at M.S. University of Baroda. He joined Communication Design at NID Ahmedabad in 1999 for a two-year Faculty Development Programme in Design Foundation and later co-led and led the Foundation Programme from 2001 to 2012. On Ahmedabad campus, he taught a range of courses in basic design, symbol design, visual narrative and the ‘environmental perception’ conducted in villages for the students of foundation year. Later, he moved to Bengaluru campus and took up teaching courses in master's programme in information and interface design. Presently, he leads the MDes programme in Information Design.

His interests are information visualisation, icon, ideogram and symbol composition, visual rhetoric, and aspects of meaning, narrative and experientiality in virtual spaces. He teaches courses related to these in different disciplines at NID.

He has contributed to the curriculum in NID and at various central institutes, including IGNOU, PSSIVE, etc. He has written chapters on Drawing, Visualisation and Composition for an NCERT textbook on Graphic Design. He mentored programmes at NID Vijayawada in the years of its inception. His academic writings are published in NID's periodicals.

He co-chaired a national conference, 'Rethinking Basic Design Pedagogy', hosted by NID in 2015. He chaired a session on design fundamentals in the International Conference' Design Education Tradition Modernity' held at NID in 2005, represented the institute at the Icograda conference at Nagoya, Japan in 2004, was a jury member at the Moratuwa University, Colombo in 2010. He presented his experience teaching the Environmental Perception course in the 'Deconstructing Design Workshop' jointly organised by MHRD, IIT Hyderabad and IDC IIT Bombay in 2013

Chakradhar undertakes projects of designing visual identities under the IDS wing and has done the designs for Indian Institute of Management Mumbai, Yashobhoomi – IICC New Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya, Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan New Delhi, DICGC, NBCFDC, etc.

Chakradhar is a visual artist and poet. His work is exhibited in National exhibitions, and his poetry is published in a few major literary journals in the Marathi language.