Sahil Thappa is Maker, Tinkerer and an alumnus of the Product Design programme at National Institute of Design. He has a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) from Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh. He has Five years of experience in the field of industrial design and two years in automotive manufacturing and oil industry.

While at NID he has been working in the domain of design democracy, open design, making, sustainable development, co-creation, digital fabrication and alternative industrial design practices. He has helped setup maker spaces in schools and developed curriculum for running such spaces and programmes.

He has collaborated and worked with organisations and firms like Mozilla, Riverside School, Design Against Crime, University of Dundee, Design Regio Kortrijk, Hill Hacks, Ahmedabad Prison, JSW Foundation, Quicksand, FabLab etc.

He was one of the three global designers to be part of the Designers In Residence Kortrijk 2017. He worked with two international designers and the city of Kortrijk, Belgium for 3 months and did 3 participatory architectural scale public installations for the city.

Currently he is faculty in Product Design and teaches making, open source and systems thinking. Apart from this he’s interested in music, origami, speculative design and reading.

He heads User Centred Design Lab at Paldi campus and is looking at an anti-disciplinary approach to fuse design tools & methods, ecology, technology, tinkering and open source.