Designing for Change in Education - A Conversation with Kiran Bir Sethi

Kiran Bir Sethi is a designer who became a teacher, a principal
who grew into an education reformer and subsequently morphed into
a social entrepreneur. A trained graphic designer from the
National Institute of Design, she comfortably uses the language
of design – iteration, prototype, design specs – to develop not
only curriculum innovation, but also community-based social
programmes.


Kiran founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad,
India, in 2001. Riverside, is viewed as a laboratory to prototype
design processes that uses a systems approach to build a culture
of empowerment, graduating young citizen leaders with an ‘I CAN
Mindset’ – using their agency for the greater good.


Riverside Learning Centre (RLC) started in 2016, has codified the
practices and processes of The Riverside School and designed
training programmes around the 6 Pillars of Curriculum, Parent
Partnership, Personal & Professional Development, Community,
Administration and Leadership that empower more schools to become
user centered.


Kiran is also the founder of aProCh—an initiative to make our
cities more child friendly, for which she was awarded the Ashoka
Fellow in 2008.


In 2009, Kiran launched Design for Change which uses a simple 4
step design framework – FIDS (Feel, Imagine, Do, Share) to
cultivate the I CAN mind-set in all children. Today, DFC is the
world's largest movement of change - of and by children, and is
in 60+ countries—impacting over 2.2 million children and 65,000
Teachers.


Kiran is a judge for the prestigious YIDAN Prize and a Visiting
Global Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In
2019, she was awarded the Earth Prize in Luino, Italy, the Lexus
Design Award for 2019, in Pune, India, and DFC has been
recognised as one of the 100 most innovative educational
programmes in the world by HundrED.org in 2017, 2018, 2019,
2020.

Social Links


Twitter: @kiranbirsethi


LinkedIn: @kiranbirsethi