Learner Centered Design Education

Soumitri Varadarajan

What if teaching isn’t about delivering knowledge, but about co-creating meaning? In Learner Centered Design Education, Soumitri Varadarajan reflects on 35 years of teaching industrial design. These episodes are not lessons—they are provocations and quiet acts of unlearning. Influenced by Paulo Freire—whose work Soumitri encountered at 25—this podcast invites educators to rethink authority, embrace uncertainty, and imagine classrooms as shared worlds of discovery.

  1. Examining a Practice Based PhD

    2 HRS AGO

    Examining a Practice Based PhD

    This is where it all happens. https://practice-research.com/

    20 min
  2. Time Traveller

    2 DAYS AGO

    Time Traveller

    I am trying this. Putting out episodes without the info and background about the episode. Let me see how this goes down.

    47 min
  3. Founder Stories

    4 DAYS AGO

    Founder Stories

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)

    21 min
  4. Alladin's Lamp

    9 MAY

    Alladin's Lamp

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin

    12 min
  5. Rasa Theory

    9 MAY

    Rasa Theory

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasa_(aesthetics)

    16 min
  6. Industrial Design by Compensation

    2 MAY

    Industrial Design by Compensation

    Notes for this episode. I will make a webpage for this episode and periodically update the webpage with information about designers I find. 60 million: Jony Ive, 2011, 30 million + 30 million per year, Find me 5 others who earn this much today 30 Million: Franz von Halzhausen (Tesla Lead Designer, 51 million home), Maximillian Missoni (BMW Lead Designer), Luc Donckerwolke (Hyundai), Find me 100 others at this slab 10 million: Ivy Ross, (Google Design VP), Find me 1000 others at this slab 1 Million: Tbc, Find me 5000 people at this slab 500,000: Product Designer at Tesla, Find me 10,000 people at this slab 200,000: Tbc, Find me ... dont. This is ubiquitous 100,000: Tbc, Find me? Dont. Document instead for me places that have been de-industrialised. Go European city by European city? Something like that.

    16 min
  7. Writing can be your superpower

    1 MAY

    Writing can be your superpower

    Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson Apple in China by Patrick McGee The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil Invention by James Dyson The Big Con by Marian Mazzuccato

    35 min
  8. Shadow Self

    28 APR

    Shadow Self

    There are two texts on Derrida, on Artaud. https://kdoutsiderart.com/tag/antonin-artaud/ - For Artaud the works are intended as weapons, not commodities, but they become commodified in any event. How then to restore, to protect, their existence as “gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, a whole Kabbalah…that s***s on the other,” to maintain their endurance as “a machine that has breath”? How to preserve the destructive essence (and we should be clear Artaud’s intent was destructive, not merely critical) of Artaud’s project against “the museographic management of its surplus value.” As Derrida puts it: “Will it be possible to do what I am trying to do, to say ‘Merde?’ Will it be possible, either with or without blasphemy, to read and to cite ‘Shit,’ ‘Shit to art,’ to do it then as it must be done, in this great temple that is a great art museum and above all modern, thus in a museum that has the sense of history, the very great museum of one of the greatest metropolises in the new world?” ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’: https://arts3047.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/the-theatre-of-cruelty-and-the-closure-of-representation/ - Whilst Derrida seems to be on the brink of declaring Artaud as a success story that can defy the unravelling of deconstructive theory, he ultimately finds an end to theatre of cruelty using dialectics. The very thing that would seem to make theatre succeed in a mission that texts fail is the thing that undoes theatre as an art form: its existence as transient, finite.

    30 min
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About

What if teaching isn’t about delivering knowledge, but about co-creating meaning? In Learner Centered Design Education, Soumitri Varadarajan reflects on 35 years of teaching industrial design. These episodes are not lessons—they are provocations and quiet acts of unlearning. Influenced by Paulo Freire—whose work Soumitri encountered at 25—this podcast invites educators to rethink authority, embrace uncertainty, and imagine classrooms as shared worlds of discovery.

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