The Premise
Design education
for a post-AI
world.
The standard model of design education — teach students to produce competent visual work — has been fundamentally challenged by AI tools that can now produce competent visual work on demand. A student who graduates having learned only how to execute will graduate into a world where execution is cheap. This program starts from that reality rather than ignoring it.
What AI tools cannot do is help a person discover what they want to make, and why. They cannot develop a designer's eye, or their sense of what matters, or their capacity to bring that to other people. The educators who will matter in the next twenty years are those who can nurture exactly this — and that is a skill that has to be taught and practised, not assumed.
This program trains design educators. Its graduates are expected to return to institutions, studios, schools, and practices — and to teach differently than they were taught. The curriculum is built around the methods, frameworks, and actual practice of teaching design, not just of doing it. Prof Kirti Trivedi's own half-century of design education is the curriculum's core source material.
The program builds on the Sugiura design methodology — taught in depth across both semesters — alongside research methods, philosophy, and a sustained teaching practice component in which students design and deliver their own design education experiences. By the end of the year, each student will have built and taught something, not just studied.
Prof Jesvin Yeo
School of Art, Design & Media, Singapore
Design educator and researcher. Advisory role in program design and international positioning of the PG Program.
Prof Punya Mishra
Arizona State University, USA
Design, technology, and creativity in education. Advisory role in the post-AI curriculum strand of the PG Program.
Villa Appavou — image coming
One year at
Villa Appavou
The program takes place entirely at Villa Appavou — SAKS's home in Puducherry, a five-minute walk from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Students are here for a full year, not a semester abroad. The expectation is immersion — in the work, in the place, and in the creative community that Puducherry sustains.
Visiting faculty stay in the campus guest house. Students arrange their own accommodation in Puducherry — guidance will be provided on acceptance, with a range of options near the campus and in the Ashram neighbourhood.
About Puducherry
Puducherry is not an incidental choice. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville have made it a centre for contemplative creative practice for decades — a place where artists, musicians, dancers, and researchers come to work without the pressure of a metropolitan art market. For a program explicitly about depth of thought and the development of a creative voice, that context matters.
Explore Puducherry →
Address
Villa Appavou, 143/1 Periyar Nagar Main Road, Manaveli, Ariankuppam, Puducherry 605007
Nearest airport
Chennai International (MAA) — approximately 160km. Regular taxis and buses to Puducherry.
Nearby
Sri Aurobindo Ashram · Auroville / Matri Mandir · yoga, dance, music, craft practice · French Quarter
