What Four Years of B.Design at PID Actually Teaches: Arches, Staircases, Single-Material Furniture, and the Dream Houses Behind Every Semester

Semester three students at the Parul Institute of Design are given an assignment to build a model of their ideal house.

The brief requires a three-dimensional scale model that includes every detail the student would want in their ideal living space. The results are architectural in their attention to scale and cultural in their personal expression. Miniature vases appear on countertops. Bookshelves hold tiny books arranged in visible order. Table lamps. Decorative elements. Every room carefully thought through for spatial arrangement.

One of the most discussed models at VFDF 4.0 was built by Richa Patel.

“My dream house is modelled on the character Ko Moon-young from the Korean drama It’s Ok to Not Be Okay.”

The model reflected every aspect of the character’s personality through its spatial decisions, surface treatments, and object choices. The assignment works precisely because it forces the student to reason about a specific user in detail, which is the same skill that later produces interior designers capable of answering a Livspace interview’s three-year-old challenge.

Read More: Visual Communication at PID and Actual Teaching.

Interior design students at Parul Institute of Design spend a significant portion of their early semesters on building construction literacy.

The curriculum teaches students to design attractive interiors while also analysing building elements, construction methods, building parts, and architectural design process. The study combines historical and functional perspectives on how architecture has developed.

The arch study covers eleven types systematically.

• The round arch representing the classical Roman arch.
• The pointed arch connecting to medieval European cathedrals.
• Segmental arches, flat arches, jack arches, horseshoe arches, Moorish arches, ogee arches, parabolic arches, trefoil arches, and relieving arches for weight management in masonry.

Students learn the key elements required to construct an arch: the voussoirs which are the wedge-shaped stones, the keystone at the crown, the springer at the base, the intrados which is the inner curve, and the extrados which is the outer curve. This vocabulary is what separates a designer who can specify a building element from one who can only select from a catalogue.

The staircase module covers nine types.

• Straight flight staircases for the most basic and space-efficient solutions.
• L-shaped staircases with a 90-degree turn. U-shaped staircases with two parallel flights. Winder staircases using triangular or trapezoidal steps.
• Spiral staircases around a central vertical support. Curved staircases that arc without landings.
• Bifurcated staircases splitting into two at a landing point for formal and palace-style environments. Cantilevered staircases that appear to float. Dog-legged staircases as half-turn designs for better light circulation.

The semester five project takes material literacy and adds structural engineering.

Students design chairs that bear their own weight and structural load entirely through the mechanics of interlocking connections, without using any adhesives, nails, screws, or other joining materials. The projects are built at 1:5 scale. The interlocking mechanism itself is the structural system, which means the design and engineering of each joint is critical.

The variety of chair typologies explored during VFDF 4.0 showed the range of application.

• Lockable Floor Chairs designed for meditation use with a low profile and stable floor-level seating.
• Self-Braking Safety Casters with a safety-first wheel mechanism designed to prevent accidental movement.
• Single-Lock Pushback Chairs with a simple elegant single-mechanism pushback design.
• Weight-Sensitive Self-Adjusting Chairs that respond to the user’s body weight, automatically adjusting for optimal posture and comfort.
• Synchro-Tilt Multi-Lock Office Chairs for advanced office ergonomics.

Each model demonstrates creativity in form and a deep understanding of ergonomics, human body mechanics, and material behaviour. This is the kind of thinking that separates a furniture designer from a decorator.

Semester six students are given the constraint-based brief to design and fabricate furniture entirely from a single material.

The constraint is intentional. By limiting students to one material, the exercise forces them to deeply understand the behaviour, limitations, and possibilities of that material. The results displayed at the festival included interlocking chairs, closets, tables, kitchen racks, and other household furniture pieces.

The most celebrated piece was what appeared at first glance to be a standard sofa.

“A 1:1 scale, full-product-sized model that looked elegant and straightforward. Visitors sat on it expecting an ordinary sofa experience. What they got instead was a swing.”

The sofa had been designed as a swing, a gentle, moving piece of furniture that gave the person sitting on it a completely unexpected feeling of comfort and motion.

The piece was conceptualised by two final-year students, Samiksha Bijotkar and Kunal Vanzara, who served as the creative and design leads. The idea was brought to physical reality through the skilled hands of the artisans who crafted it: Yogesh Sahani, Bhavar Lal, and Pokhar Ram.

The collaboration between design students and artisans is one of the more important lessons the programme teaches. Design at its best depends on makers.

The diploma programme runs parallel to the degree track with its own progression.

Semester four diploma students designed lamps that applied what they learned in electrical classes at PID. Students took knowledge of circuits, wiring, light sources, and electrical safety and channeled it into functional lamp designs.

The range on display included street lamps, table lamps, gate lamps, mall lamps, and several other innovative lighting forms. Each lamp reflected a different context of use, from residential interiors to commercial or civic spaces.

Semester five diploma students designed storage systems. The brief covered residential, shop, and institutional contexts, with a size ratio of 1:5.

Prototypes included cupboards for houses, cupboards for kitchens to store utensils, a specialised storage system for a bride-and-groom clothing shop where customers could actually view what they were buying, and shoe storage models.

The bride-and-groom clothing shop brief is instructive. It asks the student to design for a retail context where the end user needs to see and handle merchandise before purchase, which introduces considerations of visibility, accessibility, and security that a basic wardrobe design does not require.

Read more: Parul University B.Design curriculum: working drawings and site visits