Master of Design in Design Management and Communication Strategy

Five students walked visitors through the 2026 Vadodara Film and Design Festival exhibition. Each chose design for a different reason. Krish Patel came because of his fascination with Indian palace architecture. Siddharth Yavaley came because of a three-legged dog he tried to build a prosthetic for as a child. Jemit came from mechanical engineering. Ovi Kelesar had been solving small household problems since tenth grade. Ruchi Natbhanjan’s mother was a tailor.

The B.Design program at Parul Institute of Design moves students from foundational form-making and thesis. Students build scale models of dream houses, engineer interlocking chairs at 1:5 scale with no adhesives or fasteners, make furniture from a single material. The curriculum includes eleven arch types with full architectural vocabulary, nine staircase types, and comprehensive lamp and storage design at the diploma level.

Interior design careers in India operate on portfolio compounding logic across the first five years. Entry packages cluster between 3 and 5 LPA at platforms like Livspace. Portfolio volume, not CGPA, determines year-two and year-three promotion velocity. Senior thesis work at PID Aparna Sud’s Filmfare-winning crossover into production design for Neerja shows where the career can go.

Vrajesh Hirjee, the actor best known for Golmaal and Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, sat for a closed-door adda at VFDF 4.0 with Gurpal Singh. His first job was advertising sales at Indian Express. His stage breakthrough came in Feroz Khan’s English production of Royal Hunt of the Sun. He was the inaugural voice of Big FM in 2008.

The Closed Door session at VFDF 4.0, moderated by Harshit Dave with Irene Dhar Malik, Deepti Gupta, and Leena Yadav, went further than the public Gender Jam panel of the same festival. The conversation addressed the silent conditioning of Indian men. The Haryana girl pushed into commerce, the Punjab street-abuse interruption, the Sui Dhaaga parent persuasion.

Shital Verma ran a three-hour storyboard workshop at VFDF 4.0 combining hand-drawing with AI-assisted concept generation. Twenty-five students pitched original advertisement concepts by session end. Leela Santhosh Kohli, an engineering-background student, pitched a Virat Kohli under-19-to-present double-timeline concept so sharp her design professor nicknamed her Dhurandhar on the spot.

The Visual Communication program at the Parul Institute of Design – compressed but comprehensive track: digital hierarchy and motion graphics , sustainable packaging and exhibition design, brochure and expressive typography, magazine publication design across the program, and CGI with virtual streaming as an advanced module. VFDF 4.0 output included Gutenberg Resurrected, a 22-language Awaaz Stambh civic innovation project.

Anvi Chanodia’s Livspace interview was scheduled on the eleventh. Two rounds. The first tested modular kitchens, materials, and deck spaces. The second tested personality and ended with a live challenge: design a space for a three-year-old. She passed.

Design placement in India does not operate on engineering-placement logic. It is portfolio-and-network driven, not campus-drive driven. Livspace, Asian Paints, Amazon, and Investis evaluate actual work, material fluency, and domain vocabulary. Anvi Chanodia, placed at Livspace in her third year at 3.5 LPA, is the 2026 case study.

Welcome to INSPIRE NZ, New Zealand’s first center of excellence in India, Parul University. Welcomed Deputy High Commissioner Matthew Ayers, and covered joint research, design and articulations.