#YoungIcons2023: Grounded in the fusion of time, space, and memory, Founder of SHED Priyanka Shah transforms projects into unique, modern responses

Grounded in the fusion of time, space, and memory, Founder of SHED Priyanka Shah transforms projects into unique, modern responses. From her Parsons years to representing India at the London Design Fair, she’s a dedicated pursuer of design excellence.

Academic Qualification: Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architectural Design, Parsons the New School for Design

About the Design Firm: SHED is a place where design meets material to produce beautiful experiences. The studio has grown to be a full-fledged atelier, composed with architects, artists, designers, carpenters, lathe turners and other material-specific artisans all synchronising to create objects at different scales as responses to modern briefs.
First Internship: One month at Gurjit Singh Matharoo

Design Philosophy: Design meets material to produce beautiful experiences. Each object is informed by practices observed and learned from across time, space and memory. Figments of imagination are chased to bring alive in these very things which will live with us and perhaps make us who we are.

Breakthrough Project: To be one of the 12 emerging and established design practices from India at the India Pavilion in London Design Fair, 2016.

Dream Project: To build a hospitality retreat where makerspaces are part of the lived experience there.

Inspiration: I love seeing how small experiences unfold in the day to day, like the way we stop and see a colourful orange/purple/pink sky during the sunset some times, or like the way we lose sense of place/time when we meet an old friend sitting for hours even in a most uncomfortable chair in a neighbourhood cafe, or like the way our mum’s cooking reminds us of comfort and we try and chase those flavours wherever we go… it is these impulses that connect us as human beings and I chase these ephemeral feelings through my design practice.

Current Projects: A rooftop cafe in Ahmedabad, a unique collection of furniture for a top-end furniture retailer, a solo show at Pulp Society, Delhi, some very interesting engagements with an award-winning restaurant group in Bombay and a pop-up installation at Magnetic Fields Festival by the end of the year!

Dream Collaboration: To work with the Government of India and bring design forwardness at different scales in national institutions.

Biggest Challenge: We like to be known as a design studio and not a furniture maker or an architectural studio or anything specific like that. We really want to be able to think through solutions across the board and that is not material specific or job specific!