From Farmer to Designer — a journey rooted in local wisdom, shaped by global practice.
Rabi is the founder of Studio 1947, a consulting and innovation studio working at the intersection of Data, Design, Technology, Communication, and Research. He started the studio in 2025 with a simple conviction: that the most meaningful design doesn't choose between local wisdom and global relevance, it builds from both. Under his direction, Studio 1947 partners with organisations to turn complex, human problems into solutions that are as thoughtful as they are useful.
Rabi's path into design wasn't a conventional one. He began by studying Philosophy at Presidency University in Kolkata, where he spent his time immersed in Indian and Western thought, logic, ethics, and socio-political theory, while quietly moonlighting as a poster designer for college events, first by hand, then digitally. That early instinct to visualise ideas eventually pulled him fully into design. He went on to earn his MA at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru, where he sharpened a human-centred, ethnographic approach to UI/UX, one grounded as much in listening to people as in shaping interfaces.
His career since has spanned an unusually wide range of contexts. As Head of Design at AIcrowd in Geneva, he led visual design and product experience for AI research challenges, working alongside partners like OpenAI, Facebook AI, Sony, Amazon, EPFL, and Carnegie Mellon University, and helping shape experiences for a global community of over 60,000 developers and AI researchers, a journey that took him from Artist in Residence to the top of the design team. As Design Director at Inclusive Minds in Bengaluru, he turned his attention to design for democracy and civic voice, building conversation-based campaigns, design systems, and data-centric dashboards for socio-political engagement. Alongside this, he has spent years as a design consultant to the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, crafting publication layouts and cover designs for a twelve-volume research series on Artificial Intelligence, along with branding and social media work to widen its public reach.
Rabi describes his practice as sitting between product and communication design, equally comfortable architecting a user journey or building the narrative and visual identity around it. His toolkit runs across design strategy, UI/UX design, information architecture, design systems, wireframing and prototyping, user research and journey mapping, ethnographic research, data storytelling, dashboard design, brand and packaging design, and strategic presentations. He has brought this range to organisations as varied as Tata Motors, Bosch, Room to Read, Bihar Tourism, the Seerave Foundation, and grassroots initiatives like Know Your Neighbour and the Jharkhand Government, moving fluidly between global technology companies and community-rooted social impact work.
Design, for Rabi, is inseparable from social responsibility. Since 2024, he has run free design workshops on design thinking, digital literacy, and AI awareness, mentoring students, youth, and grassroots communities. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic and the Amphan super-cyclone, he helped the Quarantine Student Youth Network raise over €300,000 to support affected families, a reminder that, for him, design and organising for people are part of the same practice.
At the core of it all is a philosophy he holds simply: he believes in people and nature. He sees design not as a pursuit of beauty for its own sake, but as a tool for connection, storytelling, and problem-solving, one that holds local tradition and global systems in the same frame, and balances function with emotional depth. With Studio 1947, he's building a home for exactly that kind of work: design that aims to be meaningful first.
