Shashi Caan a design futurist, educator and author, her dedication to furthering human betterment through and by design is reflected in her 25-year design career.
Shashi Caan is of Indian origin and was educated at the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, BFA(Hons), and later at Pratt Institute, New York City, two master’s degrees, the first in Industrial Design and the second in Architecture.[1]
Shashi Caan is the founding partner of THE COLLECTIVE US/THE SC COLLECTIVE UK which provides architecture, interior, workplace, and product design solutions focusing on supporting people both pragmatically and qualitatively.[2] In 2013, Shashi Caan also founded GloW-DESIGN (Globally We Design), a platform whose purpose is to generate and disseminate new design thinking, practice and processes to tackle the ever more pressing and contemporary problems facing humanity at large. GloW-DESIGN is composed by five different programs:
In 2018, The GloW-DESIGN Educators Forum 2018 formulated the Universal Design Educators Charter as part of the ReDesignEd program. The Charter was created to provide a framework and filter through which design education and curricula are assessed, valued, and contextualized globally and collectively. The Charter is a collection of seven articles, six of them affirming a common global aspiration of achievement for all designers, and the last one a disclaimer. The essays address the areas of:
The Universal Educational Charter recognizes that design impacts all aspects of life, therefore, it has to serve the endeavor for the betterment of human experience, quality of life, well-being, and happiness.
The Universal Educational Charter recognizes that design impacts all aspects of life; therefore, it has to serve the endeavor for the betterment of human experience, quality of life, well-being, and happiness.
Since the 1980s, Shashi Caan has held numerous teaching engagements at such institutions as Parson the New School for Design, in New York. From 2002-2007, Professor Caan was the Chair of the Interiors Program at Parsons [3] and she served as the Faculty Trustee on the Board of Trustees for the New York School of Interior Design.
Caan is the current CEO of the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI),[4] for which she was President from 2009 to 2014.[5]
During her presidency, in 2011, she conceived and helped to inaugurate the IFI Interiors Declaration [1]. This Declaration, initiated with input from 88 world counties. The Interiors Declaration has been adopted at city government level by some 124 world cities and two nations: the Philippines and Nigeria.[6][circular reference]
She is the author of the book Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment, (Laurence King publisher, 2011) which has also been translated into Chinese.[7]
Formerly she was Senior Designer and Associate with Gensler [2] and then Design Director and Associate Partner with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill [3].
Shashi Caan has delivered dozens of keynotes and public lectures, along with serving on many of international design juries. Most recent juries include:
Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Being in the Built Environment, Laurence King Publishing 2011 Over the last decade she has written some thirty articles, essays and critiques, published both in the US and internationally.