In 2017 — years before AI made it an urgent question — we were already asking: what is the fundamental purpose of a graduate? Not what knowledge should be imparted, but who does this person need to become?
"An unknown university in a city that already had its design heroes."
Ahmedabad is one of India's most design-literate cities. NID. CEPT. Institutions with decades of reputation and deeply loyal alumni. Into this landscape, a newly reconstituted university arrived — one that had, until recently, served local students in vocational and architecture programmes with little recognition beyond the city, and little even within it.
The board had a mandate to transform it into India's first design university. The question was how to signal that transformation credibly — to students who had better options, to faculty who could go elsewhere, to a sector that would be skeptical by default.
The answer was a flagship programme. But not just any programme — one designed around a question that most institutions in India weren't asking at all.
This was 2017. Even before AI made the question unavoidable, we were already asking it: what is the fundamental purpose of a graduate? The programme wasn't designed around what knowledge to impart. It was designed around what a future professional in the built environment actually needs to be.
Someone who can solve problems across disciplines, work on the ground, think critically about systems and people, understand themselves well enough to collaborate under pressure — and execute. Not prototype. Not propose. Actually execute.
We intended to develop solutionaries — people who find real solutions to complex challenges and work with others to implement them.
Built environment subjects taught by visiting practitioners and academics — domestic and international. Heavy on fieldwork and real problems. Designed not just to transfer knowledge, but to build the habit of seeing a domain from multiple angles simultaneously.
The deliberately broad track. Students from architecture and design studying management thinking, communications, gender, sustainability. Not to dilute the domain — to build the lateral range that makes domain expertise useful in the world.
What is usually put in a Friday workshop — here, woven through the year. Fellows worked in teams under real pressure, navigated genuine disagreement, and developed the self-knowledge to understand how they work and why. Not the soft track. Often the hardest one.
Most projects are placed at the end — a capstone once the "learning" is done. The LAP was designed to run in parallel from day one. Knowledge lands differently when you're already mid-project, already navigating real stakeholders, already knowing what you don't know. The LAP wasn't a test of what fellows had learned. It was the environment in which the learning became useful.
Every element of the Fellowship was designed to serve the graduate profile. Three decisions made the programme work as a whole.
Coming in with no background in the built environment meant starting from scratch — long conversations with practitioners and academics across the sector. What did they wish graduates arrived with? What did the field keep struggling to find? What were macro challenges for the field, specifically in India?
Faculty were brought into the logic of the year — why their module sat where it did, what the students would bring to it, what it needed to build toward. When the rigour wasn't landing in the early sessions, facilitators were replaced.
Many young people at this stage want to contribute meaningfully to the world but don't know if they have what it takes, or where to start. The Fellowship addressed that directly — through the solutionary framing, through a LAP that required actual execution, through skills that let them see themselves differently.
"The year was transformational."
"I was impressed with the programme and the diversity of the student background."
"Even their parents commented on how much had changed."
The programme was demanding. That was a design choice — rigour was the point, and the rigour was real. But for some fellows, the intensity was too much. One left mid-year.
Some fellows needed more structure and support than the programme was built to provide. That's a genuine design gap — and one we've carried into every programme we've worked on since.
"A high level of freedom works best when students arrive with self-direction already. Not everyone did."
Typically, programmes are designed around imparting knowledge.
Anant Fellowship gave students an identity, a reason to believe, a path to work toward — and the evidence, by the end of the year, to know that they could.
Seven batches have graduated since then. Many years on, fellows still point to it as the year that changed how they see themselves and the world.
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