Shikha Parmar

Shikha graduated as an architect from CEPT University. Since 2016, she has contributed to education as a visiting tutor across various architecture and design institutions. During her engagement with CEPT University since 2019, she has mentored a range of studios including Traveller’s Home at the Faculty of Design, and Between Utopia and Reality, and Spatial Fabulations at the Faculty of Architecture. Across her studios, she encourages students to question conventions, think from first principles, and employ speculative design as an approach to addressing ecological and climatic shifts while rethinking heritage, materiality, and future modes of inhabitation through visualization, critical imagination, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Her mentorship has contributed to award-winning student work recognised nationally and internationally, including projects exhibited and shortlisted at London Creates. Since 2024, she has led Speculative Archi-scapes at the Faculty of Architecture with filmmaker Anand Gandhi, an interdisciplinary studio through which she has formulated a speculative design pedagogy and an architectural lexicon for the built environments of the sci-fi narrative universe MAYA. The studio outcomes were exhibited at IFBE, Mumbai (2025) and form the basis of a forthcoming co-authored publication on the methods and design frameworks emerging from this collaboration. Alongside academia, she has led design at Achyutam Designs for over a decade, where residential, hospitality, and corporate projects have been widely published and awarded. She is currently formulating speculative design as a pedagogical ecosystem that fosters interdisciplinary exchange, critical imagination, digital visualization, immersive tools, the responsible integration of AI, and futures thinking. Central to this work is world-building as a design methodology through which students construct coherent alternative realities and virtual worlds to critically engage with present conditions and imagine transformative futures.