Kiran Bir Sethi
Member, Judging Panel, Yidan Prize for Education Development;
Founder and Director, Riverside School
Kiran Bir Sethi is an Indian designer, educationist, education reformer, and social entrepreneur. With a degree in visual communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she began her career designing restaurants, and later, writing for newspapers. While she had always been interested in design thinking and designing experiences, it was when her children started going to school that Kiran recognized her true calling.
Dismayed by the unfriendly and rigid atmosphere in schools, she founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad that focuses on empowering children with the “I CAN MINDSET” — followed by “aProCh” ( an initiative to make our cities more child friendly ) and finally “Design for Change” (DFC) which is today the largest movement of change — for and by the children.
Today, DFC is in more than 60 countries — and children use the simple design thinking framework of Feel / Imagine / Do / Share to design solutions for some of their greatest challenges. Her most recent venture is the Riverside Learning Center which offers training programmes to empower schools across the world to become “I CAN SCHOOLS” by using the codified processes from Riverside.