My professional journey as a packaging designer began in 2013 when I landed a job at ‘DMA Yellow Works’, a well know brand and package design agency in Mumbai (India). I have been fascinated by the world of packaging ever since. I enjoyed putting together a combination of different colors, typefaces and visuals/photographs to make a product stand out on the grocery store shelf. Over the years, I have worked with countless brands, designing packaging for products in various categories -food, health, beauty, pharmacy, pantry, and household.
Back home in India, my mother usually cooks for the family. She is now 60 and her eyesight has diminished over the last 10 years. She struggles to read the tiny instructions printed on the back of prepared food packaging and often asks me or another family member to read out the instructions to her. This makes her dependent on another person to carry out the task of cooking successfully.
My mother is not alone in experiencing this. People with visual impairments find it difficult to distinguish between products on the shelf and read tiny information on labels. As a packaging designer, this bothers me deeply.
Packaging is usually designed for sighted people and is resultantly inaccessible for people who are visually impaired.
I wish to use my my knowledge and skills as a packaging designer in a way that benefits a wider audience. Hence through my research, I am investigating ways in which information on grocery food packaging can be made accessible to people with different levels of vision impairments.
Additionally, I suffer from a moderate hearing loss. I am well aware of the emotional and mental impacts of navigating private and public spaces like classrooms, workplaces, banks, stores, restaurants, etc that are not fully inclusive. As a result, the subjects of inclusivity and accessibility hold personal significance for me.