Suggested reading list for Masters students at IDC -I

It has been almost an year. I have been out of IDC and working/studying here in Spain. As I continue to explore design, I often read books that I feel could answer many questions I had. I hope students still have a lot of questions. In this brief post, I present a collection of books I came across that could help design students perceive design better. I hope they keep you well insulated.


The list is arranged in order of possible things you could have in mind at a particular time in the course. So, I have structured them semester wise.

Thanks to Malay, Chinmay, Rishabh, and Advait for their contributions and suggestions. Thanks to Prof. Girish, who named some of these books in conversations. This is the Part I, Part II comes in a week or so.

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missingMenu- Understanding food menus as a language

MissingMenu is a project that generates possible combinations of food dishes from a learned menu. It does that by converting a menu to a linguistic model and then computationally generating new food dishes using Probabilistic Context-free grammar (PCFG).

In other words, the menu is interpreted as a language and a new dish is just another sentence, a meaningful combination of words. So, if you teach it the Chinese menu and south Indian menu, it generates things like schezwan idli with egg fried rice. These combinations are essentially possible as they are made by understanding the morphology of the menu system. This project helped me look at the food menus as languages and languages as a group of morphological combinations driven by adopted norms.

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Getting a Spanish student visa

This post presents the working process to get a Spanish Visa to live in Spain as a student applying from Delhi in the end of 2018. I hope it helps people who need information and reduces confusion. I control my subjectivity/rant, I will write it as a science experiment. This is the best case scenario.

AIM: To receive a Residence VISA that enables me to travel to Spain (for more than 90 days) as a student/academic intern in Spanish university.

Documents Required (Order is important):

  1. Appointment to the consulate
  2. Valid Passport
  3. Police Clearance Certificate (PCC)
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