From the hull to the helm screen.
I design what people touch, see and trust on the water — the form, the interface, the brand — and I do the quieter work of getting designers and engineers to agree on how to build it.
One boat, two disciplines: the craft and the interface.
A solar-electric sightseeing catamaran, designed end to end — presented as two case studies: the physical and cross-functional design of the boat, and the digital product design of its helm.
The boat that had to disappear its own roof.
A hull that couldn't change. A view that couldn't be blocked. Engineers who weren't sold. How design, usability and a whiteboard resolved it — and shipped.
The helm, redesigned as a product.
One person pilots and hosts. The screen had to be readable in glare, drivable with one hand, and honest about a zero-emission drivetrain — so I built an interactive prototype you can steer.
Kadal — a safety net for fishermen at sea.
A marine-safety web app for Kerala's coastal fishermen — designed for low-end phones, patchy signal and genuinely high stakes. My digital-product case study.
ONE DESIGN LANGUAGE, ACROSS A FAMILY OF HULLS
An engineer who designs, sitting between the studio and the shipyard.
Seven years across UX, product management and industrial design. I'm most useful where a beautiful idea meets a real constraint — a mould that already exists, a bulkhead that can't move, a build team on a deadline — and someone has to find the version that's both right and buildable. On this project that often meant translating between the people drawing it and the people welding it.
- ROLE Lead Product & Transportation Designer
- DISCIPLINE UX · Industrial · Brand · a bit of PM
- M.DES MIT Institute of Design, Pune
- PRODUCT MGMT Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
- B.E. Mechanical Engineering, Anna University
- BASED Bengaluru, India
Let's talk about hard, physical products.
The boat that had to disappear its own roof.
A 12 m, 20-passenger, zero-emission catamaran where the whole product is the view — and the design job was to keep the boat itself from getting in the way of it, without touching a hull the yard had already fixed. What follows is how that played out across structure, layout, exterior, the helm interface, and the brand.
Make a premium day boat desirable — around a hull nobody would let me change.
The yard had a working 20-passenger solar-electric catamaran and an engineering package it wasn't going to re-open. My job was to make it desirable, usable and unmistakably branded, inside a tight box of constraints — and to turn those constraints into the design.
On a sightseeing boat, the product is the view. Everything else is in the way.
A sightseeing passenger doesn't look at the boat — they look past it. They track a coastline, follow a bird, point a phone at a sunset. The boat succeeds when it fades and the water takes over.
That single reframing is what made the rest of the project tractable. It turned ordinary structural and furniture decisions — a support post, a rail height, a seat back — into usability decisions with a clear test: does it help the guest see, or does it get in the way?
Sightlines are the interface.
The engineering package — hull, bulkheads, battery box, propulsion — was largely fixed by the yard. So my canvas was everything the guest and skipper actually experience, worked within a shape I couldn't move.
Dockside observation of how guests board, pick seats and take photos, plus short intercepts with operators and crew.
Clustered what people actually did into a few recurring tensions — shade vs. sightline, host vs. helm, one boat vs. a family of them.
Turned them into one testable rule the whole team could design against: does it help the guest see, or does it get in the way?
Six posts held up the roof. All six stood between the guest and the view.
The first hull carried its canopy on a row of slim vertical pillars. Structurally fine; experientially a picket fence around the one thing people came for.
The fix touched structure, so it wasn't mine to simply redraw. Engineering's caution was reasonable — the posts worked, changing them meant re-checking loads, the schedule was tight. Pushback wasn't obstruction; it was risk-aversion I had to earn my way through.
So instead of lobbying, I ran a working session with the naval architects and fabricators. We put the load path on a whiteboard together and looked for a structure that spent its supports where the eye wasn't. The answer: fewer, wider pillars tied together with diagonal cross-members — a small truss that carries the same roof through two clean uprights instead of six.
HOW THE CANOPY EVOLVED · SAME HULL, THREE ITERATIONS
A flat canopy carried on a full row of vertical pillars — the version now in service.
The canopy lightens; the supports thin and rake back, off the guest's sightline.
The roof cantilevers from a slim arch — the long sightlines finally open.
The latest design (V3) was where I wanted the boat to go — but re-tooling to it would have overrun the delivery window and the budget. So I made the call: ship the current hull now, and fold in only the concept changes that added real guest value at similar cost and lead time — fewer roof pillars and the key aesthetic moves. The rest stayed on the roadmap; the boat still shipped on schedule.
Deciding what to cut and what to keep to hit a delivery window — that trade-off was my contribution as product manager.
The same deck, configured for two completely different days out.
With the structure freed up, the deck became a stage — and operators wanted different things from it. I worked the layout as interchangeable zones over the fixed arrangement, then tested two directions against real use.
The functional layout treats it as a working sightseeing vessel: symmetric benches with rod / tank holders, twin sofa-and-table lounges, circulation for a full load. The leisure layout trades a bench for a forward sunbed and adds a fridge aft — fewer seats, more indulgence, aimed at private charter. Same hull, same moulds, two products.
A completely new exterior — on exactly the same hull and structure.
The base boat I designed for the yard did its job, but it read like a workboat. So — on my own initiative — I took the same hull and structure and reimagined it as a premium touring boat, to prove how far the exterior could travel without touching a single mould. Re-skinning, not re-tooling.
I redrew the entire upper body — window graphics, the sheer line, the canopy edge, the surface breaks — as a skin over the untouched hull and deck: a row of individually cheap changes that together read as a completely different, more confident boat. The green overlay is me working the new lines straight over the yard's own drawing.
Redrawing the upper body straight onto the yard's own arrangement.
The redrawn profile resolved in CAD, ready to skin — control points and all.
A dashboard that grows with the boat — without a single new mould.
The yard builds many boat widths from one family. Redesigning and re-tooling the helm console for each is exactly the cost that kills small builders. So I designed the dashboard as a modular system.
Three moulded pieces stay constant on every boat: the centre console and two outer wings. To widen the dash, you don't retool — you drop in flat filler inserts between centre and wings. Same tooling, same interface logic, any width. Use the control to widen the cabin.
The boat needed a screen a host could read at a glance, in the sun.
The interface layer grew into a product of its own — the information hierarchy, the glare-first visual system, and a working prototype you can actually steer. It has its own case study.
A quiet luxury boat that still wanted a wink.
The visual language runs cool and minimal — a single luminous line along the gunwale that becomes the boat's signature after dark, an underwater glow, a restrained mark. Then one deliberate piece of mischief: a crocodile motif along the hull, turning a serious vessel into something people remember and point at. Confident brands can afford one joke.
A surround view, so a buyer can stand on the deck before it's built.
Renders sell one angle; buyers want to be there. I scoped a lightweight surround-view experience — switch viewpoints, flip between day and dusk, glance at the live helm — as a sales and design-review tool. Below is the interactive stand-in; the real-time 3D model drops straight into this frame.
It left the render and became a boat in the water.
The design left the render and became a boat in the water. It runs in commercial service on the Kerala backwaters, it was built and commissioned by the yard's own team, and the solar-electric platform behind it has been recognised in the Gustave Trouvé (Gussies) Awards and covered in the regional press.
PROOF IT SHIPPED
One solar-electric platform — from a tour boat to a weed harvester.
The thinking here wasn't one-off. The same modular logic and the same solar-electric drivetrain stretch across missions and sizes — this day boat, a high-capacity ferry, and a weed-harvesting utility craft for the choked backwaters these boats actually run on. One platform, adapted to the job.
Sightseeing day boat
The 20-passenger boat detailed above, in service today.
Passenger ferry
The language stretched to a transit hull — more solar, more seats, same DNA.
Weed harvester
A mission-built utility craft for weed-choked backwaters — same drivetrain, a purpose-built body.
The work I'm proudest of here isn't a surface — it's the whiteboard session. The best move a designer made on this boat was getting engineering to co-own the problem, so the prettier answer was also the one they'd defend. Next time I'd bring the surround-view tool in earlier, and settle sightline debates with a view instead of an argument.
There's more behind this than fits on a page.
The rejected layouts, the engineering back-and-forth, the workshop photos and the production HMI once it's live — happy to walk through the messy middle.
The helm, redesigned as a product.
The boat's screen deserved the same rigour as its hull. This is the interface layer as a product: who drives it, what it must answer in a glance, and a prototype you can actually steer — built, not mocked.
An interface for someone steering and hosting at the same time.
On a small sightseeing boat, the person at the helm is also the guide, the safety officer and the storyteller. They can't study a screen — it has to deliver a few truths at a glance and then get out of the way, much like the boat itself.
So I treated the helm display as a product with its own users, jobs and constraints, distinct from the industrial design of the boat.
Sun, one free hand, and a driver who can't look down for long.
Three questions, answered before the second glance.
I ranked everything the display could show against what the skipper needs right now, and let three questions set the hierarchy.
Everything else — motor temperatures, trim, diagnostics — drops to the edges, present only when it needs attention. Cyan on near-black keeps it legible in direct sun.
Not a mockup — a helm you can actually steer.
Rather than draw screens, I built the interface as a working prototype so the interactions could be felt: hold Port or Starboard and the wheel turns, the rudder swings, the horizon heels and the heading-up chart rotates under you. Autopilot self-steers; Dusk repaints the scene.
SPEED · SOG
STEERING · RUDDER
CHARTPLOTTER · HEADING-UP
The prototype describes real hardware.
The interface isn't abstract — it lives in a physical console I designed alongside it: a centre helm with the wheel and twin displays, a luminous telemetry strip across the brow, and two fixed wings for secondary controls. The same modular logic as the boat — fixed centre, fixed wings, cut-to-width in between.
One system, four moments of the trip.
The same layout adapts to what the boat is doing — the hierarchy holds, the emphasis shifts.
Range and charge take the centre; speed recedes. Solar and shore-power input lead.
Speed, heading and the chart dominate; battery is a calm secondary read.
Dusk palette, dimmed luminance, the gunwale-light identity carried onto the screen.
A motor-temp or depth warning promotes the offending edge tile to the centre, once.
Building the prototype instead of drawing it changed the design — you feel immediately when a gauge is too twitchy or a number too small. Taken further, I'd usability-test glare-readability with real skippers on the water and instrument the prototype to log where their eyes actually go.
Kadal — a safety net for fishermen at sea.
Kadal — “sea” in Malayalam — is a marine-safety app for the fishermen who go out into real danger every day with almost no digital safety net. It's the counterpart to the boats: same coast, same people, a software answer instead of a hardware one.
Software for the same coast the boats serve.
Kerala's small-scale fishermen head out daily on open water, where a sudden change in weather is the real threat — and the forecasts they get aren't built for the boat they're actually in.
Kadal is a deliberately small, reliable web app — bilingual, low-bandwidth, grown across three versions — that turns a generic forecast into a warning calibrated to your boat.
High stakes, low tools, no room for error.
Designed for wet hands, bright sun and a ₹6,000 phone.
The user profile set every constraint — and made the design harder and more interesting than a polished consumer app.
Danger calibrated to your boat — not a generic forecast.
The core insight: the same weather is far more dangerous for a small, less-capable boat than a big one — so a blanket forecast isn't safety, it's noise. Kadal gives a forecast for your zone and your boat — you set the boat once (size, engine, range), and severity thresholds tune to it, resolving into one plain verdict: Safe to go · Go with care · Do not go.
Three tabs keep it to the essentials — Sea (your zone, hour by hour), Map (distance from shore and the route back), and a hold-to-send SOS built to reach the Coastal Police over satellite when there is no signal. All bilingual Malayalam / English, with a night mode tied to real sunrise and sunset.
The same weather, judged for your boat.
The real Kadal v3, running live. Switch tabs (Sea · Map · SOS), toggle Malayalam, or onboard a boat and watch the go / no-go advice change with it. GPS & live forecast activate on your own site
What it changed.
Add the real outcome: users reached, a pilot result, feedback from fishermen, any recognition. Even one number or one quote transforms this section.
Designing for high-stakes, low-resource users strips design back to what matters: clarity over polish, reliability over richness, and respect for the person on the other end. It's the discipline I bring back to every other product I touch.