Color Me Good

February 22, 2026 in AI, Design, Programming

I use Figma's selection colors feature extensively 🙌 . It has helped me assigned my revised tokens to my elements at scale. But it did not allow the selection of elements based on their type e.g. backgrounds, text, vectors, etc. And this meant a blocker for us as well since our tokens were designed that way, like is the case with anyone working with a production ready design system.

🌼 Color Me Good is a Figma plugin that detects every color in use—both resolved hex values and design token references—and enables designers to search, filter, and select the elements where those colors are applied.

Should we incentivize feedback in AI products?

December 29, 2025 in AI, Design, Philosophy

Generative AI learns directly from users, making their feedback its essential fuel. But should that feedback be actively incentivized? This piece examines the ethics, potential risks, and practical design trade-offs involved in rewarding people for contributing to AI training, exploring how incentives might shape behavior, fairness, and long-term system integrity.

Project Gaia

October 13, 2021 in Programming, Design

The 2021 edition of ValueLabs Design Inspire Conference was themed around the phrase Regenerate & Evolve. Like last year, we wanted to create the generative identity patterns for our participants and the theme called out for it nevertheless. Our team wanted to pick natural phenomena as a concept to visualize the generative patterns and this gave a chance for us to explore both organic and geometrical renders. Below I discuss the ideation process for the same, our iterations through multiple concepts, and our final choice.

Project Lumen

February 01, 2021 in Design, Programming

Lumen is an experiment in the field of generative design and dynamic branding which investigates the use of computer algorithms to define brand graphic system instead of manually creating its instances. The generative algorithm, also named Lumen, converts the data collected from the registrants at ValueLabs Design Inspire conference 2020, into unique, organic, and personalized visual assets that are manifested as attendee takeaways like ID cards, Zoom backgrounds, etc.

The Language of Gait

September 11, 2019 in Design, Research

Language – the words and sentences used to make our intentions known to others and help us understand others’ intentions toward us – are only part of human-to-human communication. Non-verbal communication makes up three quarters of our ability to communicate.

Within weeks of being born we learn the meaning of a whole physical language, from a mother’s smile to a sibling’s frown. From thereon, how we sit, how we stand, where we look and what we do with our hands and feet give us clues about the thoughts, sincerity and mood of others. This article tries to discuss the possible use cases of this form of communication with a machine aka human computer interaction.

3D printing: Chess pieces

December 12, 2018 in Design, Game

Earlier this year, I tried my hands on the 3D modelling software by Autodesk, Fusion 360. I self assigned myself to create some custom 3D chess pieces with the software. I only had one constraint. None of my chess pieces will have any curved surface. The exercise let me to create the following chess pieces. I tried to maintain the basic shape of the chess pieces and slowly extrude and removed cuboid out of them to add more details.

After nearly 107 iterations I finalised the form of these chess pieces and decided to 3D print the rook. Following is how the 3D print turned out. I intend to get this all 3D printed and create a chess set out of it.

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

— F. T. Marinetti, The Founding & Manifesto of Futurism

Kinetic Sculpture: Readings on Motion, Speed, Blur

November 23, 2018 in Design

In 1909, the futurist poet Marinetti in their manifesto expressed a call for the celebration of speed, youth and aggression. Since then, artists like Duchamp, Muybridge, Balla and others have tried to closely imitate the sense of motion in their works. Their works reflected the beauty of graceful movements of human and animal body, ana a better understanding, ergo, representation of it. Their illustrations were modest derivations of ‘chrono’ (time) photography. Their photographs, paintings, etc attempted to eliminate the phenomenon of smooth pursuit of the eye; incorporated the depiction of visual frames or after images (lags), giving the illusion of movement in an otherwise static piece. Additionally, the object of interest may have been peaked by invention of the motion camera at the same time. No wonder there are fundamental similarities between the works of the photographs of Éntienne Jules Marey like the Running Man and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

Despite their initial mistrust, the Futurists came to embrace photography with infectious enthusiasm (read more).

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 — Marcel Duchamp's *Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2*

Éntienne Jules Marey's Running Soldier — Éntienne Jules Marey's *Running Soldier*

OBSERVATIONS OF OBJECT AND CAMERA

As objects in a scene move, an image of that scene must represent an integration of all positions of those objects, as well as the camera's viewpoint, over the period of exposure determined by the shutter speed. In such an image, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion. This smearing may occur on an object that is moving or on a static background if the camera is moving. In a film or television image, this looks natural because the human eye behaves in much the same way.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla, 1912

Without this simulated effect each frame shows a perfect instant in time (analogous to a camera with an infinitely fast shutter), with zero motion blur. This is why a video game with a frame rate of 25-30 frames per second will seem staggered, while natural motion filmed at the same frame rate appears rather more continuous. Many modern video games feature motion blur, especially vehicle simulation games.

There are two main methods used in video games to achieve motion blur: cheaper full-screen effects, which typically only take camera movement (and sometimes how fast the camera is moving in 3-D Space to create a radial blur) into mind, and more "selective" or "per-object" motion blur, which typically uses a shader to create a velocity buffer to mark motion intensity for a motion blurring effect to be applied to or uses a shader to perform geometry extrusion.

When an animal's eye is in motion, the image will suffer from motion blur, resulting in an inability to resolve details. To cope with this, humans generally alternate between saccades (quick eye movements) and fixation (focusing on a single point). Saccadic masking makes motion blur during a saccade invisible. Similarly, smooth pursuit allows the eye to track a target in rapid motion, eliminating motion blur of that target instead of the scene.

The motion blur due to camera movement can be broken down into four distinct types of motion:

Rotation, so that the image sweeps across the sensor. This is dependent on focal length - will be strongest with telephoto or longer focal lengths, and less noticeable with short or wide-angle lenses.
Rotation about the lens axis, so that the image twists on the sensor. This is unaffected by focal length (but can still be reduced by a faster shutter speed).
Sideways or vertical sliding motion. For the same subject magnification, this is unaffected by focal length. Hence if a wide-angle lens is used close to the subject, to give the same framing as a telephoto lens far from the subject, the amount of blur is the same.
Back and forth motion towards or away from the subject. Only really important at macro distances, not a problem for a distant subject with a tele-lens, but could be a problem for close ups, regardless of focal length.

INITIAL IDEAS

When I was working as the member of the photography team at my undergraduate college, we were introduced to the idea of motion blur techniques using the photos of extreme sports like racing cars and ski shots. Since then I have always associated speed with cars and sports. And if one looks at the history of automobile industry, engine upgrade has led to increasing fast passenger vehicles being driven on the streets. Hence, this thought extrapolated to the idea of a future, where the boundaries of vehicular speed would have extended beyond human perception and the highways will look like a carnival of neon trail lights. So, the question was how to represent this idea as a sculpture?

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911

The idea was nothing new and I eventually realized that. In fact the futurist painter Luigi Russolo had already made an artwork named Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911 on similar lines. Similarly the motion of a human was captured in a sculpture by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. These artworks inspired me to create a small scale wire-frame model of a Ferrari 480 F1 car’s and draw tangential lines across its surface, much like the drawing shown above. The result was not as impressive as I had hoped but lots of things were to be taken forward.

COMPUTER VISION AND MOTION BLUR

As a former computer science engineer, I sometimes crave to exercise my coding skills. And this idea of motion blur was something I wanted to capture on my device. How would the world look like if our brain did not perform saccadic masking and defragmentation. Things would be followed by their past self, fast motions would be impossible to see and reality would be a dizzy experience. These ideas were easy to describe and visualize mentally, but I decided to use to programming to better visualize it. Below is a clip of the visualization implemented in Processing. This can be easily installed on an Android device.

ZEOTROPE AND MOTION BLUR

The effect of motion and blur are the fundamental building blocks of motion pictures. One of the earliest example of this is a zeotrope. The artifact has a nostalgic and playful feel to it and I selected it as a medium to develop my concept of ‘futuristic high-speed world’ in its lines. I wanted to give my audience a feel of this world but did not want the experience to be overwhelming. It had to be completely under their control.

Hence came the idea of this ‘zeotropic umbrella’ like structure, made with reflective acrylic components, in which a user could enter and rotate (speed variable and controllable) using a regulator. The reflections would bounce between the surfaces of the installation and maybe induce the feel of standing in the middle of a kaleidoscope. It might sound dangerous to stand under this installation, and the alternative was to place a 360˚ camera and create a VR experience out of the same.

Kinetic Sculpture : Replication

January 07, 2018 in Art, Design

The outputs of the second week of Kinetic Sculpture under the guidance of Prof. Ranjit Konkar, Dr. Jignesh Khakhar and Prof. Vivekanand Yengaldas.
Team: Shafali Jain & Sarwesh Shah
Sculpture inspiration: Anne Lily

Kinetic Sculpture : Introduction

November 08, 2017 in Design

Course overview and explorations in Week 1 of module Kinetic Sculpture.
Mentor: Prof Ranjit Konkar
Team: Sarwesh Shah, Shafali Jain

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