vir-kin (like a gherkin with a v)

Fifteen years in design taught me to read a room. Twelve hours in the English Channel taught me to read the current. Neither is something you fight - you read it and learn to move with it.

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NGFP Fellow 2020

School of International Futures UK

Offsites: Following Curiosities

Delhi Dallying

Who's Cooking our Futures?

Journal of Future Studies

Roads to Resilience

Humanitarian Foresight Anthology

Time Capsule

BBC Futures & School of International Futures UK

Unbox Fellow 2014

Arts & Humanities Research Council, British Council

The Future of Festivals

Atelier Chiang Mai - The Festival Academy

ADN Satellite - Asian Dramaturgy

Asian Dramaturgs' Network - Centre42

I Stood up: Social Design in Practice

Scientific Research Journal

Thesis: Re-Imagining Planning

School of Planning & Architecture Delhi

Dissertation: Experience of Space

School of Planning & Architecture Delhi

The Curiosity Habit

Arthshila Ahmedabad

Nooncha
Trikona Foundation
Personal Creative Projects
Open Water Swim

Contact: hello@virkein.com

©2026

VIRKEIN DHAR
All Rights Reserved.

My Expertise

As a strategist, I use design as a tool to help brand founders & leaders, creative agencies and impact organisations - make informed decisions.My core offerings include:
-- Quarterly Triage for Founders
-- Brand Strategy for Consumer Co.
-- Strategic Foresight for Impact

My Approach

I think about design less as a set of finished things and more as a way of making decisions. Most people meet it at its most visible surface - the polish of spaces, products, services and experiences. Something that is beautiful, aesthetic and desirable.Used as a lens on a business, design becomes diagnostic - where is a symptom showing up, is it persistent or one-off, what does it ripple into, what's driving it upstream? The symptoms are usually unglamorous like a drop in engagement, a vague sense that the team’s lost alignment, an internal doc that never gets opened, a narrative that doesn’t seem to stick. In isolation these can seem easy to ignore. But when mapped together, these scattered signals often point to a deeper misalignment. When symptoms get connected, re-framed, and turned into the right questions, things begin to shift.My work starts there - not arriving with answers, but knowing where to look, what to ask, and when to bring in the right expertise.

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not
beautiful, I know it is wrong.” - Buckminster Fuller

PARADISE SCHOOL

Strategy Lead
Education | Goa · 2026
Making a founder's conviction survive change
In collaboration with Thought Over Design

Ten years after being built on an untested thesis, and at a change of administration, the school wanted its
conviction articulated. I worked with the incoming director, the founder and the teachers to surface what
the decade had taught them. I went deep into Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) approach, which the school was founded on, to understand how it had evolved from a classroom method into the principle by which the whole institution is run — then examined that against what parents now expect a school to prepare a child for. Two findings shaped the positioning. One: the conviction lived in the founder's judgement, not in any document — a decade of decisions, each individually defensible, that collectively had no name beyond the original inspiration. Two: said plainly to a fee-paying parent, even one already looking for something unconventional, SOLE read as risk, because self-organised sounds like unsupervised. So, the brief was not about messaging but a succession problem. How does a conviction outlive the person who held it? Positioning turned out to be the mechanism. "We trust children to learn" turned a method into a promise - one the school can be held to and seen keeping, through its space, systems, teachers and students.
Watch the film

OZI

Strategy Lead
Baby & Kids | India · 2025
Positioning a vertical player in quick commerce
In collaboration with Irregulars Studio

A positioning that would make a vertical kids' platform legible in a crowded quick-commerce market. Ran parent interviews, social listening across baby and kids’ recommendation platforms, customer forums, and a competitive analysis covering both the horizontal players and the category incumbents. Speed as a core proposition belonged to the horizontals, assortment to the incumbent, and neither was operationally winnable for this brand. But parents weren't describing impatience. They were describing uncertainty. The question changed from how we deliver fastest to what's scarce once fast delivery is table stakes - confidence in the decision, and trust in the platform.I positioned the brand on curation and judgement, held delivery speed as hygiene rather than claim, and argued against making speed the only communications anchor which may be defensible for the short term, indefensible the moment a horizontal player matched it in the category.
Identity Design by Irregulars Studio

10CLUB

Chief Design Officer (Brand & Category Strategy)
Home & Living | India · 2023–25
Building one brand out of a roll-up
With Bhavna Suresh (Founder)

10club had acquired a portfolio of consumer brands and needed to pivot away from the roll-up model. The question arrived as an identity brief but I treated it as a diagnostic question, not a naming one. Audits across acquired categories along with marketplace review mining and search data, showed the acquired names carried marketplace ranking, not brand equity. That killed the house-of-brands plan and set the direction toward one new brand.Category audits and competition benchmarking in home décor, furnishing, kitchen and dining led to a product design and selection strategy with a focus on quality and value for money for Middle Indian homes. Customer interviews shifted the brand from a helpful presence in the home to a trusted equal - reshaping the messaging and giving rise to Ten, the brand mascot, and an accessible brand voice. A shared visual language led by colour and elevated everyday frames, brought coherence to a broad product range across multiple categories.
Beyond brand strategy and product design, I led customer experience and adoption of emerging-tech to streamline cross-functional workflows.
Identity Design by PlanB/Owlworx

UNDP - INCLUSIVE IMAGINARIES

Project Director
Strategic Foresight | APAC · 2021-22
Designing a community engagement framework and toolkit for policy and program development
For Unit for Strategy, Policy and Partnerships at UNDP Regional Bureau for the Asia and Pacific Headquarters in New York

The pilot program for Inclusive Imaginaries was developed to include the following:- creating an Inclusive Imaginaries framework and toolkit to support country office staff in building links between the role of imagination as designed by the constituents most impacted by development trajectories, and programme/policy design intended for them. Training select representatives from country offices in the region as Imagination Facilitators in designing more equitable, participatory approaches for research and policy design using the Inclusive Imaginaries tools. The Inclusive Imaginaries Toolkit was developed in consultation with representatives from the UNDP Accelerator Labs and Youth Co-Labs in 6 country offices - Malaysia, Philippines, Fiji, Nepal, Laos, Samoa. 12 representatives were trained as Imagination Facilitators in identifying what flourishing might look like in our futures in Asia and the Pacific, if imagined through democratization and participation.
Download the Report & Toolkit

STUMBLE

Strategy and Curation
Cultural Evangelism | India · 2022-23
A gathering to build better creative futures
In collaboration with Kommune

The starting point for Stumble was a conversation with Roshan Abbas, imagined as gathering that brought together creators, brand makers and creative evangelists. It envisioned to become an incubator for creative entrepreneurs to discover new ideas, people and connections. It was shaped around the idea that creativity isn’t a straight path. Instead, it was about the in-between moments - the doubts, experiments, the unexpected conversations that sparked something new.
The gathering has since evolved into a digital community anchored within Kommune with a focus on exploring and discovering India's evolving consumer culture and the creator economy.
More at stumble.community
Identity Design by The Brewhouse

ODDBIRD THEATRE

Founding Team - Strategy, Design & Programs
Performing Arts | India · 2016-2020
The city's first curated black box theatre
With Shambhavi Singh & Akhil Wable

OddBird was Delhi’s first curated performing arts venue designed as an intimate black box theatre where audiences can engage deeply with the performing arts. The space was repurposed from an industrial warehouse.What was meant to be a short term collaboration, unexpectedly morphed into a founding team that was tightly knit together through shared ideologies. The founding team imagined Oddbird as a community space where collaborators - programmers, artists, and the audience, come together for a shared experience in an intimate setting.While the space was compelled to closure for a few years from 2020, today Oddbird is back in action and still runs independently with a curated program of theatre, music, dance and storytelling; alongside the nonprofit OddBird Foundation, which supports the development of new work.

RAJBAGH SILK FACTORY

Systems Design & Strategy Expert
Industrial Revitalisation | Srinagar · 2020-21
Rebuilding the Silk Manufacturing in Kashmir
For CRCI India with andBLACK Design Studio

Research and strategy for re-development of the Govt. Silk Factory, Rajbagh, Srinagar, conducted for a conservation and adaptive re-use project - part of the World Bank supported Jhelum Tawi Flood Recovery Program for Jammu and Kashmir Industries Ltd.A multi-stakeholder mapping and assessment across silk industry, craft, culture, agriculture and livelihoods domains in Jammu and Kashmir was carried out, to strategise and design an intervention program at the site.Through field studies and stakeholder consultations, a complex inter-dependent Silk value chain was identified, assessment of gaps and impacts documented, and subsequently an integrated systemic approach for regeneration of the Silk Industry was proposed.View the report

ELRHA HUMANITARIAN INNOVATION FUND

Research & Strategic Analysis Lead
Social Impact | India · 2021-22
Recommendations for building capabilities of global humanitarian innovation managers
In collaboration with Quicksand Design Studio

ELRHA is a leading global charity finding solutions to complex humanitarian problems through research and innovation, headquartered in London. Aligning with Elrha's commitment to Delivering Transformative Innovation in the Humanitarian System, we partnered with Quicksand to conduct program and scoping analysis on building skills and capabilities of innovation managers across global programs supported by ELRHA.Primary research was done through interviews, historical impact reporting analysis from various country programs, towards recommending actions that focused on - enhancing innovation practices to shift from a focus on tools to competencies; adopting non-linearity and plurality in processes; inducing systemic change and interaction between systems; and acting towards inclusion and participation that is cognisant of inherent power and governance structures in their humanitarian innovation programs.

REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORT IN ASIA & THE PACIFIC

Futurist & Storyteller
Strategic Foresight | APAC-India · 2021-22
Exploratory future narratives to make insights accessible and locally legible in India
For Asian Development Bank (ADB) Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department

ADB’s commissioned ARUP for a foresight study on the transport sector, utilizing futures, and foresight techniques and design thinking to help understand and navigate complexities in Asia and the Pacific. As a pilot, three Futurists (Fiji, Malaysia, India) were recruited to review, engage with the contents of the study and interpret it to form future narratives that brought the content to life from diverse, human perspectives to make the insights accessible and contextually relevant for communities and decision makers in the transport sector in India. Representing the realities within the Indian context of a lower-middle income country, a fictional persona and narrative was developed projected in the year 2030. It considered trends around developing sustainable and proactive urban mobility plans can help rapidly growing cities with inclusive urban planning that accommodates the needs of marginalised groups, women and children; and focus on universal access, new digital platforms for formal and informal service integration, mass public transit, and electric mobility solutions as a promising mechanism for improving access and affordability.
Watch video story

MAPPING PERFORMING ARTS INFRASTRUCTURE IN DELHI

Researcher & Analyst
Dance and Theatre | New Delhi · 2011-12
Revitalising Spaces for Performance and Education
For Gati Dance Forum supported by Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi

Working with Gati Dance Forum, a resource organisation and arts initiative in India, a scoping study was carried out to map, document, assess and the existing built infrastructure for performances in the city of New Delhi. The objectives of the study were to create a landscape map to inform re-development initiatives, study existing operational models to assess gaps in knowledge of inclusive practices and unintended impacts of the same. Through desk research, extensive field studies and interviews, a framework for qualitative assessment of operational models, and a minimum standards index for re-design was created. These were subsequently disseminated through focus group discussions with users over a year, towards the aim of incorporating a future-focussed infrastructure support program. The dissemination and discussions led to recognising the absence of a concerted community that could lead ecosystem development, and hence resulted in the program being transformed into a community-building effort.

UNBOX FESTIVAL

Curation, Program Development & Experience Design
Community Platform | India · 2011-16
Explorations to reimagine India's plural futures
In collaboration with Quicksand Design Studio

Unbox Festival is a flagship gathering of the Unbox Cultural Futures. The festival celebrates interdisciplinary collaborations with the gathering being the central manifest fro inspiration, dialogue and hand-on action. It brings together creatives, academics and development professionals that are keen to push the boundaries of their practices. Incepted in 2011, the three day festival has had five editions over the years in Delhi and Bangalore.
Unbox Cultural Futures is a community platform that invites curiosity to reimagine inclusive and pluralistic futures in India - through explorations in art, design, technology, culture and social change. It encompasses inter-disciplinary labs, engaging public platforms, research initiatives, immersive installations and compelling publications.
The initiative is anchored by Quicksand, a design research and innovation practice that connects private sector innovation with underserved communities in global emerging markets.

SPACE10 DELHI

Curatorial Lead
Design Research | India · 2019-20
The first global learning outpost for IKEA's former design and research lab SPACE10

SPACE10 is a design and research lab based in Copenhagen. Delhi was their first satellite space and learning outpost, set up with a mission to gain new knowledge and diversify their perspectives - by gathering designers, technologists, artists, architects, academics and entrepreneurs under one roof to explore how design and emerging technologies can create a better everyday life for people and the planet. We developed a strategic programme and facilitated partnerships for SPACE10 Delhi.
Photography by Sheena Dabholkar & Athul Prasad

IGNITE FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE

Festival Director & Curator
International Dance Biennial | India · 2010-16
Platforming South Asian Contemporary Dance
With Gati Dance Forum

IGNITE Festival of Contemporary Dance was a platform developed in response to the glaring absence of infrastructure and avenues for independent contemporary dance in India. The first of its kind international biennial, it brought to the fore contemporary dance practices rooted in India and South Asia. Incepted in 2010, the multi-day festival has had four editions over the years in Delhi and Jaipur, with participation of over 300 artists from 15 countries.IGNITE was an initiative of Gati Dance Forum, a community driven platform to engage with and support the independent dance ecosystem in India. Its programs encompassed artist residencies, flagship festival, conferences and facilitating support for emerging dancers and choreographers in India and South Asia.

TABLE RADICA - HABIB

Creative Producer and Designer
Immersive Lecture-Performance | India · 2019-20
An immersive experience of memoirs with food, found documents and music.

A Table . 30 Guests . Taster’s Menu . A Radical Life.A radical cultivates taste - taste as discernment, taste as presence and taste as a performative act. If we form ourselves by the books we feed on, the friendships we savour, the camaraderie we let simmer, and the journeys we relish, a radical life has a beginning in what is consumed. Audience is invited to gather around a table, and become visitors, friends, and witnesses of a radical life. All sorts of stimuli are brought to the table to touch, to see, to hold, to savour. It presents the life, loves, and food of Habib Tanvir, an iconic Urdu & Hindi playwright, a director, poet and actor of the modern theatre in India, a man of the world. The experience shares his encounters with love, questions on theatre, his relationship with the homeland, and turmoils of making choices that lead Habib to be remembered as a radical life. The show has been performed in Delhi, Goa and Ahmedabad.
Performed by Amitesh Grover
Written by: Sarah Mariam
Gastronomy by: Bela Gulab Juhi Champa Chameli
Light Design by: Tech Quartet
Photography by: Radhika Agarwal

VATAPI

Artists: Vishal K Dar & Virkein Dhar
Sculpture| Delhi · 2020
A site specific field of light, sculpture and sound
With Black Box Okhla Residency 2019-20

If he has no traveller
To offer mystical meat
Pleasing him for the moment to be
Then for all his days
He is no demon
He is lost within
He is no more.Vatapi re-imagines perspective outside of cartesian geometry and the ways in which we view our physical world.Inspired by the thicket of a black box and the transformative qualities of light, 12 people enter the field every 30 minutes to experience a site-specific field of sculpture, sound and oscillation. Vatapi is presented as an ongoing exploration of the artists’ engagement with light and sight, condition and duration, myth and technology. Two beams of light, one tracing an elliptical orbit and the other piercing through a pulsating circle, entwine in a rhythmic beating of echoes through a time-coded set of conditions. The stillness of non-space evaporates with the embedded soundscape of the Earth’s magnetosphere.

CHANNEL DAYS

Marking each of the days of training in Dover, in the run up to my swim across the English Channel. I documented 20 swim training sessions over a period of 4 weeks. While the spatial context of each session was the same - Dover Harbour Training Area or Deal Beach, the work drew from visual memory, mapped swim route, weather, water temperature and time spent in the water each day.

A POEM A DAY

An audio-graphic jugalbandi (duet) to reflect on and archive our days during the COVID 19 pandemic. Initiated at the beginning of the lockdown in India, each day an audio poem was selected and read by Sudhanva Deshpande, and an artwork was created by Virkein Dhar as a response. The poems are read in English, Hindi and Urdu, and no poet is repeated in the selection.

"We began this journey on the 28 March 2020, not knowing that we would be doing this for as long as we did. The intention was not to curate the best poems or to make the best artworks, rather to respond to each day as it came, as it felt. The 226 poems you hear and the 226 artworks that you see are both responses, in words and in drawings, of all that we found around us and some that remained hidden."

DANCE

An independent, collaborative contemporary dance practice between 2007 and 2014.

Virkein - Open Water Swimmer

English Channel Crossing | 23 July 2026 | 12:16:00
Swimlife Veera Tide Relay Team (4)

Follow Along on Instagram

THE PROBLEM

Early-stage leadership teams are often drowning in more good ideas than they have the time, money or attention to execute. Roadmap items, brand initiatives, hires, a board ask, a competitor move - all competing for the same finite quarter.For a founder, the questions are usually different:
What actually needs my attention right now?
What happens if we delay this by a quarter?
What are we saying no to by saying yes to this?
What evidence would change our mind?These decisions are often made without a full view of the trade-offs. Priority conversations are spread across teams, each with different incentives, and the most urgent, visible or loudly argued priority can easily become the most important one.The founder is often left to piece these competing priorities together alone, mentally weighing the trade-offs before committing valuable resources.

Full Picture View

Map the priorities, pressures and open decisions competing for the quarter - across product, brand, marketing, hiring, customer experience, growth and investor asks, into one shared view.

Decision Framing

Clarify the real choice underneath the noise. What are the options? What does each one depend on? What does each path unlock, delay or make harder? What information is missing? What assumptions are being treated as facts? I use the framework that fits the decision rather than forcing every question through the same strategic model.

Written Triage

A clear synthesis of the decisions, trade-offs and scenarios, followed by recommendations on what to push, pivot, pause or kill this quarter, and the reasoning behind them.

Leadership Session

A working session using strategic foresight methods to pressure-test the choices against business goals, customer evidence, metrics and constraints, and surface where they may not hold up before a customer, the market or an investor. The aim is not simply to arrive at a recommendation. It is to make sure the decision has been properly framed, questioned and understood before action follows.

Why this has to be independent

In principle, everyone around the table is working in service of the business. In practice, everyone also has something they own, something they advocated for, or something they are responsible for delivering. I am retained specifically because I do not.That means I can ask questions that are harder to ask from inside the system:
Do we need to do this at all?
What are we continuing because we have already invested in it?
What are we avoiding because the alternative is uncomfortable?The value of the role is structural. It only works if the read remains independent of everyone else’s incentives - including, at times, the founder’s own attachment to a decision.

HOW THIS WORKS

This runs as a quarterly retainer rather than a conventional strategy project. Each cycle gives the business a structured moment to stop, look across functions, reframe the important decisions and make explicit choices before the next quarter begins. It sits alongside the existing leadership, brand and product functions rather than replacing them. I am not another execution layer to manage.The value compounds over time - the more of the company’s decisions, patterns and outcomes I see, the more useful the independent read becomes.You can begin with a single quarterly cycle before deciding whether to make it an ongoing annual rhythm.

WHY ME?

I have spent 15 years working in early-stage environments, from founding my own venture to being part of founding teams across design, culture, social impact and ecommerce. Much of my work has involved deciding where to position a company, awhich customer to prioritise, how to sequence product and brand bets. I’ve learned firsthand where systems often break - not because of the product or the tech, but because of humans, and the gap between capability and conviction.I have also built strategy tools for policy contexts involving a UN agency and a multilateral development bank, where poor prioritisation carries consequences beyond a missed quarterly target. Across environments, the recurring challenge has been the same - identifying which problem to solve, in what order, and why.

Happy to walk through what a first quarter could look like. Drop in your details in the form and I'll get back to you.

THE PROBLEM

When early stage brands reach a point where the product is moving faster than the brand around it, the founder’s original instinct becomes harder to translate across teams.
And often, there aren’t clear answers to some fundamental questions:
Who are we really building this for?
What can we credibly own that competitors cannot?
What should remain consistent as the business grows?

Brand Positioning

A clear articulation of who the brand is for, what it stands for, its core promise and the territory or differentiation it can credibly own.

Customer & Category Research

Through customer conversations, competitive analysis and existing data to understand what people value, where the category is converging, and which assumptions need testing.

Identify the Right Creative Partner

Find and assess creative partners not only for their ability to execute the strategy, but for how well their thinking, working style and approach fit your team.

Minimum Viable Brand (MVB)

Define what needs to exist now and what can wait, so the brand can launch or evolve without overbuilding.

Voice & Messaging

Translate the positioning into a clear and distinctive way of communicating across customer touchpoints.

Creative Direction

Turn the brand strategy into a clear, actionable brief for internal teams or external creative partners.

HOW THIS WORKS

Projects are scoped around the decision the business needs to make rather than a fixed package of brand deliverables. That can mean defining a new position, sharpening an existing one, preparing for a rebrand, building a minimum viable brand, or giving a creative team the strategic clarity needed to execute.

The goal is simple - make sure the brand is solving the right problem before investing in how it looks and sounds.

Happy to scope what makes sense for where you and your brand are right now. Let’s chat.

Reach out at hello@virkein.com