Prof. Rupa Agarwal has 28 years of experience in various aspects of design. The most significant contribution is in design education. She has handled many academic administrative posts in National Institute Fashion Technology, notable amongst which are Chairperson of Department of Fashion Communication and Chairperson of the Master of Design program, Campus Academic Coordinator (Academic Head) of the Mumbai Campus. She is currently heading the craft cluster initiative at NIFT across all its 18 campuses as Head Cluster and is located at NIFT Mumbai. Her core teaching areas are Design Methodology, Design Research, Interactive spaces, Design History and Sustainable systems. Her expertise in curriculum design has led her to be part of many committees within NIFT. She is part of the core committee to develop the curriculum of Design Thinking for classes 6-12. It is being facilitated by the Department of Skill development, Ministry of Education for Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). There are over 3,000 schools that are running the course in 2023-2024.
She believes that teaching is a creative process. Design thinking must be applied to design teaching as well. She is passionate about the ways in which designers could use their unique skills to solve sustainability issues. In the process of doing her Ph.D. from IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay, she developed a nuanced understanding of the subject. Her endeavor was to develop a versatile model that is relevant in any domain of design. The research contribution of her thesis was a conjecture-analysis model for integrating sustainability in design pedagogy.