Shreya Paliwal
Shreya Paliwal is an award-winning designer specializing in brand systems, packaging design, and strategic design innovation. Currently serving as Chief Designer for Brand Systems & Packaging at Think Design in New York, she brings more than five years of experience working at the intersection of brand strategy, product design, and user experience. Shreya has built a reputation as a founding designer who helps organizations scale their design maturity and accelerate innovation, translating complex ideas into cohesive systems that drive meaningful business value.
Shreya’s interest in design grew from a lifelong love of both art and science. As a child, she aspired to be an artist while also enjoying mathematics and scientific thinking, eventually realizing that design offered the perfect intersection of these interests. For her, design is a discipline where the analytical principles of science meet the creative inspiration of art—particularly when designing products that require both technical functionality and thoughtful form. Growing up in a small town in India where “design” was often associated primarily with fashion, she discovered the broader possibilities of the field and pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Product Design from Avantika University. After graduating, she joined a startup as its first designer, where she helped grow the organization into a recognized brand. Through that experience, she developed expertise in building comprehensive design systems that spanned industrial design, logo creation, brand experience, product experience, and design strategy.
She later earned a Master of Science in Packaging, Systems, and Identities from Pratt Institute in New York, where her studies expanded her perspective on design as an interconnected system that shapes how brands and products are experienced. Prior to her current role, Shreya served as a Founding Designer and Design Strategist at HRS Navigation, contributing to more than 30 projects across healthcare technology, digital systems, and branding, and helping the organization earn international recognition including the prestigious iF Design Award and A’ Design Award. In her current role, she leads projects ranging from digital product experiences to brand systems, collaborating with cross-functional teams to understand user needs, gather feedback, and ensure consistent, high-quality design outcomes. Passionate about continuous learning, Shreya thrives on solving complex problems and quickly adapting to new domains, bringing her design expertise together with technical insight to create thoughtful, impactful solutions.
• Human computer interaction for User experience design
• Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman
• Matlab On-ramp
• THINK503x: Design Thinking: Ideation, Iteration and Communication
• THINK502x: Design Thinking: Empathizing to Understand the Problem
• Sustainable Packaging in Circular Economy (SPCEx)
• Pratt Institute - Master of Science - Systems & Identities
• Bachelor's degree - Industrial Design
• Pratt Circle Award
• IF Design Award 2024
• Academic Scholarship
• A' Design Award for Medical Devices and Medical Equipment Design
• Aryabhata Scholarship
• Catch Fire
• Providing design services for sustainable causes and non-profit organizations
What do you attribute your success to?
I've grown as a person in terms of how resilient I am, in terms of how my brain works now. It kind of is able to determine 9-10 steps ahead of what the product is going to go through before it goes through it. I've developed better communication skills and learned about working with teams and team spirit. There are a lot of things that have contributed, but personal growth is one of the main factors.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
It's never linear. This career that I have so far wasn't a straight path. I was pushed into something, worked through it, then pushed into something else and worked through it. Whatever I had planned never worked out in terms of career, but in terms of projects, it did. So it's like a balance of planning. I wanted to do HMI, but I ended up at Pratt, which was good in a way because then I ended up being in New York, which was better positioning that way. Even though it's not linear, sometimes the path takes you someplace else.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say resilience, because design is a very subjective thing. If I show you a design, you might not like it, versus if I show somebody else a design, that person might like it. It's very subjective, based on our preferences, choices, and biases. That requires resilience. Let's say you're working on a project where you know that this is what users want, but if you are getting it through people who have a particular bias about that particular design, users might not want it. That's when resilience is required to still do it and be able to prove with data that this is what the users want. It's not about what we like, you like, or I like. It doesn't have to be that way. It has to be what users want. So resilience at that point to be able to put that point forward, because the success of that product is dependent on that. Sometimes women are intimidated by the kind of backlashes we get when something is not right. We then end up sometimes doing things that everybody agrees on, because then there's less accountability for that project, but then that resilience sometimes also leads to good achievement. That was my personal experience.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
For women in general, there are a lot of other things that determine their career path. The timelines are different for each woman, some plan earlier and some plan later, so you're constantly re-navigating it, which is very difficult. The good thing about design is that because it's never about one particular technical area, unless you are in a specific domain, it's kind of accepting in multiple ways. It accepts you from different domains as well and brings you in. I have a friend who was a teacher before but now she is into UI UX design after developing the necessary skills. That's a good thing. The challenges are there are certain technical fields that really require you to be in the profession for years, like more than 10 or 20 years, like mechanical design or maybe manufacturing. If you are in healthcare or any technical side of a product, there are pros and cons, but it's kind of similar to any other industry. But I think with women, the major thing is about them being able to determine when do they want to re-navigate or change their paths.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think definitely transparency. Looking straight ahead into the problem, rather than avoiding the problem until it becomes a big problem. If you have a problem, you are saying that there's going to be a problem. Sometimes we tend to avoid it, saying, okay, maybe it's not the thing, until it becomes a huge problem. And then, solving that problem is, like, even more effort, so directness, transparency, trust, honesty. And definitely service.