About Mohan Venkadesan
An interdisciplinary journey across vision science, healthcare, design and entrepreneurship
Mohan Venkadesan is a vision science innovator, healthcare technology founder and interdisciplinary designer exploring how science, technology and human-centred design can create better futures for healthcare.
As a child, Mohan Venkadesan had only one dream: to become an astronaut. He wanted to fly, to command, to leave the Earth behind and see what lay beyond it. He began preparing for that dream long before most children ever think about a profession, with a clear path in mind, to join the Air Force as a fighter pilot, master the skies and, one day, journey into space. He worked towards it with the quiet certainty of a child who had already decided where he belonged.
Then, during his training, something he had never heard of suddenly stood between him and the sky: colour blindness!
A routine medical examination revealed that he could not distinguish certain colours in the way aviation standards required. The doctors explained what it meant. Under the rules governing military aviation and human spaceflight, he could not become the fighter pilot he had trained to be, nor could he one day sit in the commander’s seat of a highly sophisticated aircraft or spacecraft. There were other roles he could pursue. There were other ways to remain close to aviation and space. But the one role he wanted most – the person at the controls, the one responsible for the mission, was no longer within reach.
For the first time, Mohan encountered a world in which something he had never thought about could decide what he was allowed to become. He had never considered colour. He had never thought of his vision as different. Yet a few words on a medical report had suddenly drawn a boundary around a dream he had carried for years.
But something unexpected happened.
Instead of walking away from the question, Mohan became fascinated by it. What exactly was colour blindness? Why did some people see the world differently? How did the human eye and brain transform light into the colours we experience? And if something as fundamental as vision could be misunderstood or go undetected, what else might medicine be missing?
The dream of reaching space did not disappear. It changed direction.
The boy who once wanted to understand the universe from a spacecraft began wanting to understand something much closer to home – the extraordinary complexity of human vision. That curiosity became the beginning of his journey into vision science, medical technology and healthcare, and eventually towards a larger ambition: using science, technology and human-centred design to build better ways of detecting disease, screening health and improving the lives of people whose needs are often overlooked.
His professional journey then began in optometry, where an interest in vision science quickly developed into a deeper curiosity about how healthcare technologies are designed, built and brought into the real world. Rather than following a conventional path, he sought opportunities to work beyond the boundaries of clinical practice — developing products, working with healthcare organisations, building ventures and exploring how emerging technologies could address unmet needs.
Over the years, this curiosity has taken him from clinical environments and healthcare R&D to entrepreneurship, social impact, product development and design research.
From clinical problems to real-world technologies
Mohan has led and contributed to 16+ healthcare and innovation projects, spanning medical devices, preventive eye care, vision screening, learning technologies and inclusive solutions.
Several of these projects progressed from concepts and prototypes into commercial or clinical implementation, while others became research outcomes or informed new directions. His work has received government funding, resulted in 5 patents, and been published in peer-reviewed research.
His colour vision screening technology is one of his flagship innovations. The clinically validated, patent-protected technology delivers results in under six seconds and has contributed to screening 1M+ children worldwide.
His work has also involved collaboration and product integration with leading organisations in eye care, including Aravind Eye Care System, Sankara Nethralaya and ZEISS.
These experiences taught him something that continues to shape his practice:
“An idea becomes meaningful when it can move beyond the prototype and create value in the real world”.
An interdisciplinary way of working
Mohan’s practice sits between disciplines rather than within a single one.
He combines vision science, healthcare R&D, product development, human-centred design, prototyping and futures thinking to explore complex problems from multiple perspectives.
His approach often begins with an unmet need or an emerging possibility, then moves through research, ideation, experimentation and prototyping.
Understand → Imagine → Prototype → Test → Learn → Translate
Sometimes the outcome is a medical device or healthcare technology. Sometimes it is a speculative prototype, scenario or design fiction that explores what healthcare could become.
This ability to move between practical and speculative work is central to his practice: building solutions for today’s problems while questioning the assumptions that might shape tomorrow’s systems.
Healthcare, entrepreneurship and social impact
Mohan has experience not only developing technologies but also building organisations and ventures around ideas.
He co-founded a healthcare-focused NGO working to strengthen access to primary eye care and improve patient outcomes. He has also built education and career-focused ventures, exploring learning technologies, AI-enabled platforms and new approaches to career development.
Some ventures progressed commercially; others remained early-stage experiments or evolved into new directions.
Each experience contributed to the same iterative philosophy:
Build → learn → adapt → build again.
For Mohan, entrepreneurship is not simply about starting companies. It is a way of taking responsibility for an idea and testing whether it can create meaningful change.
Design, futures and speculative practice
His design journey expanded significantly through the Royal College of Art in London, where he explored questions beyond conventional healthcare product development.
Design gave him new ways to investigate human experience, systems and possible futures.
His work now includes interests in speculative design, design fiction, futures thinking, inclusive design and emerging healthcare technologies.
Rather than predicting a single future, he is interested in using prototypes and scenarios to ask better questions:
What if healthcare worked differently?
What might emerging technologies enable?
What could become possible if we redesigned the systems around people?
This complements his practical healthcare work. Some projects are designed to solve immediate problems; others are designed to provoke thought, challenge assumptions and explore possibilities.
Education & continuous learning
Mohan studied Optometry at BITS Pilani – Elite School of Optometry, where he developed a foundation in vision science, community eye care and medical technologies.
He later pursued design education at the Royal College of Art, London, expanding his practice into human-centred design, speculative design, prototyping and futures thinking.
His professional development has continued through programmes and courses associated with institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, covering areas such as healthcare innovation, psychology, artificial intelligence, design and futures thinking.
For him, education has never been limited to formal qualifications. Much of his learning has come through building, failing, collaborating, experimenting and working directly with people and organisations in the real world.
What is Mohan Venkadesan exploring now ?
Mohan is currently interested in building the next generation of preventive and diagnostic healthcare technologies, particularly at the intersection of vision science, AI, medical devices and human-centred innovation.
He is also exploring how design, foresight and interdisciplinary research can help healthcare organisations anticipate emerging challenges rather than simply react to them.
He is open to collaborations with researchers, clinicians, designers, entrepreneurs, healthcare organisations, innovation teams, investors and mission-driven organisations working on ambitious problems.
The common thread is simple:
Bring different disciplines together.
Build something.
Learn from the real world.
Make it better.
Beyond the work
Mohan is naturally curious about the world beyond his professional practice.
He enjoys long motorcycle rides, walks, photography, books, nature, science fiction and observing the small details of everyday life. He is fascinated by people, systems and the unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.
He has also deliberately experimented with his relationship with technology and society, including periods away from social media and the internet, as a way of observing how people communicate, discover information and respond to unfamiliar situations.
He believes curiosity is one of the most valuable skills a person can develop.
And perhaps the simplest principle behind his journey comes from his childhood hero: “Araise Awake and stop not till the Goal is reached”
