Please note

This is a course exercise, not my portfolio.

This page was built as teaching material for Prototyping and Making Skills, a master's elective at TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering. The projects shown are used only to demonstrate how a portfolio site can be made.

My actual portfolio is at mahanmehrvarz.name.

Mahan Mehrvarz

Industrial design, MSc · Delft

I make things that sit between objects, screens and the city. Trained first as an architect, I now work at the scale of the hand — furniture, tools, small machines — while keeping the habit of asking what a thing does to the street it ends up on.

Below is a selection of work from the last several years: products, interactive pieces, buildings and urban studies, in no particular order of importance.

Selected work

38 projects

  1. White freestanding kitchen cabinet with a lifted lid and pull-out drawers holding rows of glass preserving jars, shown as a render and installed in a kitchen beside an oven

    The Grow Canning Table

    Furniture · Kitchen storage

    A compact cabinet for preserving and storing home-grown food: a work surface on top, jar racks and a cold drawer below, on castors so it can move between kitchen and garden.

  2. A small hand-built quadcopter with exposed circuit board, wiring and a camera module resting on a pile of rust-coloured rocks

    Not Another Tool

    Interaction design · Prototype

    A rough, self-built drone used to ask what a tool is before it is polished into a product. The prototype is left deliberately unfinished so its workings stay visible.

  3. Animated white paper model of a windmill with turning sails, photographed close up against a soft grey background

    Prompting Realities

    Speculative design · Paper model

    A series of quick paper models made in response to generated images, testing how fast an imagined object can be brought into the room as something you can hold.

  4. Aerial photograph of Amsterdam streets overlaid with paper-style speech bubbles reporting stolen bikes, each with a date, location and description of the thief

    Who Steals Bikes

    Data design · Amsterdam

    A mapping of bike-theft reports as first-person notes pinned to the city, turning a police statistic back into a set of small, located stories.

  5. Three phone screenshots of text-message conversations in which a person is told where they should be at a given hour of the day

    Where Shhe Goes

    Design research · SMS experiment

    An experiment run over text messages: participants were asked where a stranger should be at a given time, exposing assumptions about gender, name and daily life.

  6. Web page mock-up showing a grey world map with red location pins and the caption that recent tweets including the word discrimination were about these places

    Not About From

    Web · Data visualisation

    A small website that places tweets mentioning discrimination on a world map by the place they are about, rather than the place they were sent from.

  7. Black-and-white view over dense Tehran rooftops with the blank side walls of buildings highlighted in bright green

    Waif Walls

    Urban study · Tehran

    A survey of the blind party walls left exposed by Tehran's uneven rebuilding, picked out across a rooftop view as a single connected surface the city has never designed.

  8. Three spheres collaged from aerial photographs of Tehran, the central one glowing orange, floating against a blurred cityscape

    Tehran Now

    Visual essay · Collage

    A set of image-globes assembled from photographs of the city, each one a different reading of Tehran at the same moment in time.

  9. Animated diagram of lines fanning out from a single point, labelled possible, plausible and probable, with a small magenta dot marking one future

    Will Design Save Tehran?

    Futures · Diagram

    A futures-cone diagram drawn for a talk on the city, asking which of the plausible Tehrans design work actually reaches for.

  10. Map of Tehran districts with overlapping red and green circles of varying size and a pop-up label naming a cinema

    Tehran's Data Narrate

    Data visualisation · Tehran

    An interactive map layering public venues and activity across the city's districts, built to let residents read their own neighbourhood in the data.

  11. Dark blue figure-ground map of central Amsterdam with canals in pale green and dozens of small orange photograph markers scattered across it

    Second Nature

    Urbanism · Amsterdam

    Urbanism and the Anthropocene: a photographic survey of the places where Amsterdam's built and natural ground can no longer be told apart, pinned to a map of the canal city.

  12. Black-and-white aerial night view of a city grid, with streets traced as bright lines of light

    Traffic to Light

    Installation · Light

    Traffic data rendered as light: the flow of cars through the grid becomes a slowly changing pattern of brightness on the streets themselves.

  13. Technical drawings of a folding lattice structure, with a grid of lettered and numbered axes, wave-shaped section lines and small orange arrows showing movement

    Toward a Moving Structure

    Kinetic structure · Drawings, simulation, film

    A folding lattice that changes shape as it is pulled, developed through drawings, a physics simulation and a short film of a plastic prototype in motion.

  14. Black-and-white simulation of many thin chains hanging in arches from a flat base, forming a cluster of catenary vaults

    The Muqarnas Experiment

    Simulation · Form-finding

    A hanging-chain simulation used to grow muqarnas-like vaults from pure tension, then inverted into compression forms.

  15. Grainy video still of a footballer in a blue kit kneeling face-down on the grass, filmed with a VHS-style scan-line effect

    Narcolepsy

    Video · Short film

    A short video piece cut from broadcast football footage, slowing the moments when players fall and stay down.

  16. Mock-up of a website called Watch Azadi Online showing a live video player, a grid of numbered camera views of Azadi Tower and a Tehran weather widget

    Understanding Azadi

    Web concept · Tehran

    A fictional live-stream site for Azadi Tower, imagining what it would mean to watch a national monument all day, from every side.

  17. Tall green slab tower with a tree printed on its face, standing in front of snow-covered mountains under a bright blue sky with clouds

    Tehran Image Tower

    Speculative architecture · Tehran

    A proposal for a single blank tower on the city's edge that carries one image at a time, facing the mountains rather than the traffic.

  18. Workshop interior with a long wooden table and black chairs, a bright green painted alcove with a window seat and industrial pendant lamps

    Future City Innovation Lab

    Interior · Workspace

    A co-working and workshop space for an urban innovation lab, kept plain except for one green room that marks the place to sit and talk.

  19. Close-up of a white ceramic mug on a wooden desk with a person's hands typing on a keyboard behind it

    Woman, Architecture and City

    Symposium · Identity and film

    Visual identity and short films for a symposium on women's work in architecture and the city, built from quiet scenes of everyday working.

  20. A person in a beige coat carrying a brown Royal manual typewriter with green keys, photographed in warm evening light

    Goooshe Vintage Shop

    Photography · Campaign

    A Vintage Archaeology: a photographic campaign for a second-hand shop that treats each object as something found rather than sold.

  21. Close-up of a cream-coloured Classic 12 typewriter with a hand pressing one of its round keys

    Vintage Shop Anniversary

    Film · Goooshe

    A short anniversary film for the shop, shot entirely on the objects it has sold over the year.

  22. Isometric arrangement of overlapping mobile app screens in white and purple, showing listings, photos and rating stars for the Dezz platform

    Dezz Platform

    UI design · Mobile

    Interface design for a service marketplace app: listings, profiles and reviews laid out on a single purple accent.

  23. Flat teal illustration of the Tehran skyline with Azadi Tower, Milad Tower and mountains under stylised clouds

    Hayat Life Platform

    Illustration · Identity

    Key illustration and identity for a city-life platform, reducing Tehran to a handful of recognisable silhouettes in one colour.

  24. Three white smartphones fanned out showing the screens of a list-based app with a green and yellow logo

    SABC App

    UI design · Mobile

    Screens for a lightweight ordering app, designed to stay readable on small, older phones.

  25. Grid of white smartphones showing orange and white app screens with maps, order lists and a sign-in page

    WePrint

    UI design · Mobile

    An app for finding nearby print shops and sending files ahead; the flow from map to order in as few screens as possible.

  26. Open laptop and a smartphone on a grey surface, the laptop displaying a website with an orange world map

    GP Group Web Presence

    Web design · Corporate

    Website and visual language for an engineering group working across several countries, organised around a map of where it builds.

  27. Green bank card covered in a pixelated mosaic pattern, with a Persian bank logo, an embossed card number and the cardholder's name

    A Union Façade for a Bank

    Identity · Bank card

    A pixel pattern devised for a bank's building façade, carried down to the smallest surface the bank owns: the card in your pocket.

  28. Misty render of a music centre made of stacked white boxes with tall glazed facades, rising above a line of trees with birds overhead

    Chahar Gah Music Center

    Architecture · Cultural building

    A music centre composed of rehearsal and performance volumes stacked around a shared foyer, named after the Persian musical mode.

  29. Render of a curved performing-arts building with a ribbed dark timber shell, seen from above against a green ground

    Center for Performing Arts

    Architecture · Competition

    A performing-arts and gymnastics complex wrapped in a single ribbed shell that folds over both halls.

  30. Render of a glass office tower of shifted stacked blocks above a lower stone-clad base, with pedestrians in the foreground

    Pasargad Bank Headquarters

    Architecture · Office tower

    A headquarters tower of offset glass volumes above a heavy public base, planned so the ground floor stays open to the street.

  31. Aerial render of a low white civic complex with flat roofs and courtyards, set among dense green trees

    Jey City Center

    Architecture · Competition

    Competition entry for a city centre laid out as low courtyard buildings under a single thin roof, keeping the existing trees.

  32. Green-tinted view of two cable-car gondolas above a hazy city, with the title Jamshidieh residential complex printed on the image

    Jamshidieh Residential Complex

    Architecture · Housing, Tehran

    Housing on the steep northern edge of Tehran, reached by cable car; a study of living on the slope rather than cutting into it.

  33. White massing model of a city with a winding blue river valley and orange and yellow planning zones, criss-crossed by dotted red routes

    Farahzad River Valley

    Urban strategy · Tehran

    Strategic design and planning for a river valley running through the city, proposing a chain of green rooms along the water.

  34. Street map of Amol with main roads drawn in thick blue and orange lines, yellow circles at key squares and place names in Persian

    Amol Tourist District

    Urban planning · Amol

    A plan to link Amol's squares and bridges into a walkable tourist district, drawn as a network rather than a zone.

  35. Sunlit stream running between the trunks of plane trees, with a paper boat floating on the water

    Mahallat Bazaar Landscape

    Landscape · Mahallat

    Landscape design for the bazaar's water channel, keeping the old trees and letting the stream become the route through the market.

  36. Hand-drawn master plan of an oval former airfield filled with green fields, building blocks and looping roads

    Former Military Airport, Tehran

    Urban design · Master plan

    Development and revitalisation of a disused airfield as a new district, keeping the runway as its central open space.

  37. Winter street render with a person in a hooded jacket in the foreground, snow falling, and low buildings and figures behind

    Architecture Post-Production

    Visualisation · Workshop

    A workshop on post-producing architectural renders, working from a bare model to a finished winter scene.

  38. Screenshot of an image-editing program with a render of a white plaza and stepped building open in the canvas and a long list of layers on the right

    Visualisation Training

    Teaching · Software

    Training sessions on architectural visualisation, taught by building up one image layer by layer in front of the group.

About

I studied architecture and worked in Tehran on buildings, urban studies and interfaces before moving to the Netherlands to study industrial design at TU Delft. I am interested in tools, in cities, and in the small objects that quietly organise both.

Currently
MSc Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft
Background
Architecture and urban design
Works with
Wood, paper, electronics, code, cameras
Languages
Persian, English