Cheshta Kela is a London-based design researcher with a background rooted in both academic and spatial practice, she explores how interiors affect emotion, perception, and identity.  Her work sits at the intersection of design, psychology, and philosophy exploring the emotional, ethical and dimensions of interior space. Her curiosity questions how environments reflect, shape, and sometimes exploit the bodies that move through them.

Blending speculative thinking with narrative design and philosophical inquiry, she uses writing, film, and spatial storytelling to reimagine the role of interiors in society. With a background in cross-disciplinary design and lived experiences that inform her ethical lens, Cheshta approaches interiors not just as functional enclosures, but as emotional and political agents.

Her thesis project, Drained, is a speculative film and research-led design proposal that investigates the commodification of human plasma. Set in a sterile, claustrophobic waiting room, the film reveals the slow psychological collapse of individuals within a system that treats biology as currency. Inspired by her brother’s real-life experiences as a plasma donor, the work traces the emotional and spatial consequences of healthcare systems that quietly extract from the most vulnerable, transforming sites of care into architectures of control.

Drained merges research, worldbuilding, and psychological narrative to examine what happens when survival itself becomes transactional.

Through her practice, Cheshta advocates for emotionally resonant, ethically grounded, and intellectually curious design: always led by the belief that interiors are not neutral spaces, but sites of agency, tension, and transformation.