The School of Interdisciplinary Design and Innovation (SIDI) has been created in November 2020 to give thrust to the design-centric education mandate of IIITDM Kancheepuram. SIDI draws its motivation from two major developments that have impacted the education sector in the year 2020 - the pandemic that exposed the fault-lines in the prevalent teaching/faculty-centric model of education, and the National Education Policy 2020 that has created possibilities for developing new learning/student-centric networks of education and innovation.