 My name is Sameer Chabukswar and I belong to Yoj Designs. I am the CEO and founder of Yoj Designs. Introducing myself, I feel that I've come a full circle or about to come a full circle. I started my career as an industrial engineer. I'm a trained industrial engineer and I was designing man-machine systems back in 1994, 93 and 95 and as a natural progression decided to pursue my masters in human factors engineering. Where we were taught you know what are the implications of designing for the humans rather than for the systems and that's how I've gotten to the field of user experience design. A few years back, about eight nine years back, I felt that the need for design in India is great and we need to create a niche here and therefore I started this company Yoj Designs and we've been fortunate to make a small dent. Today we see that about almost 80% of our clientele are from India so there's great awareness about the field of design and user experience design and I hope to continue this journey forward. Thank you. Thank you Samir. Hi, my name is Narendra Ghaté. I'm the chief designer in Tata LXC. I'm a mechanical engineer and I think I'm a good mechanical engineer. I've done my industrial design and I've also done my MBA from I am Bangalore so it's a bit complex but last 20 years I'm in Tata LXC and we started from almost zero and now we are a very large design practice with very different diverse domains and that way I totally agree with what I think Professor Natkarni said in the beginning that we are dicing and slicing the design profession into small small bits and pieces and each one of us so we have started service design we have started UX design we have started branding we have started graphic design so all of it is sort of giving us projects but overall what we see in our studio that if the designer is good he's able to actually apply himself in any one of these different domains and that's what I hope all of us would get into also in terms of agreeing. Thank you Narendra. Hi, I'm from the academia side not from the industry side I'm Deepak, Deepak John Matthew. I am a student taught teacher because I have not studied design I studied physics I studied painting I studied graphic design and I did some research on design education and I worked in NID for 14 years now we are actually have a new baby in the new IIT IIT Hyderabad we have started a department of design where normally when everybody starts from class one two three four I start from the opposite we start a PhD then MDS then we are started a dual degree for the engineers now we'll start BDS so that's the opposite direction we are looking at so this is my background but my best education from the age of 20 to 30 I traveled all over India hitchhiking and traveling almost like that so before being a part of this academia I was a nice person my audible hi I'm Maina Khosh and currently I'm teaching in Jadovpur University which is like one of the top state universities in India before that I have been teaching in IIT Kharagpur for almost five years and prior to that I was working in one of the corporate sectors in design research and development that was again another for almost five years prior to that I was working on some research projects funded by the government and before prior to that I was doing my master's in design from IIT Kanpur so and you might be wondering like how old is this person right so this is for last 11 years I've been pursuing that and in between I forgot to mention like I started up my own consultancy and like started to running it on and off so the motto that I had was to try out different organizations and you know you know have experienced different ventures in different models and modalities so and it has been a it has been a very interesting experience all through you know experiencing the government organizations looking at your own business looking at research projects as such so it has been it has been quite a nice journey but in short and my background as a bachelor degree was from architecture so I'm a registered architect as well so so that's one thing and what one thing that I have that I focus still date is I'm still learning there's so much to learn and I feel I'm so incomplete and you know it's never enough so so that that's what drives me and it's great being part of UX India and meeting all of you here we'll interact further during this session thanks all right thanks for the introductions to the panel so let's um straight to the question the first question right so we all as a community I think we are all fairly successful today I mean if not everyone at least because I haven't I haven't seen too many students raising their hands as individual designers I think we all know design as a craft well but the but the issue that we are facing today I think of the lot that we have today I don't know how many of our of us are individual contributors which we are going to come to know in the design quadrant so the results that we're going to announce after lunch today but there are individual contributors versus there are design leaders per se but there are a lot of people who aspire to lead their products businesses by design so the question to the panel there here is with so much emphasis being given to design driven innovation especially given the context of where we are today in India are design leaders born or are they made so I would like to start with academia side of the things design leaders are born or or are they made are they made okay oh very good question but what is a design leader actually because a designer is a designer you know the moment you become a leader you put on weight and you know just you know commanding all these things so that way design leaders are made but I would ask the same question to you are designers are made or created because all this design education all the academia the biggest question is actually design after teaching design the industry will tell they are not good you know they don't have the experience so I would say to become a design leader you need a primarily you need leadership qualities so that is plain as well as sometimes it is coming from your cultural background see I'm coming from a village I lived in the forest in my childhood so when I came to this kind of age I had severe stage fright you know so I could not even stand at the stage for a minute you know I could not speak English because I studied a government school but I in in in over a period of time I come and talk now I can sit anywhere in the world no problem so you know I'm not scared of you so but maybe because I was trained in the forest climbing the trees that I'm using now or you guys are training me you know so all these people are training me so I don't think there is nothing called born or nothing called trained it's the difficult question passes on to me right so to answer this I recall one of my professors from IIT Kanpur professor Prashant Kumar so this question was there also and what he said I still remember and I kind of agree to that is we are all designers anyway like we are designing life firstly so the decisions that you take towards the decisions that we take towards our lives working working for us towards something and we are crafting it crafting around it I think that that's what is the basic quality which a designer has you know to take a take a vision and to work and change things around it which works for you and works for others as well so I think we have that outlook as living creatures as you know people with cognitive abilities we try to do that all the time but yes as I agree with Deepak as he was mentioning like when it comes to the fitness when it comes to academic paradigm yes they are taught designers are taught and built to act and react or you know to craft the knowledge in a particular fashion which works towards the end but then you get born designers as well now from an academic platform we get to see this difference of designers born and designers taught is at the placements so you know people who are not bothered with placements as such are perhaps the designers born and people who who are very motivated towards placements are perhaps the designers start it's a it's a very what do you say it's a very crude way of looking at it but you know just to give an idea you know it's I think both both are correct and and both exist that way thanks so what do the industry feel okay I'll I'll give a very specific couple of not examples but what I think are points that I think is a definition of a leader especially a design leader and if I wear again I'm looking at the prof again if I wear my student hat looking back what I see was the design teacher was able to interact with multiple students their projects look at them and quickly give them enough feedback so that the student improves the design leader in an organization which I hope I mean so I have some of my team here which I hope I'm doing in our office is to be look to look at different projects and very quickly and hence the different designers very quickly tell what has to be done so that the project succeeds that the customer succeeds to be able to give nuanced directed quick feedback and clarity that is required is what I feel is a primary role of a design leader I mean the leadership quality might come there but the point is everybody's on the same side so the moment a solution comes clear everybody just knows what to do to bring that clarity is part of the core leadership role of a designer or a design leader is what I think if a lot of business school shared the same thought process as Deepak here they would be out of business because they sell leadership we create leaders right specifically design leadership I think design leaders are made because design as a discipline is a deliberate attempt classic definition attempt to you know solve certain problems of human beings an artist cannot be made or a trained artist actually is a misnomer because most of the times they are born with something there could be certain designers here I don't know they are born with the natural ability to design but I think that design leaders are created and multiple factors kind of contribute to that of course the education of layer for leadership as well but astute understanding and empathy for humans is what makes a design leader cool so leadership apart I think we all aspire to even if our designers trained designers I think we are emotional at core and being emotional I think it pays two ways so we take advantage of being emotional to understand our users and empathize a lot with them and in empathizing a lot with them we might become a little sensitive as well so that speaks about me I'm more sensitive and also probably a little bit more introvert and then sometimes I keep thinking that it might be detrimental to making a case for if I see a problem if I see a way it has to be addressed and stuff I need to be able to influence across the board so that this is this is the right way to do it right so so that kind of quality is it something that has to be taught and inculcated in the students on the board go onwards or is it something that has to be supported by the industry so that they groom them into successful people right so so the question here is for academia right so in order to help these people to influence across the board right so for academia how should we mold them in the early stage so that they don't just come out as as the products that we see today who are just designers being involved in their own worlds but they also get a big picture view of things so that they can cut through the org and then drive that influence across so that in the common collective interest of the business they drive the design driven approach which will help both businesses and customers succeed right so the question question for academia is how should we mold them in the initial initial in the first place to start with apart from taking just design how should we mold them yeah okay uh how the question is how do we mold the designers to fit the industry fit the industry so that they can drive the influence yeah actually it is almost like a readymade shop every industry actually feels that you know just go to a bakery by the cake and just pick it you know so it's off the shelf you know everybody thinks that you know you just bake it keep it ready like our job is keep it ready and you come and pick it you know and then oh it's very tasty it's very nice you know like but i feel like as academia we feel like parents you know i'm like a father i feel like i'm a mother or father so i get a baby i grow them and i feed them i comb her hair and put nice bindi teacher how to cook how to broom know how to talk nicely and the industry is like mother-in-law you know next day morning whatever thing you do they don't like it you have not trained them enough you know they don't know they don't know they're not a no experience come on i'll train you first two years they they put them under training okay so this is what we want you know so i think um our job is to make them a nice good human being so designer is secondary you know what we we we train is to be sensitive to things you know so to get adapted to any place and so tomorrow you're going to uh you're getting married to a ux company or a furniture designer funny furniture design company or you know maybe something else you know like you are and you need to mold like i'm i'm sure our our early generation there was nothing called compartmentalized design thing you know like say i'm a photographer so if there's a furniture to be designed i say i don't do it because i'm a photographer so that is what is happening today but as a designer you get adopted to the new environment and so it takes some time you know to get this thing and then an intelligent design student their job there are two types of designers in the world you know one is you want a job nice placement good fat salary like nowadays you know i'm sure we get something like 15 000 applications for this hundred 200 odd seats in design school okay so these many people want to become designers earlier i'm sure hardly some 40 50 people are playing so that is what we say that genuinely interest or the misfits of the other discipline or those who would not get into engineering you know they were coming now this is very lucrative so they're coming that is why you find all these misfits because they're not interested they're interested in that money actually and so they will also very slowly get expelled also so nothing to worry about that actually you know like you when you throw out people because they actually came to you because you're paying good salary that's why they're not genuinely interested in doing something you know so that's what i feel you know so i don't know i answered the question yeah Deepak just snatched away the you know metaphor of mother-in-law was just preparing for that like so um yeah i look at it from how do you really prepare the the budding designers for the world and so one of the ways that that we all are looking at or all the D schools are looking at is the interdisciplinary which he was also mentioning Deepak was also mentioning like rather than having these silos within an academics you kind of break it and you explore which is in many cases the scenario when you hit the industry right so maybe you're trained in something but you have to do something completely different or you have you at least have to be scalable enough to pick up something which is it sounds very alien to you so that's one but coming to the preparedness or you know how how much you are prepared they are for the industry now for this one of the very interesting things that's happening right now when you see the academic world when a student comes in in the first year when we talk to them sometimes you know what's their mission what do they what the expectations they have from the course sorry about my throat so um so one of the things that we are we are surprised with is a student in the first year knows he would be like you know by the end of two years or three years i i wish to develop this startup it will have all these features and you know he's ready with you know his ideas he already knows what to do and the the design education is perhaps just a means just an academic means to reach there which unlike was what professor was mentioning was is the is the zeal to learn and to unlearn you know the the best part of academics is you have to unlearn many things as well like you have this expectation of learning but then you don't get you know narrowed down with the vision that this is the way things has to be done you know you also unlearn certain things you accept some new ideologies and you you kind of become more flexible in nature so that that should be i think the true nature of design education i don't know how much it's achieved or is achievable in reality but having said that if you have this kind of a setup i think that makes you much more prepared for the industry so i don't know if if you get graduates or post graduates like that who are who are who knows the basics and who are ready and who can pick up things quickly i think that's what we aim at as a preschool to prepare the students with the with the readiness so that you can accept a new change and you can scale up very fast so it's it's almost you diminish the gap like oh i'm training training this person again so it's like you already know certain things and you are just scaling up to the expectations of them i think that's the way forward and that's the that's the model which is the schools can adopt or or even that's the approach the students should have while they're pursuing the education so what does the industry think once you get this well trained people from their parents to your side how do you help them succeed by balancing things that are required so that they are successful i mean the issue here is i think academy is saying that we are doing the best from outside and once they land on on this side they are pigeonholing to one kind of thing wherein they are just refining their craft and that's it most of them right so if not everybody and then that could be the reason why we only have very few leaders but is there any way industry can help them to be groomed into leaders yeah sure some mother-in-laws are really good and welcome you know their counterparts there also so what we do specifically is to train people on on the job directly and give them understanding of how to fish rather than teaching them you know this is fishing and you know i'll fish it for you and that has helped a lot even young designers who have their basics right then can pick up very fast one of the huge gaps that we see still from academy is that since design is taught as a craft it's more like doing you're doing an interface if you do wireframes if you do visual design that's design is the concept that is emerging out of the students i think that needs to be broken in some form and given some kind of constraints of time effort and money which is business orientation because because of the academic projects though they are timed maybe three or four weeks when the real projects come the work kind of spreads you know out of the time bounds and that is one of the biggest gap that i see right now since we're all talking about metaphors i also give one more so my wife is a kindergarten teacher and we discuss quite often and the education that i think she gives to the fire world is what really makes a huge difference in that kid's life i feel the design colleges need to be like that kindergarten school where they are just preparing the base like he just now said and the kid knows that he has to learn for at least 20 more years before he sort of settles down what i have an issue with multiple times is that and the student also and maybe some of the colleges also are training for their first job everything is you know what is my placement what is that first job i'm going to get once i somehow get into the job my life will be fine it is not that way so this attitude of learning continuously and having the basis fund us back is something that we expect the academics to sort of impart cool um now let's change the gears i mean the fact that our economy today i think indian economy i think it's it's offering a lot of opportunities and we designers are getting a chance to work on our own needs for our own consumers and there is a lot of excitement out there in in the startup world wherein design can play a crucial role so is there any any such thing as indian design or indian ethos in curriculum that you could embed so that they can become successful designers and then drive the interest of our audience our own people right so so we are at a crux wherein we can drive innovation for our own needs through design so i'd like to hear from academia side what are we doing to teach something to designers so that they can design effective for effectively for our own own own needs for our own people and also also from the industry side how do you see these things changing because until yesterday um as we understood right so we were kind of a back office for everything that was happening in the western world and and now we have a chance to design for ourselves right so so to start with from the academia side how are we teaching them to design for our own needs is there anything like indian design in the curriculum i just want to understand the question what do we design for ourselves means it's me or the group people in this room or for our indian economy yeah okay india i don't know what is india because is it the india as per the geographical map or little bit older which was including pakistan and bangladesh or little bit older including the gandhar the afghanistan and little bit older which is including the iran and the arabia or little bit older which actually was gondwana you know so i consider i wanted to design for gondwana you know which is just when we all wear one one piece of one chunk of soil and then we just drifted apart so something is there in all everybody's mind which is your common and because we have drifted i'm wearing a shirt which is a printed and you are wearing a blue shirt so that kind of a choice difference is there actually so so basically design is design you know when you call indian design you always suddenly we run back to a village and run back to a craft you know pachamaldi craft you know or you that is indian design okay so why you are actually because they were doing for themselves you know are we doing anything for the ourselves is the shoe made by me no is the shirt made by me no then how can we call but if you look at the olden tradition of india the the potter was making for that himself and to the community nearby so the the need was but today when we're looking at i don't know whom all you are serving in the world actually when you know we live in multiple times you know like so when you say i'm designing for india actually my course is in india but i'm actually looking at the user experience of somebody sitting in alaska you know so regarding do we teach to be indian designers we teach them to be designers too as i said in the beginning to be sensitive i believe we should not teach design we should teach them what he was telling actually we teach them business we teach them etiquettes we teach them ethics we teach them about time management you know you know all these things we teach then automatically they will become a good designer because design is something which you are also the other is involved you know that is it's like marriage you know like if i'm single no problem i can get up at any time i can sleep at but when i'm married you know somebody else will wake me up oh chalo uto bachako school page night types you know so similarly design has that aspect the other is involved the other person is involved the the user is involved so there are certain things to start with you know trained into that sense actually that is what we need to train actually not design actually design as per the need now we have all of this process you know like all design can be taught three days no no problem rest you require another maybe so many years to be you know to refine it to bring it to that thing so did i answer your question that was a very indian answer the jokes apart like design in india the first thing that came to my mind is make in india so you have you remember that logo like there's a lion there with a lot of gears in it so so the way we are looking at design in india as again deeper corrected point pointed out correctly is that we look at vernacular entities like whenever we are talking about indian design as such or india in design or things like themes like that we are going back to the vernacularism so that's one approach of looking at design but then there's another way of looking at it which is the way scientific world is looking at is like the number of patents and number of you know technology transfers or things like that which are happening in india and you know what's what's like the innovation index that you have in in the in the global range so and are we producing enough you know enough of these people who are catering towards it so that that's like an indicator where do we stand and and that's that's what is is one of the parameters very politically speaking you know like like where we are heading and you know are we at the at the cutting edge or things like that being a developing economy our economy is facing a lot of you know different attributes so looking at all of that yeah the role of designers or the role of indian designers in the entire arena is is gaining momentum so that's a very good thing to happen a good thing which is happening and but this there's different notions towards it towards it so so it's it's it will take some years to answer you to like to see where we are in that arena you know are we the players or are we the consumers or are we the partners so so it will take some time and evolution where we are heading to but we are we are looking at a very dynamic time so that that's very very interesting to look at so before going i wanted to ask you one question to the moderator is there something called indian engineering or indian subjects why you have read it but only about indian design absolutely not so the the entire essence of the question is because we have this big thing about design in indian make in india was there anything specific to that i think i got the answer okay i have a slightly longest answer and it's slightly more practical in terms of what i see in the industry and what is happening uh 15 20 years ago when we started a studio there was a lot of insecurity about india among indians itself and initially we had a lot of difficulties doing or convincing our customers that we can do a project for you here in india we being tata's you know we could just change our stance and we started doing projects abroad first so we did a lot of projects in the us and uk and japan and when we came back and started showing those projects saying that see this is what we've done for japan and this is what we've done for us we started getting projects here strangely people in us uk did not judge us for being indians they just saw the kind of work that we are presenting but in india there was this insecurity in the beginning but now a lot of that is changing there's a lot of confidence in the industry about indian designers or the talents that is over here and one simple example that i would like to give uh is this a service design project that we did for kochi metro so it's a government organization it was a large project and it was literally done for the first time in the world where a single design agency was given experience design service design for all touch points so right from designing the jingle to station furniture to the app to the branding to the interconnectivity to the system design all of it was done by a single agency because the government was forward enough thinking and had confidence in us that we could do it so there's a huge sea change that we are seeing in the last few years and again uh referring to something that professor nath khan said about uh involving government we're doing so many projects where government is actually proactively thinking about using design in some of the programs so we see this change happening and we are very glad to be a part of it um design in india basically um should be judged based on the impact factor uh it's good that at least we are talking about design in india 15 years ago this question would not even arise they would always say back office of the west right at least we are now questioning is there something called or exploring that factor and i think the you know design is design of course but the problems of india are very different because of the scale and to solve those problems maybe i don't know whether you have that experience or not maybe we'll have to come up with new methodologies or new processes we don't know at this point because that work is probably being done by a very small section even in the industry right now um so i think design in india should be viewed as a very nascent just born child right and which has which should be just based on the impact that it will have later in the game