 The name says Larry. Larry means step up, right? Who want to take the questions first? First question, who going to take it? Ask anything. This is unconfirmed, there is no. My role currently is UX designer. So I work as a UX designer in Nokia. So what is the future for an UX designer, five years down the line? Is it product management or is it like, we should remain as a senior UX designer? What could be the role? Incredible thing about us being designers is that we get to design our own careers and we can design anything, right? And you're going to change as, for me, I started out in advertising. Actually, I'll back that up. I started out in publication design. I realized that I cared much more about what was happening in the interaction and then I realized that by doing advertising we were solving the wrong problems. So I moved into experience design and then I moved into business transformation. So every single step of the way I was pivoting because it was a problem that I wanted to solve, which is what designers do. So figure out what your problem is, how you want to solve it and how you can change your career to get there and don't be intimidated and say, I don't know the skills. The skills are where problem solvers. So just use that. This is Manish, a quick background. I'm a communication designer. I have 2.5 years of experience working as a visual designer as well as an interaction designer. So my interest has been lying more into research work now. So how do I guide myself or take the path towards into research as the research is a very big spectrum to jump into. So what research, I don't know, research is very big, but I'm more somewhere, I've been reading books, a lot of books, but it's not just reading or getting that knowledge. It's also that I need to implement it somewhere, someday. And then that is how I probably get the groundwork, get to that groundwork. So what is the path that I need to reach this? If I understand correctly, you are a designer, you want to get into research. Yes, no. You're looking for a path to get into research. Yes, yes. So anyone going to take this? I'll take this one. He was interested in research a lot, but we didn't have enough projects to give to him. So he used to work as a UX designer pretty much like what you are doing today. But one of the things I told him, and this is the same thing I'll tell you, is that why don't you look up things which are being done in the research space? So for example, I work in the travel industry. What is happening in the travel industry domain? There are a lot of people doing a lot of research. Google is doing research. Anyone, because there are a lot of people whose life and algorithm and work touches travel. And why don't you make a small publication out of it every month? And so that's what it started with. It started with that. It started with, hey, we could probably research this. Or look at small opportunities to get into research. Should we do usability testing for something? We should kind of think. And over a period of time, and this is a very short period of time, I would say within three to four months, he was someone who I handed over the entire research, Beton too. So he's the guy who was leading our research thing, because he's passionate about it. He shows commitment to do it. And he took it in small, bite-sized pieces. You never really start anything big. If you want to run a marathon, you start in small steps. That's pretty much the way you should go about doing it. Ranjit, I would like to add to what he mentioned about research. So what Jay mentioned was nice, because his team members was very passionate about doing research. They gave an opportunity or a direction of saying, oh, pick up this and pick up that. But if you're looking at a serious researcher as a career, build your base knowledge. Research is not that we take up few publications, look at them, draw some inferences, and build up new paper. If you're doing research, you'll have to really go down, dive deep, understand what's really happening, build hypothesis, get questioned, ask questions. And for that, you would need probably some mentor who has already been a researcher. And I think that would be good enough because you don't want to start something and then realize, oh, I'm not really an expert. If you want to get really recognized as a researcher, get to a mentor, spend time with him or her, learn the art of researching, the art of presenting, the art of questioning your own hypothesis and presenting them. The more you present, you'll realize whether it is actually working or not. And then you design and then see if the research hypothesis really worked, and so on and so forth. So I would suggest that. So of course, unfortunately, today if you see, you don't have any schools which will teach you research. There are a few, MIT has started doing it because the professors themselves are coming from a research background. They have PhDs. Awesome. It's a great thing that MIT has done. Talk to them. They will be more than happy to remotely connect with you. I'm also just adding one point to Presad, right? See, basically I work for a company which has hard-core researchers. These guys are PhDs and human factors engineering. They're trained and experienced in analyzing particular data. So you should really look at what varies your heart is on. If you seriously want to pursue those kind of careers, maybe you should start somewhere and basically start looking out in terms of where you can get mentored and go further. Anyone else next? All coursework for MIT is free online. So you can go and just look at their website and just get every single piece of information. Some are videos, some you can read, but it's all free. You can go ahead. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, ma'am. My name is Pratikesh and I am from IIT-Hedrabat Design Department. So my question is like, I have two perspectives. One is from student perspective who is learning in design department and thinking about what they feel about design. And second perspective is about employee. I'm working as a UX designer or something. So my question in between two, like as a student, what I feel about design is we are going to libraries, reading a lot of books and going through a lot of articles and understanding what is design philosophy. Not only this, about if a student's mind is working like he observing something, what he saw and he's perceiving something about design. So what he's developing is philosophy about design. But when I came to a conference like this and I saw a lot of professional people are there. So they are more interested in execution. What is UX design and how we can execute the product and how we can find something from it for the profit of the organization or how we can change something which is betterment for the company. So my question is like, I would like to share one experience. I was coming from my hotel to this place and I was trying to book Ola cab. But the thing is, simultaneously I was thinking like after 10 years might be population will be much more denser than today. So what will be the consequences of this Ola system? Because traffic day by day increasing, increasing. So how will they manage? So my question is in brief like, as a student, what should we think about like whatever we are learning today in our academics and the way we are developing our philosophy, how we can incorporate that thing into execution like practicality and the practical projects what we have in the market. So my interpretation of your question is that there is so much of deep thinking or slightly more pure thinking that happens in academic but moment you become an employee it is business. And why and which is good. So that's a simple way of my interpreting this question. And I'll give you a slightly roundabout answer and I hope it answers it. In IDC where both me and Prasad were from, every day we used to have something called as a night library. Every day two hours we are just supposed to look at books just images. And what it did for two years, it made us visually very acute and sensitive. We could look at small, small things, right? And that now even without thinking I apply. Similarly in your college the deep thinking the kind of philosophical questions that you're trying to answer to, this design philosophy that you talk about that starts defining how you look at problems, how you think about them. It just builds you as a better person and you have much more confident about solving any problems. So in your professional life when you come you already have a head start in terms of how to approach certain things. What is a good way to do it? What is wrong? What is right? And that helps you solve whatever you're doing. Now you might be doing a very specific, small job part of a job and that may not be solving the world and the traffic pollution and all of that, right? But still the academic background that you have will help you in your day to day life easily. You won't have to struggle every time in your professional life because the base is strong. So that's what I feel education does to the way we think. Yeah, I guess what education does really is the very fact that you're asking that question is you're questioning the fundamentals of it all. And I'm pretty much going by Narendra's interpretation of your question but there is a pragmatic thing and there is a philosophical thing and they are like always like Yin and Yang. They're always interacting with each other. You do something in the new, reflect back on it. There's a wonderful book called The Reflective Practitioner and I think in today's day and age of like deadlines and stand-ups and sprints and so on and so forth, sometimes we do lose on the reflective part of it because we are kind of probably looking at like short sprints and spurts and bursts of activity but when you look at it, it just adds up. When you look at a CEO's role, the CEO has a whole bunch of controls, almost like a music mixer in front of him or her. So she might say that, hey, listen, I'm going to sort of invest more in operations and less in this and more in HR and less in that but they're all interconnected and I think this is what probably school kind of teaches you that everything eventually is interconnected. You are not traffic, you are the traffic rather, you are not part of the traffic, you are the traffic. So it's almost like that and that's what probably is great that school teaches you to reflect and to think about and look at the bigger picture. I think the important thing about school like they all said is that it teaches us how to question and how to think and how to learn. One of the beliefs that we have at IBM is to be essential is a core belief for every single person. We are required to do 40 hours of learning per year, every single person and we have to prove that we've done it. That means that we're learning through reading sessions, through attending workshops, through attending different engagements. So by having that 40 hours, we're keeping ourselves relevant. So technology is going to change way faster than what we can keep up with and if we don't do that, we're not going to be useful to our company. So we'll have new things come out like blockchain. If we can't be educated enough to speak about blockchain in front of our clients, then what good are we? So it's important we're gonna keep changing our philosophies all the time but being able to dedicate ourselves to learning as we grow is really critical. So guys, basically we have great design leaders in front of you. What I would suggest is maybe be quick and ask in terms of something which you want to know, which you really want to know from this panel. Who is taking the question? So hi, I'm Tulsi Rao. I have a common question which is like, as a designer, we try to put the user in the center and connect all the technologies. But as a developers, think the opposite way. Put the technology in center and then try to connect as many users as possible. How do we strike a balance and how do we convince the developers not to think like that? Yeah, so I'll take that. I mean, this is a classical problem we strategy consulting companies consult on in terms of a trade-off between. So that's a similar trade-off between a design and business and similar trade-off between tech within an organization and what design wants to do. I think the main balance is for you to, like Jai was mentioning, it's always a yin yang. So you can have technology, make sure that your design process is strong enough and the way you design should be something where your end users are watching for it and you just have to do smaller incremental backend technology developments. So I think once a technology starts become a little bit more transparent to the end user and they start appreciating designs is when that yin yang will move. So I think that's how you got to look at it. We approach every problem with a creative strategy and technology, so it's a three-legged stool and the user is at the center. They're our North Star. So that's, it's the way that we balance everything out and it solves all problems hopefully together. Sometimes you're gonna weigh a little bit more on one side instead of the other. I will also add that if the developers are pushing that means we are not doing our job to help them understand that design will drive everything else. Today technology is going at a super speed and there are designers there as well. They are designing the technology but if you're not able to catch up with them then designers are always going to be on the receiving end saying that, okay, this is a technology, use it, force fit it, launch it tomorrow and it's not going to help the user. It's not going to make our lives easy and it's not a win-win. So we'll have to kind of be pushy about it. One liner, take the engineer to meet the users. I think that's probably good user research. Take the engineer, take the designer, take the product manager, all three of you go and meet the user and understand his or her problems very, very well from there. I think that solves part of it. The unsaid rule of all designers is half of their life is evangelizing, communicating, you know, explaining to people who do not understand things that we see. We have to make it easy for other people to see. So whether it's engineers, whether it's end users. So just take it as a part of your rule irrespective of what you're doing. So let me ask one question to the audience. I see Suresh is here. So Suresh works for Oracle and I think he has 10 years of experience and mid-break he has joined IIT Hyderabad for doing his PhD on design. Suresh, can you tell all our friends, why did you take a decision to do intermediate education, continue your education passion between your career when you are making very good money? That's a big question. Before that answer, that question, I have one question supposed to ask. Off of my answer, which is already there in... I'm sorry, you're getting Prasad. Now Prasad already gave the off of the answer what I supposed to. But let me ask the question. It is for everyone. So basically my question is the industry is already accelerated towards automation and artificial intelligence. And what is our user experience? Designers and community strategy and since the technology is accelerating towards high-speed and designers are trying to solve the problems and how we can control and how we can do better design. And so far we are doing human-centered design and now it is system-centered design. So a lot of human intervention going to be radius and what is our designer's role and how we are going to contribute to the industry. That's my question. Okay, so I had partly answered one half of this question in an earlier session, but let me just explain my thinking of this. For a long time, the technology and the product and you take a car, you take any product, it could do far more things than what the user expected. And as a result, you needed designers to train or the people had to be trained to use a product. Now what is happening is people are expecting far more than what the technology can deliver. So you are having, I was talking about Alexa and things that it cannot do, but then you feel why it can't do that or automation in cars, for example, if you expect how come it cannot do this? So people are expecting far more from the technology and now the user's or user designers or user experience designers role is to actually bridge the gap and make people understand what are the limitations of technology, at least in the next five years, this is going to be a big role of designers to limit the expectations. So I work with Watson a lot and we try to implement Watson into all different industries. What we try to understand is how we can augment that industry and how we can augment the thinking within that industry, not replace it. It's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence. So we're taking jobs and instead of having people doing a bunch of reading, doctors doing a bunch of reading, we're now able to take those doctors and put them in front of their patients and help more patients faster. So that's the way that we see role shifting and changing. It's about finding the correct application and making sure that those applications are usable for the people who need to interact with them. Just add another line to it. We had a recent conference, UX now in Delhi where this wonderful designer comes up and she says that when AI takes over UX, I'll be doing design because design won't be dead yet because design is essentially for human beings. Yesterday I was having a video call with one of my friends and she demonstrated me Alexa that she had. She was in the United States and she said, let me demonstrate that to you. And she said, hi, Alexa. So I said, oh, good. She said, hi. And then she ended up speaking lot more than what was required because this person had said, hey, hi. And Alexa ended up saying, hey, good morning. It's a nice morning. How are you doing? Blah, blah, blah. And what my friend responded was, hey, stop, Alexa. Now that's not a conversation we would usually have between two people. So I think with a lot of this technology, lot more problems are coming. So amazing opportunity for designers. And that's why the leap that I was talking about the workshop yesterday is okay, not limiting to feel good design and visual design and all, but there's a lot more thinking that we need to do by shouldering our responsibilities with these technology designers. They are designers too, I believe. They're designing something new. Can we shoulder ourselves with them and say, okay, let's create better Alexa and of the world is what I think we should all start thinking, then we will get there.