Latest Service Design projects by students at NID
by Deepak Pakhare on September 26, 2011
Earlier this month, we concluded the six week long Service Design module at NID. The end goal of the service design module within the Design for Digital Experience program at NID is to introduce students to the emerging discipline of Service Design through fast-paced autonomous projects that the students collaboratively tackle with our guidance. While last year’s theme was around commercial services and focused on design entrepreneurship, this year along with students, Anshuman and I tackled the complex topic of social innovation. Using design for creating better services in the business context in itself is challenging. We wanted to explore designing services for the bottom of the pyramid in the Indian context. Thus emerged the brief. We gave students several themes:
1) Economic empowerment of women in urban lower middle-class homes
2) Healthcare in the public sector
3) Education for underprivileged children in cities.
4) The girl child in poverty
During the six weeks after the brief was delivered, we paid several visits which started with day-long knowledge immersion sessions in the studio at NID’s Bangalore campus. These were closely aligned with the activities students were engaged with at that stage followed by work status presentations by students and finally feedback sessions and discussion around next steps. We covered service design fundamentals, process, definitions and terminology and discussed case studies. The emphasis was on learning from doing and each session ended with guidance on the next steps. Student would then spend the rest of the week to do design research and come up with service ideas and refine their concepts further by developing service blueprints, creating evidences of the service and mapping customer journeys. Some of the students created experience prototypes as well.
Here are some compelling examples:
Parvarish – by Arti Mohan
Sukanya – by Manisha Mulay
Samarth – by Ashwini Sukhdeve
Pavitra – by Pratik
Here are some more examples from last year’s module:
Saksham – by Mahelaqua
Re-faced – by Nivedita Khandekar
If you find this interesting or have questions, do leave a note.
Touch & Multi-Touch: A UX Perspective
by uday on February 6, 2011
Last saturday, I spoke at College of Engineering, Anna University in Chennai in a K-Barcamp session as part of their Kurukshetra 2011 Program. The session had 3 main themes – Multi Touch, Android & Cloud Computing. My talk was on Multi Touch focussing on the UX angle. Here are the slides from the talk. The Q&A session was interesting as always. 
Mobile Applications, Emerging Markets & Tourism
by uday on January 11, 2011
The slides from the talk I gave in Luxor, Egypt in December 2010.
Mobile Developer Summit 2010: Prototyping SMS/Voice Services
by uday on November 19, 2010
Last week, I was at Nimhans, Bangalore talking on Prototyping SMS & Voice services to the audience of Mobile Developer Summit 2010. Here are the slides + photos from the event.
Oodles of inspiration at Kyoorius Designyatra
by Deepak Pakhare on September 15, 2010
This is the first time I attended Kyoorius Designyatra. It had a distinctly different flavor than Goafest which is another similar event that’s held in India annually. I attended Goafest earlier this year which attracts the advertising creative fraternity in hordes. The emphasis is on acknowledging and rewarding creative talent in ad agencies behind noteworthy ad campaigns and have loads of fun on the beach in the bargain! Kyoorius on the other hand attracts designers and creative folks of all shapes and sizes and is organized in a very stylish, professional and sleek format. Not to mention the swanky 5-star venue at Renaissance Marriot Powai in Mumbai !
I loved the talks by Michael Kaye from Mother Design New York, Dutch stalwart such as Gert Dunbar, Rodney Fitch of Fitch Design (Now owned by WPP) and John Jay of Wieden + Kennedy. There was some “young blood” at the event such as designer Bas van der Veer from the Netherlands among others. Then there was Alok Nanda who stood tall and held his own in the presence of international design gurus. Tim O’Kenndy of D&AD turned out to be a fabulous host and MC for the event.
Interestingly the general theme and a common refrain in this conference (as well as in Goafest) was that advertising needs to come out of its traditional-media-focused thinking. Several speakers touched upon the fact that agencies need to embrace technology, internet and social media much more and make it a part of their media mix. This I felt holds true especially for India since agencies and design houses elsewhere are beginning to do some very interesting work with Social Media or for that matter with just plain light and sound technology.
The sheer lack of awareness about the event keeps most UX professionals away from such events. And that’s sad. Because for designers in the software development world too, events like these are a superb source of inspiration and universal design knowledge. Designers on this side of the divide can look at representation at such events so that the creative fraternity in turn can learn from the tech perspective we bring to design.
Lastly the unsung hero for me is Rajesh Kejriwal of Kyoorius who brings international design inspiration to Indian design students and professionals through Designyatra.
Here are some sketch notes I took during the talks. Enjoy!
The Rise of the Mechanical Designer
by Deepak Pakhare on September 15, 2010
Last month, I was chilling out by the backwaters at Ashtamudi in Kerala with my wife and I get a call from Uday. He tells me that the Adobe Summit folks in Bangalore have roped him in to talk about UI prototyping and that they need a designer to talk about design – any topic of his/her choice. I say yes, and after coming back from Kerala, I get down to work on the slide deck.
Instead of resorting to doing original sketches like I usually do for my slide decks, I did my own table-top photography this time with props I found from Uday’s desk and my wife’s point-n-shoot camera! Look at the presentation deck and you’ll know what I am talking about!
The folks at Adobe Summit asked for an abstract and the draft of the presentation. I could never send the draft in time to the organizers, but here’s what the abstract looked like:
Innovation happens. Whether designers like it or not. But whenever they play a larger part in driving innovation through design, it affects humans in more profound and positive ways as when businesses or technology drives innovation. There are fireworks around, happiness in the air, grace and beauty in our midst, when designers are at the helm! Designers are supposed to be fountainheads of creativity. And innovation IS a function of creativity. However, true design driven innovation today is rare and happens way too infrequently. Apple, Ideo, just a handful of folks. I believe, we the designers are not seeding or influencing innovation enough because we are towing someone else’s line most of the time. In my personal experience I see less rigor in the design process in organizations. We settle for the obvious and mediocre too soon, too often. We are experimenting less, not iterating enough. We are designing by committee. We must look outside our design briefs and requirements docs for inspirations from life around us. Experimental Art, for instance can be an unexpected breeding ground for innovation. We must infuse thought, reflection, soul into our work. The world needs Thinking Designers as much as it needs Design Thinkers.
5 New Skills that Every Web Designer Needs to Know
by Deepak Pakhare on September 15, 2010
I notice a certain pattern emerging in the three talks I did this year. These were random opportunities to talk to designers and developers at various forums and I found myself following a general theme around how to be a well-rounded, “T-shaped” designer. This talk at WebApps 2010 in Bangalore continued thematically from the earlier talk at IIT Kanpur and as if on cue the topic I was given was: 5 New Skills that Every Web Designer Needs to Know. I zeroed down on what I think are good skills to have to be a more effective designer especially when you are just starting out on a design career.
1) Sketching
As a designer, I can’t imagine expressing my ideas in bullet points! As with most skills, practice makes perfect. While chasing deadlines, sometimes designers ignore this at the risk of getting their sketching skills rusty.
2) Prototyping
Prototypes are a great way – I would say, the only way – to demonstrate the value of an innovative product idea even before you begin to build it. So it is clear how important it is for designers to learn to prototype.
3) Moodboarding
Designers have to deal with a lot of subjective judgment while designing web sites. When it comes to the visual style, personality and branding of the site, people tend to think these are arbitrary decisions taken by whimsical visual designers. I think moodboards are a very effective tool that help in OBJECTIVELY articulating the reasons behind design decisions.
4) Creative Pitching
A lot of designers fail to convince stakeholders about the value of their designs because they can’t pitch their ideas beyond merely presenting creative justifications. Designers are expected not only to defend their designs on the creative front, but also to articulate how well they meet business and consumer objectives. Only then can they expect to get stakeholder buy-in.
5) Empathizing
User engagement right at the beginning of a product’s life is the key to creating end products that delight customers. User research is the process-driven answer to get user validation around our products. However as a designer, you need to constantly put yourself into the user’s shoes, so that you never lose sight of who you are designing for.
How to prescribe the UXpill
by Deepak Pakhare on September 14, 2010
Immediately after joining Yahoo in March 2009, I had the opportunity to deliver a talk on User Experience Design to the final year students at IIT Kanpur Design Degree Show. That set the tone for several other academic engagements in the coming months about which I have written elsewhere on this blog. The trip to IIT Kanpur was revealing in several ways. The campus had an air of state-sponsored authority with white Ambassadors parked outside the entrance. A Siyasati appearance to everything around. The upkeep of the solid and functional stone architecture of the 60s was impressive. Some of the original fittings like the switchboards, doorknobs etc inside the guest rooms were still intact. The squat buildings set in a sprawling manicured flatland.
I think this was my very first glimpse of the amount of influence and power the IITs of the nation wielded. And I was acutely aware of the fact that I was a guest of the Indian state!
The talk itself was well received and the students showcased some interesting projects.
FREE LOVE and the Pencil Project
by Deepak Pakhare on September 1, 2010
Fellow UI/Interaction designers, here’s a rare GUI prototyping tool that comes for – nothing! The Opensource Pencil project is an innovative idea for a prototyping tool because guess what? It’s a Firefox add-on! And it works on any platform that can run Firefox 3. Plus, a standalone version is available for Windows XP/Vista and Linux GTK+
Right now, it is pretty basic but enough of a web-application to prototype – well, web-applications! Not quite enough yet to give Axure RP, Omnigraffle and the like a run for their money and they probably never will want to step on their toes full of commercial clout. And that’s the whole point of this post. Trendwatching.com describes the ongoing rise of ‘free stuff’ as spreading ‘FREE LOVE’. From real-world freebies to free online photo-editing software. Photoshop is an overkill – if all I want is to rotate and touchup photos I took on a weekend picnik.
Pencil Project may not have the same mass appeal as, say, Google Docs, or a Blinksale or a Tadalist because it caters to niche users – UI designers. It nevertheless embodies the spirit of free love especially when it comes with the promise that ‘Pencil will always be free…’ As they say, we must watch this space. BTW, they prototyped their website using Pencil. Much thanks to the guys at http://www.evolus.vn/
Go ahead, try it out:
