In our career as a designer we are expected to grow - from a practitioner of design to a collaborator who can seamlessly work with business and technology teams. From a collaborator to a mentor who will guide young designers. From a mentor to a manager who can guide a team to success and growth. If everything goes well we can become a strategist who can contribute to the business or a design leader who has the proverbial seat at the table. This growth demands skills. It also demands smarter and intelligent decisions.

We at DesignUp have launched a school with programs that can super-charge your career. This is a school for design practitioners, managers and aspiring design leaders. As a teaser or a curtain raiser I spoke to three design leaders about careers:

Amy Huang | EVP User Experience Design | Lazada
Navneet Nair | Director of Product Design | PhonePe
Fatema Raja | Group Design Head | Gojek

Do not forget to check the intensive 5-weeks keystone program called Uprise at Designup.school. This program has been curated for designers who have been working in high growth startups, large enterprises or lean teams for three years or more. Your team will benefit from this and you will too.

Drupad Mistry is a musician, composer and a designer. He works as a User Experience Design Specialist at McKinsey.

In this episode he guides us through Sarod - his musical instrument, collaborations, inspirations, travel and of course design. There are a few things that he mentions that we should probably know about:

• The Sarod
• Ustad Amjad Ali Khan
• The French documentary on Flamenco Music and Manganiyars
• Sarod Studio - A collaborative YouTube Channel

We at DesignUp have been working hard on our Deconstruct Report on the pandemic and how it has affected our design-in-tech industry. This is a long drawn out exercise with loads of data collected, interviews, stories, data visualisations and unending deliberation over how to present things to you. We should announce the launch of this report soon. In the meantime I thought of doing a sampler, like a teaser or a curtain raiser.

We at India are reeling from the second wave that is mightier than the first one. Before this became clear, about a month back, I spoke to 5 designers individually and posed five questions to them.

The designers are:

• Seema Seth, Founder - Studio Sky
• Aakash Kumar, VP User Experience Design - Makemytrip.com
• Upasana Nattoji Roy, Founder - Switch! - A motion design studio
• Rasagy Sharma, Information Designer - Gramener
• Fatema Raja, Group Design Head - GoJek

The concepts, books and shows suggested by these designers are below in no specific order:

• Hikikomori - Acute Social Withdrawal - Estimates suggest that half a million Japanese youths have become social recluses, as well as more than half a million middle-aged individuals.
• Michael Pollan - Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers
• We Cannot Go Back and Start Over, But We Can Begin Now, and Make a New Ending
• Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
• The Body - A guide for the Occupants by Bill Bryson
• Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom
• The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy
• The Good Place - The Good Place is an American fantasy comedy television series created by Michael Schur. It premiered on NBC on September 19, 2016, and concluded on January 30, 2020 after four seasons and 53 episodes. Available in India on Netflix.
• Shh! Don't tell them there is no Magic in Design thinking by Jared Spool
• The Manual for Living by Epictetus

Simon Roberts is a business anthropologist.
 
He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of anthropology in business and the use of ethnography in corporate research, design and innovation. Early in his career Simon established Ideas Bazaar, the UK's first dedicated ethnographic research company and subsequently led a human-centred R&D team at Intel Corporation. He has been actively involved in the EPIC community since its inception in 2005, he chaired the conference in 2012 and 2013 and is currently Board President.
 
 His book The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them is to be published by Bonnier in 2020. Simon has written and spoken widely about ethnography, business anthropology, innovation and ageing. His work has been covered by The FT, WSJ, Quartz, Bloomberg and the BBC.

He co-founded Stripe Partners in 2013.

You can read his article on UX-ification of Research here.

Yonatan Levy has been building tech products since 2005, some of which are used by millions of people. As a product manager, UX expert, entrepreneur and executive he has led teams in industries ranging from e-commerce and fintech to social platforms and cybersecurity.

He has gathered profound insights on problem-solving and creative thinking, which has led him to become a trainer of executives and professional teams. Yonatan has written a #1 Amazon Bestseller titled The Other Ideas: Art, Digital Products, and the Creative Mind, and founded the Problem Hacking® method for effective problem-solving.

You can follow Yonatan on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can download your free toolkit here: https://www.yonatanlevy.co/designup

To win a free Problem Hacking eBook:

1. Download the free toolkit from here.
2. Send Yonatan Levy three challenging questions in a mail to: yonatanlevy1@gmail.com
3. He will choose the winner and the answer to your question will feature in a later episode of this podcast.

Giles Colborne is the founder of CX Partners and the author of Simple and Usable.

Giles works on digital strategy and organisational design for major brands, worldwide. Currently, he is devising initiatives for senior management in large corporates to measure and manage the customer-centricity of their organisations.

In this episode, we talk about his journey to CX Partners, the urge to write a book, simplicity as a concept, user cohorts, and strategies for designers to design simpler products.

You can read the CX Partners story here, visit the Simple and Usable website here or you can buy the second edition of the book here.

Data visualizations and creating a narrative for easy consumption are pretty complex skills. If you add the expertise of journalism to this mix you get compelling stories made with data and code. Gurman Bhatia is a data and graphic journalist with experience and competence in this art form. Visit GurmanBhatia.com to know more about her work. Listen to this insightful episode made for user experience designers, graphic designers, journalists, storytellers and more.

Links and resources from Gurman:

• Gurman's Portfolio
• Reuters Graphics Portfolio
• Reuters Global Coronavirus Tracker
• Women are fading out from Bollywood music (Hindustan Times)
• The figures behind the faces (Reuters) and behind the scenes of that project
• A window into Delhi’s deadly pollution (Reuters)
• Deadly Delays (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
• Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve” (Washington Post)
• Data Journalism/Visualisation Resources including blogs, newsletters, Slacks and books curated by Gurman

Last year DesignUp initiated a study on the State of Design in Technology in India and South East Asia.  This report was published and unveiled as DesignUp Deconstruct in November 2019 at the DesignUp Conference. In this episode, we talk to the research team that made this report possible.

We have also initiated the survey for the next report that covers the lives of designers during the pandemic. Click here to participate in the next report.