Learning Design Thinking By Design Doing

 via GIPHY I was invited by the organising team of the Society for Technical Communication’s India chapter conference to introduce the concepts of Design thinking to the participants. We did some brainstorming and decided that instead of giving a lecture for an hour about design thinking and walk off, it would be better if we can find some additional time and get the participants to experience Design thinking methodology by using the process to attempt to solve something that everyone of them are currently facing. I got about 150 mins at the conference to deliver this experience. After a lot […]

How to Run a Good Brainstorming Session

  Last week I was invited to run a Design thinking experiential workshop for the STC conference in Bangalore. We had about 70 people in the room. All of them experienced technical content writers. As I always believe, learning happens best when people have a lot of fun while learning. We then retain a lot of what we learn in that setting.  I am getting beside the point. I am sure that everyone of us, me included, have at one point or other, been invited to join  in a brainstorm to come up with ideas to solve a given problem. […]

Designing in the Era of the Algorithms

  I came across this video by Josh Clark where he talks about the challenges and opportunities of designing stuff (products/services) in the era of algorithms. This is a must watch video if you are currently engaged in developing a product or service which uses machine learning or artificial intelligence. He points out some very interesting places where you could potentially go wrong. Watch, listen, understand and avoid these mistakes. Hope you like the video and learnt something important.

When Your Biggest Strength becomes Your Biggest Weakness

Premise:  Once advice that almost everyone agrees to, when it comes to defining our strategy (personal, professional or organisational) is that we need to “Play to your strengths”. If you are a business that has already seen some amount of success, the chance is that you know what your core strength is. So, you build on it. You continue to invest in your strength to get even better at it. You continue to invest until you are the best-in-class on this topic in the whole wide world. This strategy works really well, until it doesn’t. The  irony is that most […]

Great Customer Experience is not Just the Responsibility of the Brands

Yesterday, I went to a unisex salon for a grooming session. I was attended by a young stylist. I started to engage him in a conversation. I asked his name (Sohail) and the place from where he came from (Chandigarh).  I asked him about how long he was in Bangalore, how did he end up here in Bangalore. He said how his uncle had come to Bangalore in search of work and he got him a job at this salon (owned by someone in Delhi). Apart from the salary he was drawing, he also had a paid accommodation provided by […]