DesignUp 2024

Pablo Stanley is a Latin designer based in Mexico. He is the co-founder and CEO at Musho & Lummi — AI design tools aimed at unlocking people’s creativity. Previously, he co-founded Carbon Health and Blush, and held roles as a staff designer at Lyft and lead designer at InVision.
Pablo gives talks and workshops around the world on product design, animation, illustration systems, storytelling, accessibility, behavioral economics, challenges of being a designer, doodling, and the art of comics.

He has a YouTube channel called Sketch Together, where he shares design tutorials, livestreams, critiques, and other fun stuff. Pablo also hosts various podcasts, including ‘Diseño Cha Cha Cha‘, which features interviews with Latinxs in the tech industry. He’s the doodler behind Open Peeps, Avataaars, Humaaans, Open Doodles, Bottts, and Buttsss.

Moreover, Pablo is a talented writer and illustrator, known for his comic series ‘The Design Team‘, portraying the lives of startup designers.
In his latest endeavor, Pablo aims to share his wealth of experience and passion by creating design courses for emerging designers.

Anijo Mathew is Dean and Professor at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech in Chicago. His research evaluates new models of innovation enabled by technology and media convergence through the lenses of design-driven leadership and entrepreneurship. He works with global organizations to adapt and change strategic responses to transforming technologies.

Anijo is the founder and board member of Vamonde, a Chicago storytelling app operating worldwide and named by Built in Chicago as one of six Chicago startups shaping the future of virtual reality.

A native of India, Anijo holds a PhD in Design Computing from The Open University in the United Kingdom, a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from Birla Institute of Technology Mesra in Ranchi, India. He has taught at Harvard University’s School of Business, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business. Anijo served as Head of Department of Art and Design at the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah in the UAE from 2019 to 2021.

I am UXD Manager at Aston Martin. I am also a mum to 2 little ones, an aspiring pilot and enjoy gardening, cooking and travelling.

Along with my team and colleagues, we create ultra luxury and performance focused User Experience for our Aston Martin customers.

I studied Industrial Design and specialised in Product and interface design.

And then worked in design studio, consultancy before I found and then persued my new found passion for Automotive UX Design. I have worked in various capacities on cars for Tata, Nissan Infinity, Huawei, Jaguar Land Rover, Dyson Automotive and Aston Martin.

Vidisha Hegde has over 15 years of deep consumer tech experience primarily across internal strategy and operations, data science and user research. She’s worked with organisations such as KPMG, Quicksand Design, and Swiggy, one of India’s largest food-tech startups before her current role at Spotify.

Over the last few years, she learnt the craft of qualitative and quantitative research, and discovered the power of using these methods along with data science to understand user behaviour more deeply.
She is also adept in using design research principles to uncover unmet user needs that can guide new product building.

Her unique experience combines business & product acumen, along with consumer insights understanding to help evidence based decision making for Spotify’s leadership for India, Middle East and Africa.

She holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, and currently resides in Bangalore, India with her husband and two daughters. 
P.s. – Her role at Spotify has also helped her discover songs beyond Coco melon and Baby shark.

Simon Roberts PhD is an anthropologist, who studied the satellite TV revolution in India in the mid 1990s (his Hindi is still passable) and an Honorary Professor in Practice in anthropology at University College, London. As a founder of Stripe Partners, he works on product and business strategy engagements with clients that include Apple, Google, Intel, Meta and Spotify. Earlier in his career Simon led a research and innovation team in Intel’s Digital Health division, and founded Ideas Bazaar, the UK’s first ethnographic research company.

His book on the nature and value of embodied knowledge, The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them (Bonnier 2021) has been published in eight languages. Simon has been involved in EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community), an organisation advancing ethnographic research in commercial and other settings, since its inception in 2005, and has been Board President since 2020.

Born in November 1973 Suresh Eriyat is a 1997 graduate of the prestigious National Institute of Design. Specialising in Animation Film Design, Suresh came to Mumbai looking for opportunities in making animation films. Prospects of creating original animated stories in India back in the 90s being very nascent, he, in collaboration with Famous Studios, set up Famous House of Animation in 1998 and through that landmark venture he created numerous animated ads, shorts, music videos with many firsts, which brought not only national and international recognitions but also changed the way people perceived animation in India. The impending dream of creating original animation films got closer for him when in 2009 he started Studio Eeksaurus with his wife Nilima as partner.

He continues to elevate the recognition of quality Indian animation content across the world. Eeksaurus also is a very well known and widely respected advertising film production company in the country. Having won the first ever Annecy Cristal for the country in 2015, Suresh also won the president’s national awards in 2016 and 2018 for best animated film. Having sat in several prestigious jury panels of the likes of Clio, Asia Pacific Adfest, Apollo, LIA, AICP Blue Ribbon Panel, D & AD, KROK, Promax etc since 2 decades. He takes time from his busy schedule educating students, taking masterclasses for aspiring filmmakers across India and abroad. His films have won more than 200 plus national and international awards and has a rich portfolio of more than 500 films.

He is also a trained Carnatic musician, an artist, a keen observer, TEDx speaker with a deep interest in philosophy, anthropology and culture.

With over two decades of unparalleled expertise, Arin is a titan in the field of design leadership, especially within the enterprise software arena. As SAP’s Chief Design Officer, Arin currently leads a 1,000+ person design community at the world’s third-largest publicly traded software company by revenue, and oversees global design strategy across SAP’s vast array of products and services. In addition to his duties as Chief Design Officer, Arin also sits on SAP’s Innovation Steering Committee. Here, he plays a pivotal role in shaping the company’s future through design considerations, reinforcing design’s integral function in driving enterprise-wide decisions.

Before joining SAP, Arin spent six years at IBM as their Chief Design Officer for IBM Products, a tenure marked by over 60 international Design and Innovation awards. The impact of his work at IBM was acknowledged in a 2021 Harvard Business School case study. Arin’s career began at Oracle, where he eventually served as Senior Director of Cloud Applications and User Experience across his 13 year journey, setting the stage for his future leadership roles. Arin is not merely a design leader; he’s a craftsman who takes deep-rooted pride in simplifying complexity through the medium of design and technology to drive business and user outcomes. His design philosophy is underscored by the ownership of over 15 design patents. He is also a founding member and board advisor of the Design Executive Council, an independent entity by design leaders for design leaders, founded with the genuine intent to champion the advancement of design leadership.

We are fashion stylists turned entrepreneurs and designers, Karuna Laungani and Gauri Verma. The two us met while working at Elle, a fashion magazine, and immediately connected over our shared love for craft and a fun, serendipitous coincidence that we both had a twin sibling. When we decided to start a brand together we named it Jodi, the Hindi word for pair. Our logo is a winking eye, a nod to the fact that we look at life with a bit of humour and that we love to play with fun pairings – print and colour, craft and high street, India and the world.

We are fashion stylists turned entrepreneurs and designers, Karuna Laungani and Gauri Verma. The two us met while working at Elle, a fashion magazine, and immediately connected over our shared love for craft and a fun, serendipitous coincidence that we both had a twin sibling. When we decided to start a brand together we named it Jodi, the Hindi word for pair. Our logo is a winking eye, a nod to the fact that we look at life with a bit of humour and that we love to play with fun pairings – print and colour, craft and high street, India and the world.

Krish Ashok is a software guy who makes subversive music on violin and cello while attempting to break Indian cooking down to scientific first principles. He also avoids the usage of the expression “non-veg” and prefers to use “regular” instead.

Thomas Kueber is a Berlin-based interaction designer with a strong focus on humanizing technology. His career started in human-computer interaction (HCI) research at the Fraunhofer Institute in the early 2000s. In the following years he worked his way up and down across Europe, Asia and the United States in various roles within corporate, consulting and start-up environments.

During office hours he co-leads the strategic design & foresight studio Futur2 in Berlin Kreuzberg where he helps clients from the mobility, healthcare and financial sector to generate genuine value for real people. When the lights go out Thomas co-leads the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) community in Berlin, enjoys spicy food and occasionally puts on loud and bass-heavy music.

Andreas Wegner is an award-winning German designer: over the last 20+ years, the trained graphic designer worked as design director and consultant on digital products across different time horizons and in the strategic foresight field for international clients. He is the co-founder of the Futur2 Studio in Berlin where digital products are being created to make the future suck less. In his spare time he draws, walks his dog and day dreams.

Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. Josh is a design leader specializing in digital transformation around emerging technology, process, user experience, and design at scale. His projects include future-friendly interfaces for AI, connected devices, and the web—and enterprise design systems for many of the world’s biggest companies.

Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at digital agency Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world’s biggest companies.

Veronika is co-author with Josh Clark of Sentient Design: AI and the New Digital Experience, the forthcoming book from Rosenfeld Media.

Veronika graduated with high honors from New York University with a major in Politics and a minor in Data Science—a useful combination for navigating both organizational and technical design challenges. Her research projects have included building clean data sets from congressional hearings on climate change, studying the effects of mobile technology on African political engagement, and exploring how AI has impacted user experience.

Veronika also has a degree in photography from Fashion Institute of Technology. Her photographs have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine and in UNWomen.org, the United Nations organization for women’s rights.

When she’s not wrangling Figma files and thorny research questions, Veronika wrangles (very) young dance students as a weekend ballet teacher in Brooklyn. In both dance and design, she enjoys bringing discipline, grace, and an air of lightness to her work.

Dr. Raoof Mir is an Assistant Professor of Media and Journalism at Alliance University, Bengaluru. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 
His research explores the intersection of media technologies with socio-cultural and religious dynamics, with a particular focus on how technology and religion interact within various social, cultural, and political frameworks.

Dr. Mir has been recognized with several prestigious fellowships, including the INLAKS Research Travel Grant and a DAAD fellowship, which enabled him to conduct research at institutions in the United States and Germany. His research has been published in respected academic journals and edited volumes.

Taapsi Ramchandani, PhD (aka, Dr. T) is an applied social scientist with a doctorate in cultural anthropology. She’s the CEO/Co-founder of Poocho, an India-focused user research platform that literally means “ask” in Hindi. She launched Poocho in 2019 as an international digital research consultancy that delivered marketing and product strategy outcomes for brands like Tira (Reliance Retail), Caratlane, Weaviate, Blues and Copra Coconuts – based on consumer realspeak. In May 2024, she spearheaded Poocho’s launch as a product company helping research teams find, collect and analyze consumer conversations at scale. Having developed her own proprietary taxonomy to decode consumer behavior, Taapsi’s now busy productizing her knowledge into templates and machine learning models at Poocho. When not at work, she’s evangelizing the concept of “good enough” research to her friends, peers at conferences, brand leaders, and worst of all, her husband. 

With over a decade of experience in qualitative research, Taapsi’s work has taken her around the world – from the United States to Uganda, Trinidad and India. She’s an Aspen Ideas Scholar and also an ex-board member of the American Anthropological Association and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.

Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, author, and speaker. He worked at Clearleft and Babylon Health, and advised organisations like the BBC, Pearson, Tesco, and TCS in how to raise their product game.

Krishan Jagota is an engineer turned designer with a diverse career spanning creative consulting, design, branding, strategy, and community building. He holds a postgraduate degree from the National Institute of Design, India, and further honed his skills at HTW Berlin. After working at Schlagheck Design in Munich, Krishan has been leading a multidisciplinary team at Sideways in Mumbai for nine years, collaborating with clients like Disney, Pidilite, Marico, and Flipkart. His childhood fascination of magic, returned to him when he met a street magician during a field trip to China in 2017. Since then, he’s been drawing parallels between magic & design and had performed magic at Pune Design Fest, Quirky Quarter Liverpool & streets of Rotterdam.

Harshit is an Indian artist and designer working with emerging technologies, primarily artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing.

He is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab (USA) and IIT Guwahati. He was Google Arts and Culture’s first artist resident in India and has carried out other residencies at the Museum of Tomorrow (Brazil), Art Center Nabi (Korea), X-Lab (Japan).

He was the only Indian artist, among 7 international AI art pioneers at the first global exhibition of AI Art in a contemporary gallery (at Nature Morte Gallery in 2018). He held India’s First Solo Exhibition of AI Art at the Emami Art Gallery in Kolkata in September 2021. His work has been nominated thrice for the top tech art prize, among the top 3% of all global tech art works for the prestigious Lumen Prize.

His work has been exhibited internationally in renowned institutions and festivals like the Ars Electronica Festival, Artissima Art Fair, India Art Fair, Asia Culture Center among others.

His work has been extensively covered in international media, including BBC, New York Times, Artnet, STIR World.

A Balasubramaniam is the founding Director of the Institute of Design, JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur. At JKLU, he has put together robust, new-age, future-ready Design programmes for UG and PG. He is the founder of January Design a consultancy that works mainly with marginal crafts, grass-root innovations and the MSME sectors of the industry. He is an early graduate of NID, Ahmedabad, India. He was the national President of ADI (Association of Designers of India) for the term 2022-24.

He has been a consultant to NIIT to develop Digital Design courses, has headed the Fair-trade division of Oxfam, Great Britain in India; coordinated setting up PRIDE, a design excellence division at NSIC, launched the IILM School of Design, developed products with artisans in Kashmir, Nagaland, Assam, UP and Punjab, led a design team for bamboo design projects in the North-East for UNDP, and has worked with grass-root innovators with the National Innovation Foundation.

He has taught Design and been a jury member in most design institutes in the country: NID, NIFT, School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi, IICD, Jaipur, KSID, Kollam, Pearl Academy and IILM Gurgaon. He has been a member in the academic board for Industrial Design at Pearl Academy, SPA New Delhi and Nirma Universisty.

He regularly writes on India-centric design issues in the Economic Times, Businessworld and other professional design publications, besides his own blog: Design Thoughts: (http://designdesh.wordpress.com)

Kashvi Bansal is an editorial designer from Ajmer, a quaint city in Rajasthan. She spent the last five years in Delhi, where she graduated from the Indian Institute of Art and Design with a degree in communication design.

Kashvi is a data enthusiast with a passion for print media and a keen interest in human experiences. Her expertise spans across brand development, print publication, and data visualization. For her graduation project, she delved into data visualization, focusing on the representation of women in Indian cinema, culminating in a book titled *Missing in Action*.

After a brief stint as a freelancer, Kashvi now works at The Ken as an editorial designer. She aspires to create thought-provoking and lasting designs with the intent to change perspectives, as she attempts to explore and experiment with the potential of data and design together. Drawing inspiration from things with a human touch, she firmly believes that ideas breed ideas.

Beyond design, Kashvi enjoys reading, crafting zines, doing crosswords, and creating whimsical drawings.

Dhanyashri Kamalakannan is a design researcher at The Pranava Institute, specializing in ethical design practices, consumer behavior, and technology informed by care ethics. With a background in orthodontics, she brings a unique, interdisciplinary perspective to her work, bridging healthcare and design. Dhanyashri’s current research focuses on ethics in technology, where she explores how design can be used to create responsible and humane digital products. Her work emphasizes the importance of care and ethics in shaping the future of technology.

Titiksha Vashist is the Co-founder and Lead Researcher at The Pranava Institute, where she focuses on technology regulation and its socio-political implications in India. A 2024 Maitri Fellow at the Tech Policy Design Center, Australian National University, her research explores critical minerals cooperation between India and Australia. At Pranava, Titiksha leads projects on technology, ethics, and policy, with a commitment to responsible technology. She is passionate about creating a safer digital world through policy, design, and promoting digital well-being.

Pooja Saxena is a typeface designer, lettering artist, and typographer specializing in Indic scripts, particularly Devanagari. Splitting her time between TypeTogether and her independent practice, Matra Type, she works on a range of projects from branding to editorial design. Pooja combines historical sources with contemporary cultural trends to create distinctive letterforms. A passionate collector of ephemera and chronicler of street lettering, she shares her design curiosities in a newsletter titled I Spy with my Typographic Eye.

Nikon Basu is a hybrid creator in the graphic landscape of the moving image, blending philosophy and visual art to explore complex worlds inspired by Foucault and fractals. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design with a BFA in Film, Video, and Integrated Media, Nikon also holds a postgraduate diploma in Film Editing and Post Production from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. His work pushes the boundaries of film, art, and visual storytelling, creating immersive and thought-provoking experiences.

Ai Yat Goh is a visual strategist, educator, and entrepreneur who serves as the Master Trainer in Asia for The Back of the Napkin™, a globally recognized visual problem-solving method by Digital Roam Inc. (US). With a strong belief in agility and resilience, Ai Yat empowers students, professionals, and retirees through her development programs, using applied visual strategies to foster success and personal fulfilment. She is also a bestselling author, continually driving innovation and growth across industries.

Neha Saraswat is a Group Product Design Manager at Intuit, where she leads the charge in creating intuitive, user-centric designs that empower global users to achieve financial prosperity. With a strong background in statistical analysis and a deep commitment to understanding customer insights, Neha fosters trust and delivers seamless user experiences. Her leadership is rooted in a mission to align design with financial empowerment, ensuring that every interaction brings users closer to their financial goals through thoughtful, intuitive design.

Sudeep is a graduate of NID Ahmedabad, and leads design teams at Adobe, delivering world-class experiences across its Document Cloud products. He helps drive strategic direction and operational processes, ensuring the organization’s vision.

Amogh Vaishampayan thrives at the intersection of art and engineering, building software tools for creative professionals. An AI product manager since 2018, he currently focuses on image generation AI and writes about AI product development. As the head of product for Dashtoon Studio, Amogh is currently working on AI assisted comic creation. He also leads a team of creative technologists to build AI workflows to solve the unique challenges around using generative AI for storytelling. Previously he has worked on 3D product visualization for e-commerce at Avataar and innovative industrial computer vision problems at Quantiphi.

Gurman Bhatia is the founder and director of Revisual Labs, India’s first information design agency. With a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University and over eight years of experience in data journalism and visualization, Gurman specializes in transforming complex data into compelling stories. She has collaborated with top organizations like Reuters, WHO, and Greenpeace, and has trained over 800 individuals in data storytelling. Her mission is to democratize data literacy and empower impactful communication across India.

Ankur Sardana is a product designer with 18 years of experience, currently leading the design and research mandate for Tata Neu, where he’s helping build the world’s largest super-app. A user advocate at heart, Ankur believes in balancing user and business goals through innovative design solutions. He excels at building design teams and studios, having led teams at Samsung, OLX, and RoundGlass. Ankur also pushes for design excellence through innovation. Outside of work, he’s an improv coach, spreading joy through performances and workshops.

Nishita Mohta’s journey began in architecture school, sparking a lifelong curiosity for creativity. With experience spanning architecture, brand design, exhibition curation, and travel writing, she has mentored young architects and students exploring diverse fields. Her B-school experience in “creative & cultural businesses” led her to focus on managing the creative process. Now, as a Design Ops consultant, Nishita helps creative businesses streamline operations while writing her first book on the creative process, continuing her passion for creative exploration.

Nandita Abraham is an agile, entrepreneurial leader with global experience, known for driving strategic priorities with an innovative, execution-oriented approach. Currently leading the transdisciplinary, competency-based BITS Design School, Nandita is shaping the future of design education. Previously, as President and CEO of Pearl Academy, she spearheaded its global growth, managing P&L and forging international partnerships. Her expertise in creating impactful industry-academia alliances, strategic planning, and building high-performance teams has established her as a transformative leader in education and design.

Siddharth Ahuja recently co-taught “AI for Everyday Life” at Flame University, Pune, representing the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), where he also completed his graduate studies. His focus is on helping designers explore what it truly means for something to have “intelligence” and how to integrate AI into products and experiences. Siddharth’s hands-on teaching style reframes AI as a tool, medium, and outcome, empowering students and professionals to confidently design with AI at the core of their creative processes.

Mahima Chandak is a product designer who excels at integrating the human perspective into her work through thorough research. With a background in design research, product strategy, and interaction design, she brings a well-rounded approach to solving complex design challenges. Mahima’s passion lies in creating user-centered products that seamlessly blend functionality and experience, ensuring that design decisions are informed by real human needs and insights. Her expertise makes her a versatile and thoughtful contributor to any project.