Among other things, I’ve spent some time this year trying to understand what is going on with climate change, trying to understand the situation, and trying to develop a point of view.
Here’s a recent talk by futurist and philosophical designer Jenny Grettve on Feminist Economies, and my sketchnote about it.
Fiction is also a great way to have a nuanced perspective on something. The Ministry for the Future is one such book that takes the current situation and creates a cast of characters around it who approach our current situations in their different ways. It was so real, so evocative, and speaking to the times we have lived through this year – heat waves needing to be national emergencies, a national election, floods, global apathy. Though criticism of the book has said that it depicts our current economic situation and tries to find solutions in the world we live in, to me, that was its strength – it was significantly close to us as readers to make us really “feel” what is going on and move us to action.
Here’s another interesting book that I read years ago that’s been on my mind: The Gift by Lewis Hyde. I wonder how that would work, in today’s world of AI’s creative appropriation (or simply stealing).
This year’s DesignUp was game changing! Literally as well as metaphorically! Six short panels of 4 speakers each expounding crisply on different themes about the past and the future. Here are my sketch notes –
It was my first ever Grace Hopper India Conference for women in tech and having a reputation as a top conference for tech, I had high expectations from it. And more so because it was organized by women – who were, from my experience in corporate life, organized, efficient, empathetic and warm. And this year there was even a Design in Tech track. Naturally I was curious and interested.
This year the event was very large with nearly 5000 attendees, 440 companies, and about 300-400 odd attendees from Microsoft itself. There was also 1% men in attendance, the largest ever in GHCI, as we heard in the keynote.
A celebration of women in tech
Beyond the usual welcome and introductions, the first keynote speaker was Lori Beer (Global CIO, JP Morgan Chase). She shared her journey of moving from technology to finance. The key takeaway from her keynote was her message to Pay it forward – what kind of impact can you make in your own way, how you can support other women in the field and what can you give back to the women in tech community.
All the first day talks, including the keynotes, were almost calls to action to the women attendees – about owning their career and believing in themselves. It might seem redundant for some, but for most of the audience, these messages really resonated because we work in a primarily male-dominated profession, even now.
I’ve always been a designer in tech and for most of my career I have been the only woman in the room and had never seen women at the India leadership level until recently. Younger colleagues have asked me why that matters, but it does.
It takes a lot of grit to speak up when you’re the only woman in the room when you might be the only one with a different point of view. It takes a lot of determination to overrule interruptions and still make your point. It takes a lot of perseverance to imagine your own career path when you don’t identify with any of the role models in front of you because they didn’t have to make the same choices of pregnancy, motherhood and parenting. It takes a lot of courage to come back to work and prove yourself again and again because you made different choices than the people in power.
For many, this set the tone for the rousing and motivating experience for the next 3 days.
However what could have been done better was to include the male attendees into the conversation, but there was no acknowledgement of the men and how the genders can collaborate/support each other better. After the first initial mention of the 1% men stat they were forgotten in most of the sessions I attended. Like SheroesSummit, this could have been a great platform to not repeat the biases of the past and start on a more inclusive note, and possibly including different gender identities.
Design and tech
The conference content was significantly tech-intense and of good quality from what I heard and experienced. There were at least 5 parallel tracks running so it was quite easy to miss out.
Though the organizers had tried to address multiple themes within Design in tech, like de-mystifying Design, Design Thinking, the journeys of a few well-known women Design leaders, and how to transition to a UX career if one is so inclined, there was a fundamental lack of interest in the evolution of Design in Tech or in trying to understand the relationship between Design and UX – the terms were used pretty interchangeably. For a number of attendees, this was an intro to Design so there was a risk of miscommunicating the concept of design and its role in technology.
These were the talks that stood out for me:
Inclusive Design and Accessibility: Swami Manohar from Microsoft Research
Dr Manohar began by talking about recognizing your privilege and exclusion, before addressing inclusive design, and why diverse perspectives matter. His point of view, which is Microsoft’s point of view about Inclusive Design is that if we make it better for the usually excluded group of users, we make it better for everyone.
From How to Design, Innovate, and Create Designs that People will Love: A panel with women design leaders.
“Wait for the right moment of insight – a non-obvious, disruptive insight.”
“Ask yourself, does this idea fit into the narrative of the company?”
Anuradha Madhusudan
It was interesting for me to see how much curiosity there was around design. It shows that not only is there a lack of designers in the field, but also not enough designers who can demystify and evangelize their process and work to their tech partners in meaningful ways. There was a whole session on developers who want to become designers.
A case study about how these developers, Sampada and Aslesha, used design thinking to solve a real problem. I was quite impressed by their level of empathy and how they learnt and applied the design process while solving this problem.
This talk Design for Conversational Interactions by Vidhya Duthaluru and Vandana Abraham was really good, crisp and useful. From a project they had done for Uber, Vidhya succinctly identified all the steps one needs to think about while moving an interaction to a conversational experience.
This was a set of useful conditions to know while Designing for Emerging Markets by Muzayun Mukhtar.
The gender conversation
As I mentioned above, this was a celebration of women in tech. But the idea of “women in tech” itself was a bit fuzzy to some. In almost every talk I attended, by women and men presenters both, there were some sweeping statements about why women would be good at design or women would be good at accessibility or women would be good at storytelling – it’s not about gender, it’s about the person and the skills! This not only reinforced gender stereotypes but also diminished the content of their talk for me.
Despite this and some other logistical challenges, #ghci18 was a great experience and I also managed to catch up with friends from elsewhere at the conference. I met a number of really nice women and found that spending time in the company of women can be very supportive and affirmatory. If nothing else, that’s one good reason to go to women in tech conferences every year!
An app called Memoir reminds me of things I did, or thought, on social media, on this day in the past. A nostalgic exercise, no doubt, but also a reminder of some of my pastselves.
There is something special about a midweek holiday. Being the crazy workaholics that we are, we surprised ourselves with this rare treat last week, and drove up to Rishikesh in Uttarakhand. The last time we went on holiday, there weren’t any people to sketch, so this time we made sure that we’d get some suitable moments.
[At the ghats we look around for peace, shade and people to draw.]
[The photographer sits and talks about another two months…and then. I couldn’t keep up with his Hindi.]
This is not the brown boy, though it looks like him.
And here’s a restless little flower seller.
[Drawing from life is tough, but it must be done. It’s the only way to get away from the pre-conceived imagery in my head.]
[Here we are at Triveni Ghat waiting for the arati to start. It was very beautiful when it happened.
Prayer and worship always catch me unawares and I never know what to do.]
At one of the ghats we met Or, a graphic design student from Israel. He wanted to talk about moleskines and pens.
“Everyone is a hippie here, or a yoga nerd! I don’t want to talk about yoga or music.”
He was rather funny. “But India has karma, I love that concept.”
Our spiritual quest was punctuated by birthday calls from friends, all recommending their special things to do in Rishikesh, with love. And I kept thinking about all our beloved apps and digital services, which are just isolating us from each other more and more, and that just hearing the voice of a dear one on the phone is all it takes.
Finally while stirring coffee we identified our purpose of the holiday – do nothing.
It’s much easier to have fun after that.
[At breakfast one day this girl was sitting so calmly, and waiting for breakfast. Maybe the point of a holiday like this is really to slow down, savour the moment.]
You can see how much I over-analyze. It’s hard to be in the moment sometimes.
[We stayed a few hours more for the zently relaxing yoga class. What a perfect holiday. Sigh.]
I am about to reveal a hitherto unseen side of my personality with this post. You know what they say to new travelers on Indian Railways? You can talk of cricket and Bollywood, but never venture into politics, religion and caste. So it is with inktales. I talk of poetry and personal eccentricities, but never about design or technology. Most of my friends and family don’t know what a techie I really am underneath this ditsy exterior.
The point of this fascinating revelation is to show you some drawings I did with Skitch on my phone using my index finger. Yes, that finger is very important. Most touch apps for drawing don’t have very good precision. And what’s more, I drew these while traveling on the Delhi Metro on my way home from work and then Skitch saved them seamlessly on the cloud through Evernote. (And that’s one more reason why Evernote is one of my favorite apps.)
Update: If you used Chrome to arrive here through the Facebook link you’ll probably see an ad below. Chrome or some other unauthorized party has hacked into my account and placed the ad without my knowledge. Until I get this fixed please bear with me. inktales will always remain ad-free.
This is a comic I made recently, inspired by a friend’s comment. If you have trouble reading the speech bubbles, click twice; or right click and choose “View Image”, and then you can click on the image again to view a larger size.
Thanks to the brown boy for invaluable editorial help.
inktales 