Kshitiz Anand

I have been out of blogging much for quite some time now.

It has been mostly due to the startup Deskala. We recently completed 6 months there and the journey there has been truly fascinating. During this period we have interacted with a lot people, and me personally got to know a lot more because of my photography workshops too. The other reason is the travel, which if something I just love, so cannot put an end to that too.

One of the biggest challenges that we have faced as Design Entrepreneurs, (Designpreneur) is to sell the service of design to people in the Business tea. And when this happens inspite of having close to 10 years of experience between us, it surprises me. My friend and co-founder of Deskala; Porus wrote an interesting article on this phenomenon, and what both the parties namely the Business and the Design team should work towards.

In my opinion, I think that its relatively easier to become a Designpreneur, but more difficult to sustain oneself as that. It’s easy, because right from the college days, one is designing and creating products and services. The innovations is happening then and there itself and its actually their first meeting with the entrepreneurial life. Now let’s see what happenes when that particular developed idea is marketed and sold properly. Viola! you have the idea for the company that you are going to put up.

The other big challenge that we have is to position Deskala as a design firm and not a development firm. There are already numerous firms who start off with software development and slowly add designers to the team.  As Deskala, we are going the other route, wherein we say build a design centric team first and then we move forward.

As mentioned  do not want to position Deskala as a Web Design or UI Design firm. With the founding team members hailing from different design and related backgrounds, i.e. Graphic, Product. Interaction Design and Research, Architecture, etc it is not justified that we stick only to the UI part as a service.

The journey as been filled with all possible emotions, but in the end it is been very satisfying!

Came across this interesting interview about the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand. Touched upon some really nice points. Gives an explanation on the IBM logo, and also his views on why the world needs graphic designers in it.
Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I gave a talk recently at the Designers meet organized by Regalix, here in Bangalore.The theme of the meet was Digital Design Innovation. My talk focused on how we as designers should look to  to see the impact of Digital Design Innovation in the context of India, and in particular in the social sector.

Below is the presentation that I used for the talk, which ran for 15 minutes.

As the participants were not too familiar with the domain, the challenge was to lay the platform for everyone to understand easily. The idea of the talk was to introduce the concept of Design for Social Impact, and implant a hope that there would be more people who join me in the quest for ensuring that design expands its boundaries and reaches out to places where it can make a huge difference.