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I have now moved back to India for good and am available for freelance / consulting assignments in User Experience Design and Research. I truly believe that I have a lot that I can give back to the design scenario in India and hence the decision to move back. Please get in touch with me for more design services.
Recently I have been consulting for a startup based in New Delhi, India called the NSFI (Nitesh Supriya Film Initiative). They have the brands Cine – Darbaar (that organizes film festivals and other cinema related events. Recent successes include Russian and Iranian film festivals) and Indian Auteur (India’s first online film criticism journal. I write for them too on Documentary cinema and film criticism). I recently did their business card design for them.
Card Front Side
Card Back Side
The goal was to have their ideologies in simplicity, and of being a young and dynamic group of people bringing a change in the way cinema is accepted in the society in India today. It also had to be modern and at the same time reflect the confidence of the group in organizing the events, inspite of being new to the field. The right side of the back of the card was intentionally left blank to provide a space for taking notes.
I recently gave my masters graduation project presentation on designing for social impact and using photography as a research tool to help in the creation of social awareness solutions. I focused on the issue of child education in rural Bihar (India). The project was well received in the presentation and the overall consensus was good.
The final outcome of the graduation project is the website Pick Me, Click Me, Educate Me! This project serves to provide a platform to people from different backgrounds (photographers, writers, educationists, social workers, donors etc) to collaborate. It allows to utilize the work done by one group (like photographers who go to these locations and shoot), for discussion with the others who are not able to. It therefore allows aims for promoting , discussing, writing about, and finally donating (again not the prime focus) for, the issue of child education in rural Bihar.
Here is the promo video for the project
And this is the presentation that I made in the class.
Pick Me Click Me Educate Me
View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand.
Me along with a classmate (Vignesh Ramesh) participated in the Microsoft’s Imagine Cup student design competition in the photography section. We made it to the second round – the semi finals.
The challenge here was to use one of the 8 UN’s Millenium Development Goals to create a story using 12 photographs only.
We focused on the issue of attaining universal primary education and in particular told the photo story of educating the girl child in rural India.
Here is the presentation.
Educate the Girl Child
View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand.
<Please do not use the photographs without permission>
The talk at Ignite Bloomington went well. I liked the participation of the audience in smiling together with me. Here is the presentation that I had used. Please note that most of my presentations are void of too much texts, and I speak more. I truly believe that I have the audience attention better that way. One audience member later summed up my talk in his blog post,
“Kshitiz shared the lessons he learned from research in rural India. The slides were pictures of people from rural India and were the most interesting slides of the show, as they were the least ‘Powerpointy’.”
Here is a that ‘non-powerpointy’ presentation, though I confess I did use Power Point to make it!
Kshitiz Anand Ignite Bloomington Presentation
View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand.
Here’s an update of the remaining things I noted at CHI Boston 2009 conference. I think it was a truly enriching experience.
I attended a few sessions on Mobile applications, on User Experience and on Application of Design in the Developing World.
There was a consensus on the call for HCI and User Experience to expand itself and reach out to communities where it had not been so successful. From what I felt, people are ready and willing to (budget permitting) to collaborate with researchers and local people who have a strong understanding of the locality and at the same time be an expert in HCI / UI / UXd/r. As I previously mentioned India did feature a lot during the presentations along with Africa. In fact in one session all the presentations were done in India. In Karnataka to be precise! Groups from universities in UK, Microsoft Research, and Nokia presented their works done in India on user research. There was a call for the expansion of the applications made for the mobiles for varying purposes. The UK group called for the role of Participatory Media in Community Development and its approach.
There were again some studies on voice based UIs, Text based UIs, and Rich Multimedia UIs. However one interesting thing was the focus on Semi-literate users. This was interesting as it allowed for the expansion of the UIs from the text only to graphics included. Rich multimedia UI was tried out, and there was a few projects done by people on iPhones (which I was not too impressed by). A person from UNICEF’s Innovation Division, in a panel discussion asked the HCI community for a 5$ mobile phone with easy interface to reach out to the millions in developing nations. I think that’s an interesting challenge.
There . . . → Read More: CHI 09 Updates
My short talk titled, “Research Strategies for Designing for Social Impact” was selected to be presented at Ignite Bloomington event.
Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides, that automatically advance after 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement, and Bloomington is hosting its first on April 16th at 6pm.
This inaugural edition has some amazing speakers and it should be fun.
I am excited to be sharing my pictures and talking more about my project. It was a challenge to put together the presentation, but at the end of it, I think people will like it.
I am recently attending the CHI conference at Boston.
I strted my day of multiple interesting sessions with the there is this bunch of people at Stanford’s Computing Science Department (the guy who presented was Neel Patel) who are collaborating with college students in India (Dhirubai Ambani Institute) to come up with voice based user interfaces. Their paper won an honorable paper mention (one amongst the 32 that were given this honor, out of the 694 that were accepted). They have implemented the system in Gujarat and working with farmers and testing the usefulness of touchtone based interactions versus speech based interactions. I thought it was pretty interesting stuff.
The prime focus as we know at CHI is Methodologies. I noticed that there was lot of focus on the presentations on NUMBERS. Almost all presentations (except the Nokia one) was full of data. Perhaps this was a way to stress on the process. However something that was missing was the Human element in the presentations. I definitely would have loved to see more papers with actual users talking or actual users feedback than just numbers. Also although I did not come across any interesting new methods so far, people were interested in exploring (and are infact exploring) in research and application of the existing methodolies to new domains.
So, some of the papers also are exploring for children as a potential user group. So there were issues of education being discussed and also panel discussions on children. How could one design digital games as an educational tool for rural children, based on analysis of 28 rural children outdoor games, was another interesting paper. (This is being centered at U C Berkley) Though was a little dissappointed at the presentation. Perhaps will understand better when I read the paper. This . . . → Read More: CHI 2009 Day 1
I came across this interesting presentation the other day on Slideshare. Human-centered design meets Agile Development View more presentations from Maria Giudice. Often I wonder where is all this heading. While some believe that the two are definitely going to cross paths in the near future, there are a few who think that this might not be the case. Lets go through the presentation and decide for oneself. I think that the possibilities are exciting!
I think these two below are interesting artciles.
I have been in a similar position of trying to explain people what I do for a living and the moment I say Experience Design, it becomes more abstract. The moment I say Graphic Design, it becomes too narrow. People ask me to consult on Usability, but I think that a person trained in Usability should do it. But since I learnt it and done different kind of Usability Activities, I agree to it. Some people ask me to do a look and feel of their website. I think that this is a area of expertise for a person trained in Graphic Design working in Web Medium (often called User Interface Designer).
Below here is the link to an article that I recently read on Coroflot. Its thought provoking. In the end one is left with the question whethere the field really requires a formal definition of some kind, or should it be happy where it is and keep exploring newer ventures within the context of interaction design.
An extract from the piece… Like most of my friends and colleagues in the creative professions, I have trouble explaining to my mom what exactly I do for a living, so it’s not like confounded laymen are an indicator of intentional obscurity. But IxD seems to be in a different category entirely. Not only does it confuse outsiders, it confuses Interaction Designers too.
Read more here
You could also read up the discussions on this topic at the IxD discussion forums at this location.
While you may agree of disagree to the things that are said in the above two links, it gives a fair amount of understanding to the kind of confusion that exists within and outside the field.
. . . → Read More: 5 Things that is NOT Interaction Design
Of late I have been looking into the different ways of creating a website and also helped a few other people do the same. I think that the learning curve is extremely important for a designer and that is one thing I look into closely when I try out something new. With more and more build up of the online communities, one sees a lot of focus on Content Management Systems (CMS). This happens to be an easier way of doing things and thus not being dependent on the services of the developer to keep creating pages by hard-coding it on HTML / Dreamweaver. Perhaps this was the prime reason for me chosing to migrate my website to a CMS based system. I am thankful for that choice!
Wordpress – the backbone of this site.
I have used WordPress for this site (kshitizanand.com) and was totally blown away by the ease of use and the functionalities that it provided. I had been using it for the blogs, so I was familiar with the basic stuff on WordPress. After a while I then decided to try it out for a website. The wide number of themes and the every growing community makes WordPress an easy learning tool for designers. I am in love with WordPress and definitely recommend anyone who is interested in putting up an easy to maintain website
In a past project on creation of a Collaborative Tool designers and researchers, we had done an in depth study of the existing tools. The study was focused around community building, so Ning was the sole leader in seeking out to do multiple things.
Comparitive Study of different Collaborative Tools
However Drupal and Joomla were a close second and third respectively.
Joomla – supposedly popular with websites . . . → Read More: On Content Management Systems
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