A lot of times we think that design is something incorporeal. Design is constantly evolving every hour. An innovation, a new spark, a new form all leads to the growth of the design sector. We the students at Avantika had the pleasure of listening to Amber Krishan, an accomplished UX Executive, with a strong background in managing large user experience design programs, design led innovation, and helping organizations build UX capability & staff.

A post graduate from Parsons School of Design, New York, his expertise lies in end-user centered design process, with special focus on user experience strategy, setting design goals and metrics, omni-channel solution design, design for enterprise software products, advanced ecosystem research & validation techniques, setting up a mature UX practice for Fortune 500 and Global clientele.

He has proven track record in driving business results, delivering exceptional quality, through process driven design.

A regular speaker at NASSCOM, IIM-A, Nokia Roadshow, IAMAI, Usability practitioner’s association in USA he is a dynamic personality and was indeed it was a treat to listen the way he connects every field with design.

The session started with him giving us the brief about how interaction and experience design is gaining value in the current world. The session itself was divided up into 3 parts.

• How the industry is changing.
• What does design value mean to us?
• The game plan for when we move out in the real world.

Design as a separate field had no such importance until the mid 2000’s. Then came the iPhone and with it a new wave of apps and the need for experience designing. This boom created a new ripple in the design industry. He gave us an example of how his friend created a simple game called Doodle Jump for his project in college and became a millionaire overnight. The need for experiences had drastically increased overnight for everyone since no one wants a messy app to look into. This surge is growing exponentially since 2008 and is not going to stop anytime soon. After a chat on how the user experience design can be applied on everything, he talked about how the business economy is changing and is creating memorable events for their employees and creating value for them as well. This memory itself becomes a product. That is the prime reason why experience build-up is important in industry. We also talked about how cashback works in wallet apps like Paytm and that was a real eye opener. Basically these wallets run their businesses on debt based economy wherein they take large amounts of loan money from USA or China and then repay by increasing the customer base and making them spend more time on the app and creating opportunities to grow.

Recent analytics showed that design centric companies are doing far better than non-design centric ones because design integrated systems create memorable experiences for the customers as well as the employees giving them an aesthetic appeal and a sense of enjoyment even in their workspace. The concept of design philosophy comes into play here. What exactly does design philosophy mean to the end user? Or the creator himself? Students were asked to reflect on this ideology and present their views. After a lot of discussion, we ourselves realized that this philosophy is the very foundation of the glitter and glamour in terms of aesthetics of every product. The very crux of the session. Experience design. And how it is evolving.

The next part was how Artificial Intelligence is already pressing its influence over many things and making the life easier for the end user. But the question was what would be the scene in terms of design? Since design is something you do empathetically, would AI be able to take over it as well?

We were then divided into groups of 6 for a small activity. We were asked to THINK what the world in design will look like in the future according to us and then we had to present it to everyone. Everyone put forward some tremendously amazing points as to what the design world will look with AI in it. Some said that there will always have to be a human touch/ influence in it because AI wasn’t capable of emotions and designers main aim is to connect with the user and understand the problems. We need to talk with the user and feel it for ourselves and that’s when the solution will present itself. AI cannot have such capabilities of understanding the feelings of the user as such. Some suggested that AI will take over the designers work as well and we will be just someone who gives commands to it and it will self-generate patterns or designs for us thus diminishing our creativity.

The next part was about the game plan for which everyone was excited about. We all sat down again in groups and then wrote down what we wanted to be on a piece of paper. Then we had to write what we needed to do to achieve what we wanted. If I wanted to become an interaction designer what all steps do I have to complete first? A ladder-based assessment in short. Then we had to discuss in the group itself why we wanted to be what we had written down and collect their views on it. After all critics are your best friends.

A session committed to memory and heart of every designer, Amber Krishan really opened our eyes on how experiences had, have and are changing the face of the world.