In conversation with Rajaram Kudli, an IITian, researcher, teacher, entrepreneur, consultant and advisor. Madhavi Nadig continues the conversation with Dr. Rajaram, in this part he touches upon AI, learning and personalisation in learning.

• Use of AI and its positive impact on learning
• His experience of starting a learning institute for unemployed graduates and how they became employable
• How can online classes cater to the motivation of learning?
• Personalised training with AI
• Learning cannot be competitive
• His method of personalised teaching as a teacher for his students
• Personalized, compassion driven, student teacher relationship cannot be replaced.
• AI is automated least common denominator of human intelligence
• Self awareness, learning and unlearning

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

In conversation with Rajaram Kudli, an IITian, researcher, teacher, entrepreneur, consultant and advisor. Padmaja’s conversation with Dr. Rajaram covers a gamut of topics, from all his experiences through his life and his views on all things education in the present day.

• Rajaram Sir’s background, education and experiences as an educator and his views on the current scenario.
• Anecdotes from his days of being an industrial management professor.
• His journey from Belgaum to IIT
• Experiences of his Phd
• Learning by insight. Engage with anything with a serious question.
• His core values as an educator
• Thoughts on what makes for impactful learning for adults.

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

In conversation with Geethanjali, a UX designer at Nference. Geethanjali talks about her work in UX and her journey from being an architect to pursuing a career in design.

• Being an ‘artsy’ kid, chose to study architecture to explore her creative abilities.
• Enjoyed creating interesting spatial experiences rather than just aesthetic designs.
• Visualising a design and aiding in getting it built was a skill  she had already mastered.
• These were transferable skills that could be easily applied to UX design. 
• Similarities between architecture and UX design.
• Adapting from thinking in 3D to visualise design on a screen.
• Transferable skills from interior design to UI design.
• UX design process followed by Geethanjali.
• Projects that Geethanjali is proud of, that includes a project she undertook for the interview at Clearly Blue!
• Advice for people aspiring to venture into UX design.

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

A few weeks ago, Adeptic Labs had the opportunity to conduct a workshop at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. So we thought of inviting some of their design students to share their experiences as design students. This conversation with Chitra explored -

• Chosing design as a course of choice
• From wanting to become a doctor, engineer, theatre person and knowing that they wanted to be only a designer
• Challenges and experiences of staying in the problem space, solving fights with friends using a design mindset, 
• Letting go of assumptions while trying to build the right product
• Research and design, having to observe people for hours
• Being influenced by having a parent in marketing
• Design is a continuum
• Influences in their design journey through spiritual exploration, cultivating their own lines of inquiry, being influenced by friends and family and going back to them when they are stuck, influence of having a parent in marketing and the creation of impactful campaigns
•  unlearning at Srishti with a course on chaos and turning traditional learning on its head
• How research helps in design, like a scientific mind
• Engineering approaches have rules, designers work more openly
• Theatre influencing design and vice versa, seeing design through theatre as reflections of the world we live in, actors and designers minds are  like a begging bowl always waiting to be filled with anything coming their way, curating and creating experiences
• What unlearning meant in their first year at design school
• Their perspectives on what people aspiring to learn design should take note of

Jahanavi Goel:

An aspiring service designer with strong observational skills, empathetic approach, and ability to develop and deliver practical and conscientious solutions. Currently studying at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design &Technology, pursuing Business Services and System Design.

Abhiram Jois:

Abhiram Jois is a human centred design student at Srishti Manipal institute. He is currently associated with the collective Design Beku and is working on a project called COWKI (Community owned wireless knowledge infrastructure) that enables communities to co create local knowledge repositories and self host meaningful digital services. He also did a semester of student exchange with The Glasgow School of Art where he studied interaction design. His areas of interest include UI/UX, design research, open data/software, HCI4D and ICT4D. 

Rhea Mittal:

A 3rd-year student pursuing Human Centered Design at Srishti Manipal Institute (SMI), Bangalore. She recently completed a student exchange semester in Besign, The Sustainable Design School, France. And currently interning as a design researcher at IIT Delhi and has previously interned as a UI/UX Designer, Product Designer, UX researcher and Graphic designer.

Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhea-mittal/

Website: https://rheamittal04013ae9.myportfolio.com/

In conversation with the marketing team at Clearly Blue Digital, with Chitra from Adeptic Creative Labs.

Aishwarya, Snegha and Sakshi talk about marketing in their own words. This team is a very young team of enthusiastic, creative and passionate people who share  -

• What attracted each one to the world of marketing

- Spontaneously and in the course of work

- Asking google, and finding out the why behind marketing

- did DM once and learned it formally at Clearly Blue

• Learning about marketing via home business and passion-driven careers

- learning patience when getting those followers

- being consistent

- engaging with followers, building your network

• Being consistent by

- Making genuine and valid connections in the online world

• Changes in marketing tools in the last 2 years, rise of automation
• Marketing in a B2B business, seeing outcomes is a while away unlike B2C
• Takes time for people to recognize a brand, how one presents their brand matters
• Quality is more important than quantity
• Tell the story of who you are as a business or product
• Building a portfolio of a business
• Challenges faced as a new marketing team
• Helping new companies get started with marketing
• Messages for aspiring marketeers
• Learning through experiences on the job
• Focus on the how
• Being consistent flexible and adaptable

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

Continuing this series of Rarely Rational, we feature Padmaja and Chitra from Adeptic Creative Labs, examining experiences of Negativity Bias through various lenses. This conversation covers -

• Why do we have a propensity as humans towards negatively charged experiences
• How current banking applications evoke feelings of failure due to their design
• Exploring aspects of inclusivity, accessibility, and putting the user first, to counter negativity bias as UX designers
• Simple things people have done to enable the last-mile auto mechanic
• Considering the user experience to be a memorable and pleasurable experience
• Humans today have the potential to think positively and steer themselves out of challenging situations, yet they chose to dwell amidst negatively charged environments
• Tips for UX designers
• A powerfully positive statistic on cancer survival

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

In this episode of our Rarely Rational series, Madhavi Nadig and Jyothi Sridhar discuss why people love to look for patterns, and when they find these patterns they want to associate a meaning to them. 

• While we have heard of women shattering the glass ceiling, there is also a problem of them ‘falling off the glass cliff’.
• Illusion of validity is where in which a person overestimates their ability to interpret and predict accurately the outcome when analyzing a set of data.
• People think they have found patterns and are convinced only by those patterns.
• Confident about the decision made by this perception.
• Reasons for this cognitive bias. Identifying patterns is what the human brain is conditioned to do.
• People love to look for patterns, and when they find these patterns they want to associate a meaning to them.
• Example from Mahabharatha where Yudhishitira might have succumbed to this Illusion of validity. Yudhishtira agreed to play dice with Duryodhana & Shakuni after he won once. Why so over confident despite knowing Shakuni was a master of the dice?
• Daily trading in the stock markets show instances when people fall prey to the illusion of validity.
• Nithin Kamath - Founder of Zerodha said ‘How useful is collecting & analysing tons of data is a question I ask my peers. We have no data team at Zerodha as we believe it doesn't give useful insights…’
• If you have a list of contacts, then you can’t market your new product to all of them. Position your product and figure out the subset of contacts for whom this product is relevant. Example of illusion of validity in marketing. Already existing users might not be the target audience to every new feature or product that is launched.
• Interesting incident about how statisticians figured out how to reinforce aircrafts and prevent too much damage during the world war.  
• Illusion of validity in user research.
• How Interpreting data when data is actually missing can lead to incorrect outcomes.
• Avoiding this bias - by not always looking for data to tell a coherent story.
• Seek out different opinions and interpretations.
• Madhavi’s shares an experience at an Ad-tech company showing how data can change the perception of reality.
• Which is safer? Flights or cars?

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

In this episode of our Rarely Rational series, Madhavi Nadig and Jyothi Sridhar discuss why courtesy may not always be welcome. Courtesy Bias makes it hard to get unfiltered opinions, since people may withhold their real views due to courtesy.

• “Satyam bruyat, priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam, priyam cha nanrutam bruyat”
• Jyothi thinks this shloka aptly captures user researchers' expectations of their participants
• If feedback is not honest or incomplete, then it's not very useful to the researchers
• User researchers seek critical feedback
• Purely positive feedback is useful only in boosting egos
• To be nice and positive, people withhold sharing negative aspects while giving feedback
• Family and close friends give raw, unfiltered feedback. Madhavi and Jyothi wish their target group did the same too.
• Due to Courtesy Bias, users value being courteous over honesty in their feedback
• Some participants fabricate opinions that they think will please the researchers
• Courtesy Bias stems from cultural conditioning, a people-pleasing mindset, hesitation to disagree, etc
• Madhavi takes all qualitative feedback with a pinch of salt and looks for broad themes
• Jyothi tries to make her interviewees feel comfortable enough to share their thoughts openly
• Madhavi suggests taking power imbalance out of the equation
• Courtesy Bias could stem from introvertedness, feelings of Imposter Syndrome, paucity of time, or apathy
• One may exhibit Courtesy Bias in public, but express freely in private settings
• Closed polls may be better than open polls
• NPS scores give you a sense of who's a promoter, detractor, or passive about your product
• Individual user interviews may yield better insights than focus groups
• It's hard to convey negative feedback without sounding rude or harsh
• How do you handle negative feedback, if you get it?
• What appears as Courtesy Bias, could stem from multiple other unconscious biases
• Courtesy Bias is itself a form of Response Bias
• Madhavi suggests explicitly disassociating from the product so that users won't worry about hurting your sentiments
• Ensure questions aren't leading, so people don't feel the pressure to agree (to be "courteous")
• Jyothi believes news channels have figured out how to use Courtesy Bias to raise their TRPs
• Madhavi thinks the shloka needs an addition—don't propagate half-truths either.

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

This episode is a new one in our ‘Rarely Rational’ series where we explore cognitive biases. 

 Madhavi Nadig and Jyothi Sridhar talk about the ‘Peak-end rule’

• Chinese whispers - a popular children’s game. 
• Psychologists talk about two kinds of ‘selves’. Experiencing self and the narrating self. Are we playing chinese whispers with ourselves?
• What is the peak-end rule?
• The peak-end rule says we do not remember experiences accurately. The way we judge our experiences is mostly dependent on what we felt at our worst/best moments.
• People curating their memories on social media exhibit a similar behaviour. Where their experiences are remembered by what they felt at the worst/best moments.
• Childbirth is a classic example of how a positive ending takes over the overall painful experience.
• Even seemingly boring movies can leave you with a lasting impression if the ending was great.
• Madhavi’s experience with UPI both as a customer and as a vendor. 
• Raising awareness about ALS with a trend called Ice bucket challenge as an example for peak-end rule. The peak of this experience was the person’s reaction when the icy water hit them.  
• A recent Shark tank India episode had people who pitched about their makeup brand and one of their customer acquisition strategies was to conduct makeup tutorial events at 5-star hotels with free food. 
• If the last experience about a product was negative, Peak end rule is used to mitigate that negativity by way of giving out humorous error messages and leaving the user with a smile. 
• Experience with doctors
• Ratings or NPS scores need to be taken with a pick of salt. Reviewers most likely rate the service or product with their bias of peak-end rule. 
• Spin doctors - people who are skilled at doing public relations for celebrities maintaining their reputation in the public to hide any bad raps they might have received at any point.

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

In this episode of Aedge, Sushmita Charlu, a designer with a multi-disciplinary approach, chats with Madhavi Nadig, the CTO of Adeptic Creative Labs. It is a free-wheeling conversation covering Sushmita’s diverse body of work and her thoughts around industrial design, circular economy, sustainability, game design with recycled materials and designing for water equity.

• Unable to choose between arts and science, Sushmita chose to study Design where she didn’t have to give up either.
• She graduated as a Product & Interface Designer from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, studying industrial design and UX design.
• Her mentor kindled her interest in sustainability with a book called “Cradle to Cradle”, which talks about moving away from a linear economy to a circular economy.
• An ideal design is one which lives perpetually, maybe in different forms over time, but nothing is wasted.
• Cradle, here, is a metaphor for birth. Products are (re)born with a new form once the previous form is obsolete.
• Sushmita has found her ikigai in industrial design and creating a circular economy 
• As an industrial designer, she looks at products as a service to people.
• At every stage from production to packaging to delivery, as an industrial designer, she considers how to create a circular economy.
• India had a strong circular economy in the past, when repairing and renting products were the norm.
• Pride in product ownership led to the collapse of the service economy.
• Now, with renewed interest, both consumers and companies are realising the benefits of a circular economy.
• Industrial designers must consider the locally available systems and service economies while designing for that region.
• In her current role at Good Business Lab, Sushmita focuses more on social sustainability than environmental sustainability.
• She designs interventions for blue collar workers in the space of physical & mental health and safety.
• The interventions are created with a human-centric approach, delivered as a service, not as acts of charity.
• She incentivises businesses to invest in such interventions and helps them recognise the business returns from them.
• As a non-profit labour innovation lab, Good Business Lab measures the effectiveness of such interventions using quantitative research techniques like randomised control trials.
• Having government-mandated Environment, Social and corporate Governance (ESG) norms pushed corporates to invest in sustainability initiatives whose results are not seen in the short-term.
• Greenwashing is easy. But real change requires time, strategy, innovation and prioritisation.
• Madhavi wants to know the hurdles preventing the adoption of sustainable alternatives. Sushmita quips that she has opened a can of tofu and shrimp!
• Though sustainable alternatives are more expensive right now, when sustainable businesses are supported and encouraged to scale, in the future, they should become more affordable.
• Millennials & Gen-Z are currently open to paying the premium for sustainability
• Blue collar workers, who are busy earning their living, will opt for the cheapest alternative.
• Sustainable businesses can be encouraged with monetary investments and hyperlocal consumption.
• Flatheads, a sustainable brand of shoes, received a lot of support from the public after the founder appeared on Shark Tank.
• Shark Tank is showcasing many sustainable businesses from across India and it’s heartening to see them get funded.
• Sushmita calls millennials the “ready-made generation”, the first generation to have free access to and consume mass-produced goods.
• Madhavi observes that there are fewer people around to repair things today.
• The Japanese art of kintsugi values restoring things. But restoring things today is tedious.
• Sushmita shares that this is due to planned obsolescence, a strategy adopted by many businesses.
• Tech companies continue to take back your used gadgets while pushing you to upgrade by purchasing newer gadgets.
• Sushmita’s entrepreneurship journey with Vrtta includes creating an Icelandic strategy game called Hnefatafl using reconstituted tetrapacks for Kavade Toy Hive. It was an effort to combine the ancient with the modern.
• Madhavi loves the new-found focus on Indian games. She appreciates the revival of ancient Indian games and the creation of new ones, like Hampi, with artfully created pieces and minimal packaging.
• Sushmita prefers a minimalistic style which is almost a blank canvas and adds a pop of colour using rich fabrics. She chooses long-lasting furniture which will keep her carbon footprint low in future as well.
• Sushmita was concerned that Ikea’s entry into India would kill the local furniture market. But she’s observed a trend where people get ideas from Ikea’s curation, but purchase locally.
• How does one start a career in design? What skills must they acquire?
• Sushmita shares her experience of up-skilling with Offsite, a program about Industrial Design.
• In the Bali Fab Fest, Sushmita and her inter-disciplinary group designed a solution to tackle the water crisis that Bali faces as a tourist island.
• Sonam Wangchuk recently went on a Climate Fast to draw attention to the water shortage in Ladakh, due to climate change.
• To promote Water Equity, Sushmita’s Fab Fest team open-sourced their design with clear instructions to replicate it locally. They have received some funding too.
• Sushmita advises new designers to figure out what they love and pursue it relentlessly.
• She is working on social and sustainable design projects with her international peers from the Offsite course.
• Her pet project involves creating a circular economy for coffee.
• Since Sushmita has interviewed designers as the co-host of the Design Lota podcast, she had hoped there would be no bad karma in this one.

Sushmita is a designer with a multi-disciplinary approach to her work. Her work lies at the intersection of creative problem solving, technology and envisioning a sustainable (present and) future. Sushmita is currently a Senior Design Associate at Good Business Lab. She is also a co-founder & designer at Vrtta, a collaborative focused on sustainability and craft.

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at [email protected].

Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.