Celebrating International Literacy Day !
As we celebrated International Literacy Day on September 8 – it is a time to reflect what literacy means in today’s world. Possibly what semantic language was to literacy two decades ago is now design language. This is especially significant in a multilingual and multicultural country like India. The essence of design as a literacy force in today’s world is rooted in its power to drive cross-cultural communication, creativity, and problem-solving. Design transforms how we engage with information, navigate technology, and connect with each other across diverse cultures and languages. Understanding Design Literacy: Design literacy refers to the ability to understand, interpret, and apply design principles effectively. It’s not just about aesthetics, but also about how design shapes user experience, communication, and problem-solving. Why It Matters for Businesses: Design literacy empowers businesses to create user-centered solutions, communicate more effectively, and foster innovation. It leads to better decision-making and stronger alignment between business goals and user needs. 1. Business Value of Design Literacy Improved Customer Experience: Design-literate businesses prioritize user experience (UX) and customer journey mapping, leading to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Quicker Problem-Solving: Teams that understand design principles are better equipped to address challenges creatively and efficiently, resulting in faster product iterations and market adaptations. Competitive Advantage: Businesses with strong design literacy can differentiate themselves from competitors by building brands and products that resonate with consumers on a deeper level. Increased ROI: Studies show that design-driven companies outperform others in terms of revenue and shareholder returns. For example, design thinking has proven to drive financial success by identifying user pain points early and solving them before products hit the market. 2. Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Better Collaboration Across Teams: When teams from different departments understand a common language of design, they collaborate more effectively. This leads to more innovative ideas and a cohesive product strategy. Breaking Down Silos: Design literacy helps bridge the gaps between marketing, product development, and customer service, fostering a unified approach to business challenges. 3. Design Literacy as an Investment Training and Upskilling: Investing in design literacy training programs for employees can yield long-term benefits, from improving product design to increasing operational efficiency. Design Thinking Culture: Embedding a design-thinking culture in the workplace encourages experimentation and places a premium on creativity, enabling companies to adapt to a rapidly changing business landscape. 4. Impact on Brand Perception Building Trust Through Design: Consumers are more likely to trust and engage with brands that have a strong design language. A company with poor design might be perceived as being outdated or unreliable. Consistency in Visual Communication: Design literacy ensures that every touchpoint—whether digital or physical—is consistent, reinforcing brand identity and clarity in messaging. 5. Building Businesses for the Future Promoting design literacy not only benefits businesses but also equips future generations to approach problems with creativity and critical thinking, shaping innovative and future-ready industries.
The HUDE Experience: Interning with us
Among the many things we like to do at HUDE, mentoring budding professionals is a big one. We believe that the knowledge we have collectively gained through our journey is meant to be shared and passed on to upcoming ‘human’ designers, the next generation of talent. And undeniably, it is an amazingly enriching experience! We all learn in the most enjoyable way, while evolving efficient ways of working and adding value to brands and businesses. Some words from two bright and energetic interns, who were with us recently: “My time at Hude Studio was a transformative experience, offering me more than just a job. It became a guiding force, shaping my mindset and fostering a fresh approach to thinking. The journey was marked by continuous learning, making it a crucial chapter in my personal and professional development. Engaging in tasks like creating logos, social media posts, and actively contributing to a live client project provided valuable exposure. Along with the logo I also worked on creating emailers. Additionally, I took on the creative challenge of translating a blog post about the company’s services into a comic, enhancing understanding and communication through visual storytelling.” “My internship at HUDE Studio as a User Experience and Interface Designer was a remarkable experience. Having learnt the theories and laws during my master’s program, I was eager to apply them in real-world projects. HUDE not only provided me with the opportunity to do so but also exposed me to industry-standard designs. The communication within the team was seamless, and I was quickly integrated into the team and company. This valuable experience has significantly propelled my design career, and I am grateful for the opportunities and insights gained during my time at HUDE Studio.” Early-career designers, graduate students who wish to intern with us – go on, call us. A conversation is the first step to a fruitful engagement, and more journeys.
How our mother tongue shapes our emotional expression
Languages and cultures have long fascinated me. The ways different languages employ different phrasing to convey same human feelings has always stoked my imagination. It is a reflection of human diversity. It also outlines the ability of the human mind to bring a range of perspectives to the same emotional moment. I have long believed that humans should achieve emotionally critical command over at least one language, especially to the point where they can communicate their emotions with ease. I have observed that the inability of a person to express and communicate his true feelings creates imbalance in the emotional framework of the person. This is something I have continued to observe across cultures and ages. Those who have evolved a good command over one or more languages and are able to communicate his mind, come across as more self-assured and emotionally grounded. Lake of Emotions Learning one’s mother or father tongue is the simplest and most natural path to build command over expressing feelings early on in life. Learning the parents’ language plugs a child into the spectrum of emotions, expressions and engagements – a spectrum richly colored by journeys, experiences and feelings across generations. This lake of emotions is a pool of feelings that has flowered and withered in different stages of their parents’ lives. It is a whole universe of connectedness, belonging and emotional bonding. The emotional universe of a mother’s language is possibly the most natural way for a growing human to give linguistic shape to his mind and body sensations, enabling the person to give it roots by borrowing from the richness of the shared culture. More often than not, however, when these young people embark on their quest to acquire a language that is globally competitive (a language other than their mother tongue), they do not have access to the lake of emotional expressions, the immersive milieu or social setup in which micro-interactions and micro-expressions take place. Read the complete article at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-native-language-shape-emotional-framework-humans-nazim-iqbal-1c6ic%3FtrackingId=oebWGkkgTxqH2bI5DlMWQQ%253D%253D/?trackingId=oebWGkkgTxqH2bI5DlMWQQ%3D%3D
ChatGPT reduced abilities inequality
According to an ongoing research study by Shakked Noy & Whitney Zhang from MIT, ChatGPT as an AI language model, is fast evolving to have an impact on business productivity. The study conducted in the context of mid-level professional writing tasks have some interesting findings Increase productivity by 59%, with time taken decreases and output quality rises You can read the full working paper On a side note, Chegg became possibly the first company feeling the impact of generative AI. Founded in 2005, Chegg is an education technology company that provides homework help as a service, as well as digital and physical textbook rentals. The stock of EdTech Chegg dived -50% in the last two months as the CEO admits that OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT is having a direct impact on their business. Read the full story here
Will AI propel the Bard in us
Image generated by DALL-E Earlier today Google released Bard – a Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven tool that will blend the capability of search engine and felicity of human conversation. Bard immediately reminded me of William Shakespeare. Literary ‘bard’ means a tribal poet-singer skilled in composing and reciting verses on heroes and their deeds. Year 2023 has started with a spate of AI releases. Interesting is not just the release of the AI tools, but what we are experiencing is Consumerization of AI. The fast adoption by consumers of the AI tools is driven by both human curiosity in AI as well as the high degree of humane quotient that these tools are being built with. ChatGBT, supposedly the most powerful AI tool publicly available was launched by Open AI towards the end of November 2023 and now has an active user base of 100 millions. Other popular AI tools like DALL.E and MidJourney already have a million users. There are other tools being adopted like GFN-GAN (image restoration), Notion.ai (copywriting), Copy.ai (copywriting), JADBio — AutoML (knowledge extraction), Lumen5 (video creation), Lalal.ai (audio stem editor), Deep beat (lyrics writing), Deep Nostalgia (animate humans in a photos) and Generative Engine (image created from text description). All of this is possible because of the incremental work done over the last decade in the field of natural language generation, speech recognition, image reading, virtual agents, biometrics, machine learning, robotic process automation, peer-to-peer network and deep learning platforms. The scorching pace and pressure on the technology organisations to put AI in the public space carries the risk of overriding or overlooking the potential impact of these tools on individuals, classrooms, teams and society. Though some research on the wider impact of AI is being carried out, it is largely by the teams who are developing these tools. There is a need for independent groups and organizations of ethicists, racist specialists, culture competency experts and policy researchers to bring greater mind-space and investigation to better understand the impact of these AI tools on the education ecosystem, shaping of human consciousness especially of the younger generation and the society at large. Age of Bardization is a work of speculative fiction written by Albert Waldo Howard under the pseudonym “M. Auberré Hovorré.” The book was a part of a utopian and dystopian literary wave that spawned in the final decades of nineteen century and carried the attributes of speculative human future and altered reality and appealed to the readers. Though such work whether in fiction or AI provide insights on the possible directions for humans. We as a human community need to be aware that we stay clear from metamorphosing into a society of bards and chatbots.
Rise of the Human-Centered Design
Over the last few years, we have made huge progress in adoption of design by businesses, brands, and in the civic space. But even now when I head into meeting with key stakeholders in evolved corporate organisations or government departments looking to bring ease of use to their technology stacks, I encounter prejudices and hand-me-down assumptions. One of which is the random use and ambidextrous clubbing of UX & UI. Whether it is UX & UI or UI & UX, the pairing has caught everybody’s imagination who is looking walk the digital path. So, whether it is the CTO, CPO or CDO looking to bring an ounce of user friendliness to their products or wanting to improve accessibility of their technology stack for humans – they somehow evolve a notion that all of it is a UX & UI ride. UI is a small sub-set of the UX. UX is the experience layer of the product which combines, in varying degrees, copy writing, interaction design, visual design, iconography, motion design, and in many cases, voice and audio design. The world of experience is much wider and deeper both at the organisation, product or service level. It requires not just digital and design acumen, but a collective human perspective of emotions, ethics, human behaviour and a large dose of measured maturity. Such holistic thinking and approach build design experiences that are inclusive and accommodate diversity of human inanities, fallacies, and cultural dichotomy. We are now at an inflection in the digital evolution, and for design to be really impactful, it has to step out from the realm of designers and get into the hands of developers, engineers, project managers, marketers, technologists, civil administrators, government service providers and possibly also the users of the product or services. Which brings up the question: what would designer do, if everybody is a designer. Designers need to step up and be mentors, coaches, assimilators and the tribe that can help connect the dots. It is collectively that we can build experiences that carry diversity of perspective, yet are inclusive in their embrace and need fulfilment. We at HUDE Studio call it Human Experience (HX).
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Watch Nazim Iqbal in conversation with host Ashutosh Garg of A Brand Called You. Nazim shares his journey as entrepreneur and designer, his motivations, and his evolution into a ‘humanist-designer’. And of course, the birth of HUDE Studio. He talks at length about his passionate quest for human-centred design and how Digital today is not just expected to fulfil the consumer’s functional needs but also some emotional and social needs and desires; how brands can improve their omni-channel experience in a digital-first business environment. Get to know us better: read at length about HUDE Studio and our philosophy. Do watch and be sure to share with your friends! Drop us a comment or get in touch. We love conversations!
How can a designer respond to climate change
In the Indian subcontinent, it is monsoon time, and a time of the year when all conversations revolve around rainfall. Too much! Too little! Too late! Rising water level of this or that river! What’s more heat waves, no longer a regional phenomenon, are lashing large swathes of Europe, Africa and Asia. It is a time when climate change is experienced not as an abstract idea or a topic for an animated debate, but as a grim everyday reality that refuses to adhere to any solutions or patterns or predictions. And then arises the inevitable thought: how can a designer – product designer or web or UI/UX designer or any other kind of designer – become part of the solution for climate change? What can a designer do to influence or impact climate change, even if in a small way? Climate change – that juggernaut with all its uncertainty, its irreversibility. Here are some fairly simple ways in which a designer can make a difference. Think holistically, think big. When working on a project or system, ask the larger questions about the entire system: who will use it and how, what is being reused and renewed (as against creating from scratch), who all will not be able to use it, and its expected outcomes. Remember to ask the bold questions that people may not be readily willing to discuss – due to budget or time constraints, or lack of awareness, or just plain lazy to think wide and deep. Having the larger picture will inform your design in more relevant ways. Graphics and visuals, user journeys, navigation labels, simple elements in a design can actually create awareness and sensitivity towards climate change or sustainability or environment (as appropriate in the given context). Having it as a core concern will, in any case, enable you to think of and design visuals that ‘speak’ climate-change awareness, and in turn, influence users and stakeholders. Have ethics for your work and collaborators. As a smart designer you remain aware of the bottom line and the need to balance ‘good’ and ‘worthwhile’ projects that inspire and give you a sense of a larger purpose along with ‘mundane’ corporate work that keeps your boat afloat. Global studio leaders, however, underline the importance of getting picky today, with clients as well as collaborators within the fraternity. Given the urgency of response required by the climate emergency we collectively face, this seems like a sensible, life-affirming way to go. Then there are designers who believe that their creativity should be employed in ways that serves society rather than to come up with ‘cool’ things that end up ‘persuading customers’ and driving consumption. For instance, a global design agency used its authority to promote an environmental group, through creating its Christmas campaign ‘Ungifted’, that used powerful visuals to discourage mass consumption. We could think of it as a moral arc that every designer (actually, every human) designs for themselves, and then tries to remain as true to it as they can, while juggling life’s multifarious challenges. Keep learning and pass it forward. Take responsibility. Climate change is a juggernaut, yes! It is also complex and has various interconnections, nuances related to geography, economics, seasons and species. Everything’s linked, and everything’s changing – very quickly We need to learn, keep learning, and at the same time, help clients and teams unpack its layers. Keep reading, keep up with the research, get connected with groups that resonate with you, and be aware that there is as much propaganda on this topic as there are authentic resources. Taking responsibility is a big step. In small ways – those invisible actions nobody will see and judge. Recycling tins, minimizing use of plastic and packing material, planting a tree. Starting small is a big point of departure from our present ‘hyper life style’. The monsoons will give way to sunny days in a couple of weeks in India. And while that might keep our water worries at bay, climate change will not fade away as a universal fact of our current existence. A wholesale redesign of our world might be the way forward, one design practice or visual at a time. And if you have reached here, then do take a couple of minutes to also read this post. Photo by Akil Mazumder: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-a-green-plant-1072824/
At the Pitchfest Finals, 28 June 2022
When CX Network put out their announcement for the CX Live Start-up Pitchfest, we responded with open-minded curiosity and enthusiasm. It felt exciting to be part of the larger community of CX and related organizations and professionals. It ended with participation in the final, as one of the six shortlisted finalists. Not only was it an invigorating challenge, but also an educative and wonderful experience. An eclectic mix of people, product and services – all bonded by the common quest to improve customer experience for organisation and brands. Presenting the HUDE Studio proposition of ‘putting a human face to the digital presence of organisation and brand’ was a solution narrative that rhymed with products trying to reach out to CX professionals. In the end, the event was a great opportunity to have connected with global professionals in the larger CX fraternity. Nazim Iqbal, founder and director, elaborated on the HUDE philosophy of integrating human connectivity into digital channels. Customer experience, forever evolving, and growing more subtle and embedding deeper within products, now calls for deeper collaborations amongst specialists, thinkers, analysts and creative dreamers. Such initiatives seem like excellent places to hang out with one’s own tribe, and get acquainted with others.
Why ethical design is a business imperative
As design gains a greater role on the business stage, as brighter spotlight is shone on it, design as a practice is fast growing into a mature and responsible adult. Not only is the design industry aware of its great significance, it is also taking responsibility for aspects that are more fundamental and intrinsic to products, both digital and physical. Ethical design is, therefore, no more an afterthought starting with diversity in people imagery and ending with testing accessibility for the differently abled. It is now more nuanced and flows deeper within the muscle of the product. Indeed, ethical design strengthens a product (or service) and it is a business imperative. Today more than ever before. Some key aspects of ‘Ethical Design’ that should be taken into consideration by every UX practitioner. Design for inclusiveness All genders, demographics, races and ethnicities; minimization of unconscious biases and unintended exclusions.A range of nationalities and regional identities, urban and rural.For voice-enabled products, relevant accents and manner of speech including colloquialisms, abbreviations and typical phraseologies.No stereotypes and what is typically understood as ‘expected’ behavior of user segments (e.g., LGBTQ, older women, indigenous populations, and others). A product in the digital is available to all, and is accessed by people with varying abilities, interests and cultures. The more inclusive a product, the wider spread its usage, across users and geographies. Does this not make perfect business sense? More importantly, it aids in building a better society and world. Think sustainable design It’s widely accepted that 80 percent of the ecological impacts of a product are focused (and handled) in the design phase of a product. Decisions taken during the design phase are crucial to the entire life cycle with regard to the product’s relationship and effects on people, planet and business profits. Research and white-boarding, gathering insights, prototyping, user feedback and finally production of a digital or physical product should factor this in. Factors that influence – prominently – and need insightful exploration are: impact on environment (negative and otherwise), on society (values, social norms and specific demographic targeting) and business value (in the immediate time frame and in the long term). Context of design ‘Who is the target user’ – this line of design thinking is old-hat. Look for the deeper unseen connections with users’ lives and their decisions. Think of the long-term impact of your design and its intersection with social and environmental factors. Consider the mental map and the psychological conditioning of potential users. Post pandemic, these below-the-surface systemic aspects have greatly magnified in their bearing upon products and services design. We were once designing a solution for nutrition among rural mothers and infants. Among the many things to be taken into consideration were also the most personalized details like: language dialects in a region, a mother’s usual daily routine, average distance to the closest health center, divorced and abandoned mothers, extreme weather topographies (snow or extreme cold and extreme heat) and so on.The design model overlaid on the social model – and that is the only way the solution can have real meaning for the end user. Ethics in design enlivens the promise of being well-integrated (and sustainable) in its physical world replete with its social realities, imperfections, even quirks. Based on the powerful concept of product stewardship, it helps to ‘regulate’ the field of design in much the same way as medicine or law is regulated to provide lasting value and meaning to people and societies. Whereas earlier generations of designers often considered ethics to be outside their pale, not any more. In fact, this is the key to making design more accountable, and respond in a wholesome way to present-day human and business demands. Photo by Anderson Guerra: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-portrait-wall-art-1154198/
