When humans think of the future, we often stick to the crystal ball mindset — there is but one future to predict. We then either divide ourselves into pessimists, dreading a doomsday scenario or denialists who don’t acknowledge change and carry on with a vision of a rosy future- as if the world is going to be same however we treat ourselves and our fellow planeteers.

In short, we tend to see it in black or white - a binary.

Most of the times it is not.

Futures thinking — note the “s” — is not an emerging trend or…

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed a lot of research from the field to remote. And there have been many articles shedding light on how to tweak or adapt research methods to online and virtual tools.

For most of my projects, I am a user research team of one and my research audience is spread throughout the world. Even before the pandemic pushed us into our home offices, I could not afford, both financially and time-wise, to travel and conduct qualitative user research in the field. So most of my research gets conducted through the beautiful and enabling world of the…

How Holis and CLARA helped me engage with the wicked problem of rural exodus and its impact on the social and economic fabric of a community?

Seeking a change

In the past few months, I had been craving for a design challenge, to go out in the field and get my hands dirty. I was seeking a project that would satisfy my desire of contributing to society in a meaningful way. I was also looking forward to hone my systems thinking and service design skills- explore new tools and practices through a hands- on approach.

I discovered Holis serendipitously. Holis was organizing an…

Learning doesn’t stop once you have that fancy university degree in your hand. Lifelong learning has been one of the most important lessons I have learnt in the past few years of my life.

This recently sparked interest of mine led me to ‘Dare to learn’, a festival of learning in Helsinki from 18–19th September, 2018. The programme was quite diverse with keynotes, workshops and fireside chats running in parallel and I had a tough time prioritizing and deciding which ones to attend.

Although I engaged with varied learning experiences, some themes that emerged and appealed to me were life…

I am not a mother. Not yet.

But my husband and I so often discuss that we wont be raising ‘kids’, we will be raising future adults. As adults, they will have to face the ever changing and ever challenging world. So, I constantly think of how will I prepare my offspring for the future. What values do I impart? What attitudes do I nurture? What skills do I inculcate or encourage them to have? Should they walk prepared to the future or should they create it for themselves? …

Productivity in today’s world

As a species, we were never much concerned about our productivity till the beginning of 20th century. A quick peek at the use of the word shows how it came into vogue with the industrial revolution and it hasn’t stopped ever since.

In my last article about the future of recruitment, I described how chatbots are taking over the recruitment process. Companies already employ smart software that interact with job applicants through online chat and voice on different platforms. This software screens, communicates with applicants and presents them to the recruiters for decision making. So if you plan to apply for a job in near future, it is likely your first interaction will be with chatbot software.

So, what about the job hunters? Now that there is AI that represents recruiters, where is the AI that can represent us? Here is the…

It’s not just our homes and phones, Artificial Intelligence has made inroads in our work places and how we hire and get hired. OCR and keyword filtration technologies that help to go through job applications are not new. However, the future of recruitment is in far more advanced technology with its own brain like Mya.

Mya chats and engages with all the different applicants in different channels of their choice and aggregates data to pre-screen the applicants. She also answers the different questions the candidates have about the company and its culture. Then she presents a recruiter with a handful…