I am more HUMAN now, and I owe it to Design and Photography

A few years back when people were still arguing if Instagram was going to get big or fade away like any other photo editing app, I believed in the latter. Eventually, I got on the bandwagon and created my insta profile. While thinking of a bio that’s minimal yet witty, I wanted to write something that represented who I was. I was a designer, and I was a photographer, but I almost wanted to say that I was something more than that, partly because three is more catchy than two and partly because I wanted the bio to be something that makes me unique and different from other designers who were also photographers. So, my bio read

Designer | Photographer | Human

I am not very sure why at that time I put ‘Human’ in my bio. Maybe because I simply liked the sound of it, or perhaps around that time I was getting familiar with the sonder concept of individuality, and I was getting interested in understanding psychology, sociology and human behavior in general. Plus, it added more flare to what I was saying about myself and had some mystery to it. In fact, it was a mystery to me as well.

Something very interesting started to happen when I included ‘human’ in my title. Every time I would look at it, it felt like a reminder, as if it was telling me to live up to it, to justify why it was there, justify why I deserved that title. I started questioning what being a human means to me and why does it define me. In retrospect, I had assigned an attribute to define me and then I started searching for the reason how it was me. The attribution felt like branding done in reverse. I started taking note of how being aware of that attribute was influencing my actions and behavior. I’m not sure why, but subconsciously I would always keep reminding myself of that in every little decision I had to make and it functioned as a fundamental guideline to conduct myself. The constant reminder also worked in cultivating positive thinking in me and would occasionally pump a dose of optimism into my thinking. During that time I was also introspecting the idea that we are a result of what we think, and this augmentation of ‘human’ in my mind frame reinforced the idea of the connection between mindfulness and character.

I started acknowledging the connection that the human title had with the designer and photographer titles because I knew for sure that all these different sides of me were definitely overlapping with each other. So I did what a designer does, visualize

Designer and Human

Designers have a very unique quality for trying to make sense of things, especially people. Noticing objects around to dissect how they function and how they can be made better. By practice, we develop the skill to read human behavior, and we start understanding why people do what they do. As user researchers, we are supposed to step into their shoes, think like them and feel like them. When you spend so much time doing this professionally, it becomes a part of your instinct and it is nearly impossible to keep it separated from other aspects of your life. What this means is, in my everyday interaction with people, be it friends, family or strangers on the street, I would unconsciously start looking at them as if they were my users, I start observing their behavior and really try to understand what's going on inside of them.

This feed of influence from designer to human is not one-sided. As much as the skills of being a designer help me understand other people, the ever reinforcing human is nudging me to be of service to other humans by being a more responsible designer, conscious of what value I am adding to their lives by resolving their obstacles and helping them get a step closer to fulfilling their aspirations.

Photographer and Human

When photography sparked an interest in me, I was doing my undergrad at IIT Guwahati’s beautiful campus. Back then photography to me was all about taking pictures of nature and landscapes. Gradually, that interest kindled into a hobby when I transitioned towards taking portraits of people in their natural environment wanting to tell a story about their everyday life. My inclination slowly moved towards street photography, and what was merely a hobby before, dwelled into a raging passion when I moved to Bombay. Although I also engaged in some fashion photography and studio portraits at that time, my true calling was to spend time with unknown humans and discover something special about them. I was trying to bring forward a very unique side of their life which no one had seen before. Their life at that brief serendipitous moment, a culmination of everything that had happened before, was brought in front of me to make an impression on me, my camera and eventually everyone who would look at that picture.

This thought was so poetic to me that whenever I got a free weekend, I would go out on the streets without any specific plan of a destination, and let the world unfold in front of me. There were many instances where I would just stand by a busy street, observing everything that was happening around me, soaking it all in, not even taking a picture, just looking at the world moving around in a chaotic rhythm. I would start visualizing stories of people before and after that moment, imagining where they must be coming from, what they must have seen, where they might be going, what might be worrying them, or what might have given them joy today. I developed an increased appreciation for life and found greater respect for individuality.

My most valuable learning

The one thing for me that is at the core of being a designer, photographer, and a human is empathy. While we are learning the theories and principles of design in an educational setting, we get a lot of jargon thrown at us, some of which sticks, and some slips by, yet it is difficult to make sense of how these theories work and what they truly mean. It was only through practice and self-articulation that I was able to define a lot of these pieces for myself. The skill of developing empathy has been life-changing for me. It does not just help me identify and solve problems for my users as a designer, or capture and share stories of my subjects as a photographer, but it also has a direct influence on my everyday conduct with everyone I interact with. I have learned to develop empathy by listening to people, and empathizing with them has helped me listen to them more and understand their point of view. It has helped me become more humble and flexible in letting go of my ego, having an open mind towards learning someone else’s world view and in times of conflict, quickly come to a resolution with them which is favorable for both sides. Empathy has helped me look at interpersonal relationships in a new light with a better understanding of what the two sides expect from each other and what values and beliefs drive their behavior. It has helped me look back as far as my childhood and decode a lot of events and patterns from every phase of my life until now, understanding the roles that different people have played and how these have had an impact on what I am and how I think today.

What does it mean to be human?

Sometimes you go into rabbit holes of your thoughts questioning the existence of everything you see around you because your mind is a curious beast hunting for answers. Other times you just live the moments governed by your personalities, your habits, and your fears. Everyone is entitled to their own mind frame and their unique world view. It's an interesting thought that everything you do and everything that happens in the world one way or the other is for you and affects you, but it’s also true that it affects every other person in their own way. It is human to be oblivious but it's humane to respect and acknowledge that -

Everyone’s a character in someone else’s story

With every human I capture on the street I want to show their story visually and for my viewers to empathize with them. I also want my viewers to acknowledge that just like the arc of their own life brought them to this moment of looking at this picture, the arc of the subject’s life also brought them to the moment when I took that picture. The photograph serves as a medium to momentarily open a window into the life of a stranger. For that brief moment, the subject and the viewer have both become a very small character in each other’s life story, and as that moment has passed, they go on living their own lives being the primary character in their own story, leaving that moment and that other character in the past, but forever carrying the impact of the impression as a bent in their arc.

As these three titles maintain to represent who I am and what I do, they continue to blend into each other and the boundaries get dissolved. I appreciate that although there is hardly any conflict between the three and they all complement each other, even in times of uncertainty they manage to work together to guide me to do the right thing.

At the time of writing this piece, I am studying Design Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University where I am combining my experience as a UX Designer with the understanding of how businesses work so I can use design thinking methodologies to help them identify and solve problems.