Unveiling Culture Design with Parameswaran Venkataraman (Fractal Analytics)

Design thinking can be used to find innovative solutions to the various problems in an organization. When used in the context of organizational culture, it can yield innovative and efficient outcomes. A culture purposefully built on design thinking principles can improve the productivity of an organization and open up various innovation opportunities. But how can the cultural designer use design thinking to enhance the efficiency of an organization?

To understand the concept of design thinking and the importance of culture in an organization, in the 40th episode, we interact with Parameswaran Venkataraman, Chief Design Officer at Fractal Analytics. He has over two decades of experience in design and leadership roles in various companies like IDEO, Dr. Reddy’s, Kantar and more. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of the “Avantika Designeering Series Podcast”, “Unveiling Culture Design”.

Rohit Lalwani: Moving towards the world of design, designers today are being seen to lead the companies to create value and great design. I wish to ask how could design thinking be used at the core of effective strategy development to create advances in both innovation and efficiency?

Param: I do not think that there is one single answer to this question. In my perspective, design and design thinking is all about empathy and creativity. These are two unique qualities of design thinking and this could be applied to a problem around you such as ‘Why is my business stagnating in certain parts?’ ‘How do you revitalize that?’ You can use empathy and creativity to solve this problem or it could be applied to another question to have a broader perspective like,’ Where does my organization go in terms of a completely new business or a new opportunity beyond what I do today?’ You can apply this in another context like,’ How do you help the organization connect with its employees better?’ It depends on how you think about performance management in the organization with employees.

So at the heart of it, it is about Empathy and creativity and that is the fundamental principle that is unique and brings value to design.

Rohit Lalwani: While solving a problem it is essential to get a high-level flow of design, establishing a skeleton that could be built out. I am curious about how designers build a bridge between the research phase and the design phase?

Param: For me, design should be practised and it should start from understanding Human behaviour. That’s the foundation. From there, reframing the problem and reframing how you think about that problem that you are trying to solve by now having understood that you would not be able to understand why people are doing what they are doing and what do they need underlying that. That automatically becomes the bridge to solution design. So to my mind, they are distinct elements of the design process but it is a seamless journey. If you set up a process where you institutionalize design and the design process, it follows these distinct steps. From the beginning, whether it’s about framing the problem, then empathy than understanding why people are doing what they are doing and the behaviour then codifying those behaviours and translating that into insights. And then reframing and identifying opportunities and ideas while finding new ways of solving that problem. It’s a classic design thinking process.

If you have people who are specializing in each of these different aspects that you need in solving that problem. You need to have a person who is focusing on user research or be able to do science or design research. You need to have a person with a certain amount of business design skills.

Rohit Lalwani: Usability is one of the most critical factors for the success of a website, but it often goes overlooked. As a result, the brand and the bottom line get disturbed. I wish to ask how the future of usability looks and how can companies improve the usability of a website?

Param: Around ten-twenty years ago usability testing was considered a special thing and was given a lot of importance, but it was done in an inappropriate way. I personally do not vote for the idea of usability testing labs, this was practised ten-fifteen years ago and is still in use by some people. Usability according to me is an outcome of the design process. There is not any point in performing usability testing at the end if one was not focused on the processes before it.

Usability impacts a business when a job is done in a good or bad way.

The closer you can get to putting your product or service or idea that you’re testing into the hands of real users in the real environment, the better inputs you are likely to get in terms of what works and what does not, and this is ideally how I think people should test and explore a nitrate of what they are building.

Rohit Lalwani: I wish to ask a question about something you mentioned earlier. Understanding the customer, their pain points, needs and interest is important for any business to be successful. This could be achieved by crafting buyer personas. How could the buyer personas impact brand and marketing strategy?

Param: There are many different concepts of personas today and overtime this concept has been quite abused in the design community. According to me personas are nothing but real stories of persons whom you meet, the consumers, the users, etc all bringing their stories alive, which are genuine and not fabricated or hypothetical. This is what, to me, is an important part of a persona.

The second part is how one can bring abstraction and segment them in a way that you can start seeing patterns in how people behave.

But to me, the most important part is how do you get to those stories of what real people are doing in their current scenario and what is the journey they are going through and really bringing that alive.

Rohit Lalwani: That brings us to our last question. At Avantika University we have coined the term ‘Designeering’ which is a blended approach of the two domains, design and engineering. I wish to ask you if you find this coined term relevant and how is ‘ Designeering’ helping you in your journey?

Param: I find this term relevant and it is something that everyone should think about. Coincidentally, at Fractal, we practice similar things. The term ‘Designeering’ definitely resonates, as all the worlds of design, engineering, AI, businesses, etc. are coming together. If you think about the design you also have to think about how design is coming together with engineering, AI, and all other businesses, and only then you can create a real impact.

There are more questions that have been answered by Parameswaran Venkataraman. To learn more about Design and Technology head to our latest Podcast episode. For more details, visit our profile.