Coming from a diverse country like India, we understand how products and services can create exclusion when they are not designed for diversity. Even though tech products contain the superpower to create inclusion, many times companies and designers fail to do so by unintentionally excluding a certain population due to disparity and limited access to resources. It becomes extremely crucial for designers and companies to understand the nuances of socio-cultural, regional, gender diversity & neuro-diversity and their effects on the usage or access to products & services while designing products to create impact and value. Through this talk, we will share our experience from working with India’s diverse population. Join us for the stories, but also for some tangible takeaways in the process to design for inclusivity, and democratizing access to services.
Swar is a Co-Founder and design lead at Xeno Co-lab, and is responsible for user research & strategy as well as helping organizations understand how to best adopt HCD for innovation and as a way of working. She is a designer with a deep understanding of human-centered design (HCD) and holds a MFA in Design for Social Innovation. She worked as a Service Designer at Veryday NYC, for 1.5 years where she focused on using the human-centered design process to design healthcare experiences. After moving to Veryday Stockholm, she applied that process across sectors to build customer-centric experiences, and also innovation capability building for organizations.
Nikhita is Co-Founder of Xeno Co-lab and is a design expert with experience in handling, and managing product and service innovation cases. She is a trained product designer with a keen interest in user-centric and application-oriented design thinking and business innovation. Her design background comes in handy while translating insights into tangible and implementable product & business opportunities. She has vast experience in design research, innovation strategy, and design implementation projects across industries including consumer electronics, automobile, digital services, UI/UX.
Nikhita has also implemented and shared her experience with the design community as a co-speaker with Swar at various global design platforms such as Internet Week Denmark, SDN Global Conference 2021, and has been a facilitator of workshops centered toward building human-centered capabilities within organizations.
