My journey in design started long before my professional career did. I was in my early teenage years when my fascination for Photoshop 7 introduced me to the wonders of design & photo editing. I would just watch & observe my sister do her assignments on it and try out the tools later myself when I’d get the chance. I designed fun, meaningless (and terrible) posters of whatever TV shows or movies I was fascinated with at that point and while I did not particularly have a sense of what I was doing, I certainly enjoyed doing it.
This interest & curiosity definitely honed my skills to the extent that I could design basic templates for posters, logos, banners, posts, magazine covers, and pretty much anything graphic by the time I started University. However, my keenness with designing was not a career option until then. I was still figuring that out. I had many ideas about what I wanted to do in life and I finally picked a Bachelor’s degree in Geography with some influence from my senior secondary school teacher. I had also studied Psychology in my senior secondary school which had left an impact on me. But it was Geography that I wanted to build a career in, preferably as a GIS (Geographical Information System) Analyst. My vision to have a career in GIS only got stronger while I designed content for College events & Editorial boards on the side. But in 2020, my aspirations to get a Masters's degree abroad crumbled as the entire world fell into lockdown due to the COVID pandemic. I could not study in India as the job opportunities weren’t as good as abroad and I didn’t want to study virtually as I felt I wouldn’t get the exposure I needed. Thus, I had to quickly look at other options as my safety net as I graduated in October 2020. Enters, UX Design.
Design until that point only meant something graphic to me, something one can print or post perhaps. But when I was pondering on which direction to go in (career-wise), whilst trapped in the confines of my home, I had a conversation with my sister, who had a well-paying job in the animation industry. She nudged me to consider a career in Design as I was well-versed in it and also had an interest. She also mentioned the term ‘UI and UX’ which had just started to blow up then. I later looked through the internet at what they meant and was immediately interested. For me, UX meant designing digital products like softwares, websites & mobile applications. It felt slightly more intuitive than graphic design. Somewhere I could use my knowledge of Psychology in terms of what users need. A better pay scale than Graphic Design Jobs was an added incentive as well.
I quickly looked up some courses where I could dive deeper into UI & UX and I signed up for them. I spent my entire lockdown understanding the bits and pieces and the nuances of this discipline, but only to a fundamental level. I still did not understand what made it important and why was it so valuable. That happened after I recalled a particular story that was triggered by the statement ‘Bad Design can be deadly’.
This story went back to when I was in college and decided to explore this abandoned Cinema hall with some friends on a rainy Friday evening. So this particular Cinema Hall was situated in the Green Park neighborhood of Delhi and had burnt down in 1997, killing several people. Our exploration was somewhat juvenile and terrifying as our main motive was we had no motive. We found a lot of empty cold drink bottles with 90s Branding & flip flops & wallets that the fire could not burn. It was all very tragic. But until then we all thought it was the fire that caused the deaths, but in reality, it was actually BAD DESIGN!
The fire started when the movie was playing and it was pitch dark inside the auditorium. As soon as the news of a fire spread across the audience, panic broke out. People were in a rush to escape but they could not see where to go! And then it occurred to me, there were no Fluorescent ‘Exit’ signs at the Exit doors. Nobody knew where to exit from which caused more chaos and led to a stampede. If only that auditorium had well-lit up Exit signs, which would invoke a sense of direction in already panicking viewers, a lot of lives could’ve been saved.
This was just one story that proved why a lack of design understanding could prove to be detrimental. And it instated the importance of good & bad design for me. Now it wasn’t just something that looked ‘nice to look at’. It was something that had meaning & depth to it and something that influenced many little things we did every day. It explained why we’d get frustrated when the light switch wouldn’t be right next to the door, why we’d feel lost when we didn’t know whether to pull or push a door, why we’d feel annoyed when we didn’t know where to click next, and many more such instances. All of them were examples of bad design, and I felt I could change it to some extent.
Hence, for the first time, I truly wanted to build a career in design where I knew I could impact the world in my own ways. I wanted to understand what frustrated users and what made them feel joyful. I wanted to make processes easy & enjoyable. I wanted to design products that would make people feel they could do it too. And thus began my story in design and it’s only just getting started.