DOD - Duty of Designer

A Designer is also a citizen. His duties as a citizen of country comes first and then his professional obligations. Recent terrorist incidents have left some questions on what human has achieved and what needs to be done. I was furious at how blatantly these people are causing harm to our peace and ruining the brotherhood in our country. Not only that it's going to impact our economy too as foreign investors will be reluctant to invest in a place where there is no/less security of their assets, be it people or money.

So today I have a big question to ask to myself and my fellow designers.

What role can "we" play in curbing terrorism?

Locus of Decision

One of my professors always used to say this "why do you decide based on others? Why is your decision influenced? Why is your locus of decision always somebody else?"
I would always answer this in my heart, "we are learning, we are not experienced, we don't know what's outside. Those who are learned, experienced and seen outside world influence us."
But now I think I need to change my answer.
We'll keep on learning for the whole life. Does it mean our decisions get influenced by the learned. Then what do we have to offer? What will be our contribution? What about the thought process that goes into our mind?

And we are there ...

So the wait for few of us has ended.
The efforts of a 15 days of slogging and playing for one common goal, Designing a game has shown colors.
I can't keep my mouth shut any more now but just boast of it...

For those who feel strange to this post some track back in time >>
Games are in market. Go grab it, before it's out of stock.
It's available online at Indiaplaza.

Here's the screenshot of page where they are available for sale online.

Alternatively you can visit any toy/game store nearby selling Funskool products and ask for these.
Currently following four games are in market
1. Triplets
2. Chakraview
3. Gotcha
4. Sixteen Fixteen

2 more are yet to come in short time.
Holding my breath till then.

All of these games are effort of Prof. Uday Athvankar who guided M.Design students of IDC, IIT Bombay and taught them how to play and set the rules for game design.
More on game design at >>

Design (for) User Experience

Well what have been misinterpreted so far even in design community comes to my notice while watching a session by Daniel Makoski. Daniel is User Experience Designer at Microsoft and a part of MS surface team. He pointed out that Liz Sanders defied the term User Experience Design.

You cannot design an Experience. You can only design FOR Experience.

Well she also defined experience in very good way. Liz says
experience is a point where users memory and dreams coincide

Well good enough. So now onwards we won't say User Experience Design but Design for (better) User Experience.

Interaction Designer

“In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes, interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies – computers, telecommunications, mobile phones, and so on. If I were to sum up interaction design in a sentence, I would say that it’s about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts – for work, for play, and for entertainment.”
- Gillian Crampton Smith

Diwali-Rangoli

It's been tradition now at my home that me and my brother come up with new Rangoli designs every Diwali. Both of us get together discuss some sketches and see if they can be done using the available colors or not. And yes budget is also to be considered. Never has happened that our Rangoli costed us more than 50 bucks. No use of stencils. Sheer imagination and hard work.
So this time we though of some freehand. And what else can we think of other than Lord Ganesh himself. He fits in every shape and size, irrespective of his shape and size (no hard feeling here, this is with utmost respect to him). And yes wishing every visitor a new beginning for the new year can be best represented by him. Well when we think of new we think of light and if light be combined with Lord there won't be any darkness.
I don't have initial sketches. I'll just put the final output.