User Centric Design Community Story

Community

Community Members - 218

The 200 plus-member User Centric Design Community is as young and vivacious as the nature of their work is.

The community is championed by the design and consulting team members of MindTree. It envisages and develops enterprise solutions created by leveraging the technology available that best suit a client’s needs.

“Our job is to conceptualize, define, and design intelligent, effective and cool solutions across various digital platforms. We unite strategy, design and development services for MindTree customers and the fact that all of us come from varied backgrounds and expertise helps make that possible. Our work demands both creativity and diversity,” is how community champ Vinay Dixit (User Experience Architect and Practice Manager), puts it. One look at their refreshingly innovative Design Friday flyers (one example to the left) and you will know they are good at what they do.

The community’s ‘Design Friday’ series is a widely popular engagement at MindTree, the contents of which have been published as White Papers outside the company.

“Design Friday is a knowledge sharing platform where we discuss different design techniques, soft design and consulting skills, and business and consumer behaviors, and more. It is a platform to share and connect and eventually learn from each other’s knowledge and skills. It is basically our weekly dose of inspiration and new ideas. Apart from these sessions, we also send out mailers about articles and blogs which the members can read up on,” explains Veena Sonwalkar (Design Consultant), one of the community’s four champs.

The community also has an external blog, http://mindtreeux.blogspot.com where the members publish their views and articles and which can be viewed and commented upon by those outside of the company. In fact, the blog was even instrumental in getting them a project.

For Vallabh Munshi (Associate Designer), the community is about easing new members into the company and works as an informal

“A client got to know about us and our practice after reading the blog and got interested in working with us. So not only does this blog help us connect with each other and external communities, but it also enables the world to learn about us and MindTree and its values.

It is like our own publicity avenue,” informs Vinay

orientation. “We have fun and get our work done too,” he adds.

For Diba Kaji (Designer), it is about

So it is for Chinmoy Das (Designer).

connecting with each other. “We can get

“Attending Design Friday has certainly given

involved in our work so much that sometimes

me a whole new perspective & approach

it becomes difficult to connect with each other.

towards my work. It is really interesting to be

But thanks to ‘Design Friday,’ & our blog

able to interact with people who bring in a

we are able to do so regularly or at least once

variety of experience/views & you unfailingly

a week,” she says.

end up learning a lot.”

Ajit Balakrishnan (Consultant) agrees. “I am a consultant and even though I have not gotten into the artistic mode yet, I am learning about new design aspects and applying the same in my work.”

Veena, on her part, explains how the Design Friday sessions have encouraged people to express themselves while also developing their interfacing and articulation skills. “These sessions provide this unique opportunity which has helped even the most shy of people to open up and build their confidence, whether through public speaking or writing or even creating something. We even get guest speakers from external organizations like Yahoo!, Motorola, Onward Research + Innovation, Deskala, Selco, and other organizations.

With such a level of exposure, we are definitely learning much more here.”