Anirudha Joshi on being a designer, learning by doing, and developing community

Anirudha Joshi is a lecturer, teaching interaction design in the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in India. Anirudha discusses his career path from engineering, to working in design, to coming back to university to teach and later doing his PhD. Many of his stories point to his particular ‘self-taught’ learning style, of learning first by doing then building on that learning in whatever way he needs. He also talks about developing HCI capacity and community in India and the particular challenges, as well as design in an Indian context, and what we can learn from India.  At a personal level, Anirudha also reflects on what he learnt from a recent sabbatical - how he is shaping his research to focus on making an impact in education in India, building up a collaborative lab culture, and making healthy life choices.

“I’m happy to always be in a position where I feel like I don’t know enough about this.”

“Good work happens from good people but a lot of it is just simple things…like having a regular lab meetings, having feedback sessions, having an atmosphere.”

“Although we have residual time, it is not as productive as scheduled time.”

Overview (times approximate) - you can also download a full transcript:

02:00 On being a designer in an engineering school

14:15 The importance of learning by doing and feedback

21:50 Doing his PhD

23:20 Growing HCI in India

34:20 How he learns things by himself

40:30 Doing/teaching design in India

52:15 Reflecting on his insights from sabbatical

01:04:20 Wrap up

In more detail, he talks about…

[On being a designer in an engineering school]

02:00 Anirudha talks about being in a design school surrounded by engineers and being in the oldest design school in one of the IITs; doing his undergraduate in electrical engineer, and realizing he didn’t want to do this; then discovered design and making educational videos – around 1992-93 after his Masters, and at the time that multimedia was coming to the fore. Practicing until 1998. Ahead of curve in industry e.g., making websites, multimedia content, before many others started. But saturated fairly quickly.

05:25 Thought so much cool stuff that happens in academia in this area. Then decided to go back to do teaching. When all the confluence was happening with psychology, design etc. coming in. So design education has always been predominantly about self-discovery – developing own design sensibility, just trying things out e.g., drawing horizontal lines for a hundred pages to develop a certain sensibility to shape and form and colour. A skill and also brings attention to detail. More recent times, last 20 years, a whole thoughtfulness of research. Comes from Bauhaus.

08:10 Second German design school, Ulm, that brought in whole intellectual angle, social angle, methods and so on. Also brought in rigor and quantitative methods. Now a much wider canvas for designers. And this got him into academics. Compares this to being in industry with its short timeframes in one place and here he is 20 years in academia.

09:40 PhD at IIT Bombay, from Computer Science, so completely different. PhD about integrating HCI with software engineering, looking at design process and integrating process into software development. A very slow journey but interesting as never really attended a course on any of this until much longer after he needed it. An interesting way of learning things.

12:00 Being self taught? On the one hand all the courses he has taught, whatever he learnt he learnt on his own. Then thinks he needs to find out more about them if he wants to teach them. Challenged him in unique ways. A lot of literature in design came from 60s 70s, started by Ulm writing about design. IIT founder came from Ulm design. Can see the depth in his work as a result of the intellectual background that comes from this tradition. In practice-based profession like design need all sorts of people. Who can design stuff, and who can also reflect and think about it.

 [The importance of learning by doing and feedback]

14:15 How do you teach students other skills? Interviewing is one skill and then converting that into actionable design. Can be learnt but takes time and practice and feedback. Building up sensitivities is also an important skill. Growing up in a developing country you see lots of problems all around you. Human way of dealing with it is shut yourself off from it particularly if a sensitive person. But that is not going to help you solve problems as a designer. So you need to be open to this without messing your own thinking. When you do things in practice that is when it hits you that this is so hard. So talking about skills is very important but the best way is actually to do it. An important role as a design teacher is to give feedback, one-on-one connect with every student in the class. When it comes down to doing it you actually mess it up. And that is when feedback is very important.

17:10 Any particular technique for giving feedback? In teaching creates situations where feedback is necessary, gives feedback early rather than late, and tries to set it up as a feedback session to be ready to receive critique. Gives an example of teaching interviews. Set it up as a safe place where you can get critiqued. Later doesn’t give much feedback, more ideas. Class sizes ~15-55 students. Interesting challenge, how do you teach design in a large class situation? Most important learning point in design is when you get feedback. Some colleagues trying peer feedback but he doesn’t like it so much particularly if lot of peers are in same boat. If you can involve 2nd year students to give feedback – from position of more experience, and distance as an outside person helps in being a bit more balanced in what you say.

[Doing his PhD]

21:50 Did PhD while also working at IIT Bombay. Part time, started 2005, about 7 years after becoming a faculty member. At one time teaching 3 courses and attending 3 courses. Now he would think it is very hard to do but at the time didn’t think it was hard. Value of being naïve. 

[Growing HCI in India]

23:20 Challenges working in India and engaging with broader interaction research community? Someone suggested industry would be interested and he started conducting courses for industry people, now doing this for 19 years. Very popular as a course. Thought, why are they coming to learn this stuff as could just read books. Then realized it was more about feedback. Also about the community effect it had – people from different companies coming together and staying in contact, swapping companies. Then formed a mailing list and in those days very active discussion. 2700 people on it. A lot of discussion has now shifted to other platforms.

25:50 Then met a few colleagues internationally. Andy Smith from the UK and at that time looking for HCI partners for a EU project to help grow collaborations. That’s how he met people like Jan Gulliksen, Steven Brewster. Way before his PhD. His first CHI conference was 2004 in Vienna – first exposure to an international conference. And in the same year, before attending CHI, he organized the first India HCI conference, alongside Andy Smith. This is what has always happened. Had never been to a peer-reviewed conference before organizing one! His learning model. Then went to CHI, thought it was interesting. Then got on TC-13 (international committee for HCI) and went to first Interact conference in 2007 and by this time was already doing his PhD. But still trying to understand how should I do this myself and how should we do this as a country and how to grow it in the country as a whole. Thought conferences was a good idea. 2010 onwards got act together again to do an annual India HCI conference.

28:30 Looking on it as a community development work. 10 years ago people couldn’t even afford to go to a conference. How to have properly inclusive conferences? Need to have multiplicity of conferences. There was a recent exercise on thinking about how to look at CHI 2030. CHI growing and fabulous but growing itself out of smaller venues very fast and not sure we need to have just one big conference every year, could have smaller conferences and a big one. Lots of possibilities.

29:45 What does India HCI do towards that community development? Provides a local platform to find out about conferences. For students to see what it is. To younger PhD students to publish their first paper and the opportunity to be part of the process e.g., reviewing. A good mentoring opportunity. A good opportunity to mess up things in a safe enough way. Also a platform for people to try out things. One thing that happens in India that he doesn’t see elsewhere – got 52 submissions and accepted 15, a large number for India HCI but always get 250 participants. Proportion of submitters to participants. A lot of networking. Gives industry people a chance to keep in touch with research. Borrowing words from Paula Kotze’s talk yesterday, there are business and technology and executive people – similarly academically inclined and doing-oriented people. In India, number of people in industry is huge, about 30-40,000 people somehow doing some stuff in IUX (interaction user experience). Interested in looking at challenging work. When they ran INTERACT in 2017, they also had a lot of focus on courses. In India HCI conferences, courses are really popular. People want to learn things.

 [How he learns things by himself]

34:20 How he does this for himself? He has learnt to be a self-taught person and continues to be self taught. Wants to pass this on to his kids. Have to learn things by yourself. Keeps him on his toes. “Happy to always be in a position where I feel like I don’t know enough about this” and know I can find out if it is important. Love of learning, being comfortable with not knowing, and asking stupid questions, and knowing how to know; also about taking initiative, having meta-thought ‘what is it that I am missing here and what should I be doing next’ and constantly asking myself to do that. Gives an example of starting out doing a lot of qualitative work, then for PhD had to do quant stuff, never did a research methods course, and read about principle components analysis then after 2 months supervisor saying he just needed regression analysis – one of the challenges with being self-taught, not knowing what you should be looking at in the first place. Tends to read books from the middle of the book as doesn’t have much patience and usually things that matter are in the middle of the book not the beginning. That’s what he did with quant. Now going back to first few pages.  Reading ‘The book of Why’ on causality as he thinks he needs to understand causality if he is going to teach research methods in the future.

 37:50 Serendipitous or targeted e.g., finding that book? Not completely serendipitous. Talks about being in Sussex for some months last year and someone there at the same time, giving a talk. Impressed. He mentioned this book and it being difficult to read. So he thought he should read it as well. The book looks at the different rungs of causality – first one is causality, but then interventional and third one is counter-factual. Very powerful arguments and very relevant in current context of AI and machine learning. Learning in response to the new wave of technology. And meeting smart people and thinking about it and learning from them. “I’m always looked for, who can I learn this from?” In a sense it is serendipity but also looking for sources. 

 [Doing/teaching design in an Indian context]

40:30 How to do this as a country, when many resources situated in western contexts? Many answers. Historically design school has done this. Founded by an Ulm School graduate. So it has strong western design tradition in it. At the same time it has a lot of responsiveness to the problems around you, and also a lot of response to the cultural heritage you bring. Talks about a design teacher he had – used to teach a course called Indian Design Tradition. Language, typography, art. Rooted in respective culture. The other side of it – the technologies are penetrating our societies all over the world fairly rapidly and an opportunity to respond to those opportunities. And there is another part to this issue of how we do this as a country. One of the challenges he felt when he started teaching 20 years ago - all very bright people but don’t think they have taken a leadership role in design in the country. Need to contribute back to the field itself. Didn’t have a strong research tradition until drawing from HCI.

44:00 Issues of emergent users and opening different approaches to design? Design schools tend to attract very creative people. A lot of competition to get in. And creativity given. The question is does it get channelized? How do people learn to do text input – you can have an idea that is nice as a concept but just doesn’t work in practice? Text input makes you the most humble person. So yes there is a lot of creativity but it needs to be backed up with a rigorous evaluations and assessment and other critical approaches that is perhaps a little less in design.

46:45 Pressure to publish? Yes. IITs in general have expectation re publications and having effect. Most difficult bit is travel. Still reasonably well supported. Can get to 1-2 conferences/year. That is another reason to start India HCI for domestic travel as about 1/10th of costs.

48:10 Anything else particular to the Indian context? Have a lot to learn from the international community and a lot to give. People talk about emerging markets and developing countries. But most countries in some way are uniquely positioned. If you look at our telecom sector, we have the highest wifi penetration rates and data consumption rates per capita in the world. What have we done to make this possible? Compares to African context. In India people have data to waste, cheaper than water. Would never have thought his parents would be tech consumers, e.g., watching TV on his phone. Would never have imagined. It changes society in very unique ways. Many societal factors. Can learn a lot from what can happen. Get amazed with amount of plastic we use when I travel. Maybe we can learn how to be frugal from India. Priorities seem different to different people.

 [Reflecting on insights/changes from his sabbatical]

52:15 Big challenges for Anirudha personally? Just came back from sabbatical. Now 52 years old and probably have another 12-13 years left. “What would I want to do with the next few years.” So he has picked on a few themes to work in. Education is one of them. Education numbers lagging in India. Lot of opportunities. Something he always loved. So a lot to achieve in that space. All media including tv, youtube etc haven’t really lived up to full potential for education. Difference? Would like to have made some real difference to educational outcomes, how education could be scaled up. Talks about comparing number of people working in restaurants in different countries. But in a classroom, 50 kids to one class with one teacher. What tools can help the teacher do better work? That might be an example. Or a different way of engaging with learning, especially for kids who aren’t so proactive or a bit behind with learning. And challenge of multiple languages. 2000 self-reported languages, of which 43 languages spoken by a million or more, and 22 official languages plus English that India supports.

58:00 Any deliberate practices to support his reflection? First took a sabbatical. Went to two labs, where he knows good work happens. Getting out of his comfort zone. Good work happens from good people but a lot of it is just simple things…like having a regular lab meetings, having feedback sessions, having an atmosphere. So he is trying to build that culture back in his lab. One of the big changes he is trying to make is to bring in this lab culture. Had many interesting people but most of them worked independently so one of the big changes is bringing in this lab culture, collaboration, group meetings and so on. The other thing he realized was that 20 years ago with certain levels of responsibility he developed a certain teaching culture but he has not updated it or responded to the changes that have happened. Life has become easier. And a huge amount of travel. Which means the amount of time he is giving his students is less and less. Talks about he would block out teaching, travel, research then students can be met in the remaining time. Now the lab has a schedule and then also do free other time. Although we have residual time, it is not as productive as scheduled time. These are simple things. Not sure why he couldn’t have figured it out on his own, but it helps to see such things.

01:01:00 How does he look after himself? That’s another thing he did in his sabbatical. Started picking up weight, a lot of diabetes in the family. Doctor said he had to lose weight. Now on a diet plan that gives him enough energy to exercise. Schedule that in. Now wears a fitbit – seeing the delta changes are the ones that motivate you. Gives an example re his running. Never been a runner. Also got back to cooking. The brain doesn’t stop thinking, on auto-pilot. When cooking or running, the brain can’t just wonder off and that’s useful. Mindful cooking and mindful running.

[Wrap up]

01:04:20 Wrap up. And complementing him on giving so much acknowledgement to his students and collaborators.

End

Related Links

People: Andy Smith – Case study on Institutionalising HCI in Asia: an impact focusing on India and China

Conference/keynotes: Interact2019 conference

Slides from Anirudha’s keynote talk: Designing technology for adoption by emergent users

Paula Kotze’s keynote talk: Is HCI ready for the 4th Industrial Revolution?

Book: The Book of Why: the new science of cause and effect. by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, 2017, Basic Books.