Meet Saurabh Rathi

 

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Saurabh Rathi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Saurabh, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

Cars have always been fascinating to me since childhood. As a kid, I often doodled cars in the back of my school notebooks drawing inspiration from cars that I’d see in automotive magazines like Autocar and Topgear. As I grew older, I wanted to explore a path to build a career drawing cars. Automotive design at the time in India, was a rather nascent field and there weren’t very many design institutions.

I decided to take up Mechanical Engineering with the goal of better understanding the science behind how cars worked. At that time, almost all cars were powered by internal combustion engines. As I went through the course, I realized that while Math & Physics were fun, I missed the aspect of doodling cars and the engineering careers didn’t really provide me a path to that dream.

This, is what led me to explore further studies abroad. ArtCenter College of Design was a highly reputed Transportation design school so I decided to go there and learn the art and science of design in general and how it applied to vehicles. As I went through the course I learnt Human Centered Design practice, and started applying it to designing for in-vehicle experiences. Designing for vehicles was particularly exciting for me because it allowed me an opportunity to design for physical and digital components. That solidified my career path towards being an HMI Designer.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

As our cars get more and more smarter, you need someone to actually design how that works. There are way too many features and functions for it all to be “just a black button” that you press and turn it on / off as you used to in cars back in the day.

This is the problem that I solve for. As a designer, my job is to understand what are the goals and needs of people while they’re in their vehicles – listening to music while driving, checking if they’ve parked correctly in the spot, watching some movie while parked etc. With that understanding of the needs, I design elegant solutions to make it easy and intuitive for people to perform these tasks within and with their cars. The goal here is to minimize the cognitive load for performing such tasks because we want people to focus on driving at all times.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

As a designer, the most important thing is to be curious and experiment. You would most-likely not get the right solution in the first try. Design is an iterative process for that very reason, and Human Centered Design requires you to iterate with Humans in the loop to make sure your solutions are addressing the needs of the people and easy for them to use / understand.

My advice would be to experiment as much as possible. I am a strong advocate for prototyping – which is to build demonstrations of the ideas / experiences that you’re designing. You learn so much within minutes through prototyping that you’d never realize looking at static screens and designs.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

As a designer, I believe my niche is creating for novel interactions and experiences. I love designing for products and experiences that have not been done before or have very less standardized templates. Solving these kinds of problems requires applying first principles approach which i thoroughly enjoy. So, if you’re working on a project / product like that I’d be happy to help and connect.

I’m reachable on Linked In and my personal website.

https://www.saurabhrathi.com

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