A 9-year veteran of Microsoft, Surya Vanka is Manager of User Experience Excellence, and oversees best practices and engineering standards to create high-quality user experiences for Microsoft’s customers. Uesr experience innovation happens daily at Microsoft. But with more than 300 engineering teams and 600 user experience professionals spread across the world in groups from 2 to 40, it's up to Surya and his team to capture the best of these innovations and make them widely available. Surya's mission is put the users rather than technology at the center of the development process for all of Microsoft's products. Surya was professor of design at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. He is the author of two books on design, has lectured on design in over 20 countries, and published widely. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Form, ID Magazine, WIRED, Interactions, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, and Channel 15 Television. He is the recipient of several awards including best practice awards at Microsoft, an accessibility achievement award, Sloan Foundation Award and an IDSA best paper award.

 

 

As much as this forum of distinguished design thinkers explores the promise of design as that strategic tool by which goods and services can be re-imagined to resonate with an Indian way of living; as much as this forum devises ways to reconcile Indian traditions and modernity without sacrificing culture for progress; as much as this forum emphasizes that design has a responsibility to help all Indians access what they consider a good life, be they at the top of the economic pyramid or at the very bottom; and as much this forum explores how design is a lever that can catapult a large and poor India to become a confident and thriving nation, it must not stop there. There is another important question that deserves attention of this forum, “What should the role of design be in the globalizing world, one that appears to simultaneously prospering and imploding?” New India at the start of the 21st century is among the few places where fertile conditions exist to support this inquiry. The scale, the speed, the diversity, the complexity, the ingenuity, and unprecedented social challenges present in today’s India affords those with an interest in the future of design to honestly face tired old habits and acknowledge the deep paradoxes ingrained in current practices of design. Excellent design need not be the birthright only of the wealthy. The poor customer is not an unsophisticated customer. Design is not a new model in traditional communities; it is often a time-honored way of living. The new India can be the Laboratory, the Hothouse, the Crucible where new Design can considered, experimented and furthered for the benefit of all. The challenge to this forum is to be alert not only to what Design can give to India, but also to what India can give to Design.