The ultimate goal of good design is to leverage new technologies and make it easier for people to use them through smarter products !
Sahil Ravjit Singh, our next pathbreaker, Industrial Designer at DesignGen, an E-Bike design company in Munich (Germany), helps design bikes – their form, ergonomics and the interface.
Sahil talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about how design is shaping modern society by bringing together ubiquitous tech and data science to build better and longer lasting products.
For students, you cannot predict your future! But, at every step, you learn a bit more and you’re a bit better equipped to decide what you want to do next.
Sahil, Your background?
As a boy, I always found it easier to learn by doing things rather than reading or listening. So I spent a lot of time outdoors and would spend a lot of time building things. In class, I liked drawing diagrams a lot, they made it easier for me to understand concepts at school. I ended up studying Maths, Economics and Psychology in 11th and 12th.
What did you do for graduation/post graduation?
I was pretty confused after school, I liked different things about various professions. Finally I decided to study Product Design at NIFT Delhi and later got the chance to do a Master’s in Industrial Design at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) in the USA.
What were some of the drivers that influenced me to pursue such an offbeat, unconventional and uncommon career in Industrial Design?
To be honest, I didn’t know much about the future opportunities in this field until I got into college and started meeting more people. At every step, you learn a bit more and you’re a bit better equipped to decide what you want to do next. I knew I wanted to do something creative, I also enjoyed applied sciences so I searched for careers that had both of these things.
I joined the Product Design course at NIFT, I selected the course because it focused on object design and manufacturing. Before selecting NIFT, I had visited the campus and spoken to some of the students and found this area the most interesting. Here, I learnt my fundamentals in design. Some of the classes that I enjoyed were – Manufacturing Processes, Anthropometrics, Form studies and CAD.
After NIFT, I worked at a design studio in Bengaluru, but eventually decided to pursue a Master’s in the US. I got into a few schools, but eventually picked SCAD because it was a one-year program and I got a pretty significant financial aid through their merit based scholarships.
At SCAD, I studied Industrial and Furniture Design. Here, the focus was more on Human Centered Design and the technical skills required to facilitate it, like – user research, ideation, rapid prototyping and design thinking.
How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted? Or how did you make a transition to a new career? Tell us about your career path
After completing my masters, I went on to intern at Kohler in the New Product Development team in Wisconsin. I was lucky because I got to implement my recent learning in an actual design team. I pitched a conceptual product for the kitchen team based on research on the US market and kitchen trends.
After I completed my OTP, I returned to India and started my first job at the Centre for Research and Innovation at Havells in Delhi.
At Havells, I worked closely with UX research team and IOT engineers to develop smart products for the Indian market. The projects varied from big picture research like home automation in urban India or the studying the UX of Air Quality products, to projects with a narrower scope like incremental improvements in the physical user interactions in existing appliances and consumer products.
Building end to end products at Havells gave me a lot of confidence and experience that I could use as a launching pad for exploring other paths I was fascinated by.
After spending three years at Havells, I decided to work more in an academic setting and I applied to work as a research fellow in the Digital Society School in the Netherlands. Here I worked with much more speculative research. For example, my team focused on smart products, and how the data gathered through their prolonged use could be displayed to their users playfully using genAI tools. We did this in the form of AI generated comic strips.
While working here, I got a job at an E-bike design company called DesignGen in Germany, where I work as an Industrial Designer, designing experiences for companies that specialize in mobility and performance products.
How did you get your first break?
I got my first gig through Behance. I had been posting my work there, and someone contacted me to do a freelance project. I got my first internship and every job since then via Linkedin. So, I would definitely encourage everyone to document their projects and experiments online.
What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you address them?
It was challenging for me to figure out what to do right after school, since design is sort of in-between engineering and humanities, there wasn’t much information available to me.
I addressed it by A – finding people who I admired and B – reaching out to those people, and slowly finding out more about what they do and how they got there. You’d be surprised how many strangers are willing to help if you ask nicely. The internet helped a lot.
Where do you work now?
Currently, I work at an E-Bike design company in Munich, Germany called DesignGen. Here, I help design bikes – their form, ergonomics and the interface.
Other than this, I also freelance as a product designer, specifically with a Berlin based startup that uses large language models to reimagine the process of software localization (adapting content to different languages and cultures).
What are the skills required for your role? How did you acquire them?
The technical skills required here are quite similar to the ones I’ve acquired during previous roles. It’s also pretty easy to learn new software / techniques as needed in this day and age. We do a lot of ideation, CAD modeling, concept rendering and iterative prototyping to test out our designs with end users. Like most modern design processes we repeat these steps, until we’re satisfied with the final product.
I would say though, I have come to learn that the most important skills needed in todays workplace are the soft kind – being able to communicate effectively with people from diverse backgrounds and positively collaborating within your team.
I’ve added some photos to show some of the things we work on – screens, handlebars, bike frames and gear shifters.
How does your work benefit society?
My work is basically taking new technology and making it easier for people to use. Like say designing e-bikes in a more user-friendly way makes them more likely to be adopted and used in place of cars, which is better for their health and also our planet.
Tell us an example of a specific memorable work you did that is very close to you!
The very first product I launched while I worked for Havells meant a lot to me. I worked on the project from start to finish and learnt a lot along the way. It was a smart Air Purifier that functioned in a different way from other similar devices in the market. Building it was complex and I leant a lot through the process.
Your advice to students based on your experience?
My advice to students would be to focus on exploring – try new things, talk to different people and ask a lot of questions. You never know what you might discover.
Future Plans?
In the near future, I plan to set up my own consultancy, and develop some of my own ideas into products. I’m a proponent of open source design and I’m also looking to get involved with some interesting projects I’ve been following.