The field of design research and strategy uncovers unmet needs and latent desires, thus ensuring strategies translate into meaningful, human-centered solutions that drive business value.
Aishwarya Narayana, our next pathbreaker, Strategic and Service Designer, works with global brands in diverse sectors, helping teams design better products and services using research and storytelling.
Aishwarya talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about her previous work at Mckinsey Design (Sweden) that complemented their strategic consulting arm by helping understand users and apply design thinking to innovate products, services, and ecosystems.
For students, don’t be afraid to mix things you love, even if they seem unrelated. Ask questions, stay curious, and don’t rush to figure it all out
Aishwarya, can you share your background with our young readers?
I grew up in New Delhi and moved to Bangalore when I was 18. My dad is an engineer and my mom is a biochemist, and they always encouraged me to be curious and explore freely. As a kid, I was drawn to how people think, feel, and connect. I wrote poems, enjoyed sketching once in a while, and was really into debating and clever advertising. At one point, I got deeply into anime, and that sparked a whole new interest. I became fascinated with the idea of designing worlds where different kinds of people could live happily together. That’s what first pulled me toward designing spaces and eventually, a career that brings together people, places, and imagination.
What did you do for graduation/post graduation?
I first took up Architecture at RV College of Engineering. In my second year, I realised I needed some level of formal training to better position my ideas in design and to understand people more deeply. So I took up a Bachelor’s in Psychology on the side through distance learning from IGNOU. Later, I pursued a Master’s in NeuroAesthetics from Goldsmiths, University of London, where I explored how the brain responds to beauty, spaces, and sensory experiences.
What made you choose such an offbeat and unconventional career in Design Research?
It wasn’t a single moment, but was more like connecting the dots. Architecture felt like a good mix between art and science, and I settled on that. Over time, I realised I could bring in my love for understanding people into the mix, and that’s how I started shaping my own path. As I look back, my path traces my aspirations for “drawing the invisible” across people’s experiences.
How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted?
I didn’t have a rigid plan. My approach was to say yes to interesting opportunities and follow what made me curious.My first job was as an architect, but I soon moved into empirical and field research in architecture and urban experience.
After my bachelor’s in architecture, I worked at Chandravarkar & Thakkar Architects while exploring architectural research more seriously. Alongside, I completed a BA in Psychology with an internship at a neuropsychiatric hospital, which gave me insight into psychotherapy but also confirmed that clinical psychology was not my path. Around then, I attended talks at NIMHANS, NIAS, and IISc, where I met Dr. Deepti Navaratna from IGNCA. She invited me to pursue an internship in cultural cognition research and then later we set up a ‘Music Culture and Cognition Lab’, where I studied temple architecture and its multisensory experience using empirical methods. This was my first exposure to field research in an interdisciplinary context. I continued to practicing writing and publishing research papers.
One of the most memorable experiences has been presenting at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) conference at the Salk Institute, it was truly transformative for me. It showed me the global potential of fusing architecture and neuroscience. That is also where I met Itai Palti, who encouraged me to co-found Conscious Cities Bangalore. These experiences solidified my interest in neuroscience applied to design. While I visited and interacted with several design schools that were more or less open to interdisciplinary research in Architecture, none of the applications turned out favourably for me. I felt quite defeated and disheartened, not knowing what would be next after IGNCA. Then I discovered that there’s a new field, Neuroaesthetics (which did not focus on architectural design per se), a transdisciplinary field exploring and examining how we create, experience, and share art and artistic experiences. Goldsmiths University of London was the only place that offered a structured program, an MSc, in this field. Although the program was only in its 2nd year, it felt like a natural next step as the course work was building on a strong foundation of psychology, empirical cognitive science, statistics, and was open to electives from creative fields as well as an interdisciplinary thesis. Once I was accepted I did apply for a scholarship with the Inlaks Foundation – I actually made it to Mumbai, and cleared two rounds of interviews as well. But it was the path of working and entrepreneurship alongside my masters that actually helped me finance my studies and repay my education loan – the scholarship is notoriously competitive and I was happy to have made it as far as I did in spite of my unconventional profile.
During my master’s, I started working with Hume (Human Metrics Lab), first as a consultant and later as lab lead. Hume specializes in science-informed architecture and urban design, applying psychological and neuroscientific insights to projects for architects, developers, and government agencies. My role grew from leading projects to overseeing international collaborations as the Lab Lead after my masters, developing methodologies, and managing client relationships. It was not directly part of my thesis but strongly complemented my academic work and gave me financial independence during my studies.
At Capita, my fellowship focused on child development in the context of the climate crisis. We explored how urban design and architecture could support healthy growth for children, applying research to societal challenges and looking at the intersection of built environments, wellbeing, and resilience.
Conscious Design was part of the global Conscious Cities movement, which I helped expand with Itai Palti. We organized festivals and events across cities to explore how design can be more human-centered. In 2019, I co-organized the festival in New York. In 2020, we ran an online edition with 17 city chapters, and in 2021 Bangalore hosted with 36 chapters. These brought together academics, civic leaders, and businesses.
CD Kalpa was our India-based initiative, growing out of my collaborations with NIMHANS, Janagraha, and Architecture schools in Bengaluru. We focused on delivering facilitation and learning design services in Conscious Design and Science informed spatial design to students as well as design agencies and citizen fora. We have also been research partners in conducting crossdisciplinary research in urban design and mental health with Dr. Urvakhsh Mehta at NIMHANS. All in all – business, science, and design have always gone hand in hand for me.
I joined McKinsey Design (Veryday) in Sweden, working with global brands in the automotive, finance, and lifestyle sectors, helping teams design better products and services using research and storytelling.
Along the way, I built skills in strategy, technology, and facilitation. I also learned to use AI tools and lead multicultural teams.
How did you get your first break?
My first break came when I started writing research papers during my final year of architecture. That helped me find my voice and build confidence in mixing design with deeper thinking.
After the 2021 Conscious Cities Festival, work at Hume and CD Kalpa slowed down, and I felt it was time to expand my consulting toolkit in a new market, Sweden. In spring 2022, I came across a LinkedIn post by my future manager at McKinsey, who had a PhD in anthropology. I reached out, and we discovered a strong overlap in our research and ways of working.
The interview process was extensive: presenting past work, completing an on-call assignment, and a final culture-fit round. In Sweden, collaboration and openness weigh as much as technical skills. My natural inclination to work with people and bring out their best helped me fit in. McKinsey became a strong foundation where I worked for two years before stepping into parenthood, which has been transformative in its own right.
What were some of the challenges you faced?How did you address them?
Challenge 1: Explaining an unusual career path when others expected a straight line.
How I handled it: I learned to tell my story clearly and show how each step built something new.
Challenge 2: Imposter syndrome, feeling like I didn’t belong in certain rooms.
How I handled it: I reminded myself that curiosity, listening, and asking good questions matter more than knowing everything.
Challenge 3: Moving to Sweden and starting over professionally.
How I handled it: I took time to understand the culture, built connections slowly, and let my work speak for itself.
Where do you work now? What problems do you solve?
Right now, I’m on parental leave raising my daughter, but I recently worked as a Design Researcher at McKinsey Design in Stockholm. I helped companies understand their users and build meaningful, inclusive experiences. A typical day involved listening, sense-making, visualising ideas, and working closely with designers, engineers, and business folks.
McKinsey acquired a Stockholm-based design agency named Veryday, formerly known as Ergonomi Design, and integrated it into McKinsey Design. The team included product designers, digital designers, researchers, and design leaders, collaborating with McKinsey’s global consulting offices as design experts. We helped clients understand users and apply design thinking to innovate products, services, and ecosystems.
I worked across diverse industries: pet food, plant-based food innovation, financial services, automotive, and lifestyle. Our role complemented strategic consulting by grounding it in user research and design methods, ensuring strategies translated into meaningful, human-centered solutions.
How does your work benefit society?
I try to make the invisible visible. That means listening to people who often get left out—like workers, caregivers, or kids—and bringing their voices into decisions. Whether it’s a product, a city, or a service, I want to help improve the collaboration amongst those who create, sustain, and interact with the ecosystem.
A memorable project?
Even before I started working as an Architect, one of the most purposeful and fulfilling projects I worked on was my bachelor’s thesis in architecture. It was centered on designing a psychoanalytic therapy and research center that reimagined the therapeutic encounter as an equal dialogue between the client and the therapist, rather than a hierarchical relationship. The idea was that when patients are seen as participants in a shared journey, the “talking cure” becomes more authentic and transformative. I explored how spatial design through light, proportion, and sensory cues could evoke calm, curiosity, or introspection, and in doing so, support emotional openness and meaningful dialogue.
Your advice to students based on your experience?
Don’t be afraid to mix things you love, even if they seem unrelated. Ask questions, stay curious, and don’t rush to figure it all out. And remember: If it’s worth a dream, it’s not worth a compromise. That one line of graffiti changed my life. It’s what made me pursue architecture, then psychology, and then strategy—to build and curate a life I truly wanted. And I’ll keep doing that.
Future plans?
I’m looking forward to growing as s Strategic Designer. I want to keep building tools and spaces for learning, play, and wellbeing especially for kids and families. And I want to keep working on problems that need care, creativity, and collaboration across design, AI, and society.