Nikhita Ghugari & Swar Raisinghani
Co-Founders
Xeno Co-lab
Nikhita is a co-founder of Xeno Co-lab and is design expert with experience in handling, managing product and service innovation cases. She is a trained product designer with keen interest in user-centric and application oriented design thinking and business innovation for positive social impact. Her design background comes handy while translating the insights into tangible and implementable product & business opportunities. She has wide experience in design research, innovation strategy and design implementation projects across industries including consumer electronics, automobile, digital services, UI/UX.
Swar is a Co-Founder and design lead at Xeno Co-lab, and is responsible for user research & strategy as well as helping organizations understand how to best adopt HCD for innovation and as a way of working. She is a designer with a deep understanding of human-centered design (HCD) and holds a MFA in Design for Social Innovation. She worked as a Service Designer at Veryday NYC, for 1.5 years where she focused on using the human-centered design process to design healthcare experiences. After moving to Veryday Stockholm, she applied that process across sectors to build customer-centric experiences, and also innovation capability building for organizations.
Social Sustainability in Tech
It’s safe to say that the challenges presented by emerging technologies are forcing everyone to reimagine the way we work across all industries. The rallying call for a more ethical practice to build innovative tech solutions requires a systemic approach that radically changes the way tech companies work – across people, product and process, and align it to business KPIs. This is where we believe designers have a crucial role to play.
Through the keynote Payal & Nikhita will summarise the challenges that we face as humanity and the unintended consequences of emerging tech on consumers and society. They will share a framework around Social Sustainability in Tech (SST) & a toolkit to practice it that they have recently released in an open source report. The framework lays out 3 key principles for designers and industry leaders to align the practices of companies in a way that can result in a more socially & ethically responsible practice for tech. Through the talk, Payal & Nikhita would like to encourage everyone to take the first step in thinking intentionally about the ethical use of our skill sets and technology and how we can make the space safer for the consumers.
