Nikhita Ghugari & Payal Chakraborty
Founder | Founder & CEO
Xeno Co-lab | Darjeeling Design Co
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.
Payal Chakraborty is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded and scaled three companies in the brand design and technology space across geographies. She has a proven track record of developing innovative solutions for global clients, merging multi-disciplinary design and diverse creative brand strategies leveraging design thinking as the core order of function. She is the founder and CEO of Darjeeling Design Co. and Director at Red Baron.
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 Swar & 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, Swar & 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.
