Suj Premachandran
Bringing the Power of UX Design to Children
In this episode of Brave UX, Suj Premachandran shares how Digital Influx brings UX to children 👧🏾, how they integrate Eastern educational philosophy 🪷, and the challenge of changing archaic education systems 🌋.
Highlights include:
- How are you helping children to become creative thinkers and designers?
- Are some of Digital Influx’s practices too ‘foreign’ for UK educators?
- How are you bringing design to people of colour through Digital Influx?
- What inspiration have you taken from non-Western education systems?
- Why do students create projects related to UN Sustainable Development Goals?
Who is Suj Premachandran?
Suj is the CEO of Digital Influx, an international, industry-led, and interactive EdTech platform that helps children, teens and adults to develop UX design skills and to think differently about problems, large and small 🌱.
Suj is also the Vice President of the recently established Digital Influx Foundation; a US based non-profit that aims to make design education accessible to all children ☀️, regardless of their socio-economic background.
Before founding Digital Influx, Suj worked in design recruitment as a senior talent partner for Revolut, one of the world’s first global super apps 💳. And also as a creative talent consultant for product and UX people at Salt in London.
Suj is an advocate for design & UX education at Tech London Advocates, a network of more than 15,000 tech leaders, entrepreneurs and experts across the globe 🌍. He is also a member of the Design Leadership Forum.
Transcript
- Suj Premachandran:
- When you are a kid, your creative juices are flowing, but when you get older, they take that creativity away from you in school, they start focusing on the pure academic, and I think we need to start harnessing that creativity. Don't let that go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behaviour-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Suj Premachandran. Suj is the CEO of Digital Influx an international industry-led and interactive EdTech platform that helps kids and teens to develop UX design skills and to think differently about problems large and small.
- It's also a recruitment platform, but more on that later.
- Suj is also the vice president of the recently established Digital Influx Foundation, a US-based nonprofit that aims to make design education accessible for all children regardless of their socioeconomic background.
- Before founding Digital Influx, Suj worked in design recruitment as a senior talent partner for Revolut, one of the world's first global super apps, and also as a creative talent consultant for product and UX people at Salt in London.
- Suj is an advocate for design and UX education at Tech London Advocates a network of more than 15,000 tech leaders, entrepreneurs and experts across the globe. He's also a member of the Design Leadership Forum, and now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Suj, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Suj Premachandran:
- Thank you for having me, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed looking at all the wonderful things you've been doing Suj, with Digital Influx and learning a little bit about you. And one of the things that I did learn about you was that you have described yourself in the past as, and I'm going to quote you now as a lazy person, and given what you've been up to recently, I found that quite hard to believe. What do you mean by lazy?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I try to find solutions really, really quickly, and sometimes the best way to do that is finding the right people to support you. I'm an ideas person. I studied advertising at university, I studied creative advertising and it was there that I learned firstly about portfolios, but how quickly an idea can prosper into something amazing. And I've taken those ideas and realised strength and weaknesses and to a certain degree I'm a little bit lazy, but I know how to combat that using my skillsets.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If you cast your mind back, when is the first moment or point in time that you remember taking this approach to trying to achieve something or solving a problem? Is this something that you've always done or is this something that's come around recently?
- Suj Premachandran:
- It's just life. I don't think anyone's got an ultimate strategy until you're, unless you're watching too many YouTube videos. For me, it's just all kind of come into place. But one of the things that's consistent in my life is understanding youth culture, right? I'm from East London, I'm from a single parent household. I'm from a borough called Newham, which is I'd say one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the capital. And what I've realised is if you're a kid from the nineties or the eighties or the two thousands, one common factor is that the education system is not meeting up with the speed of tech. We're still teaching kids the same things that we've been teaching them for the past 30 years. We're not successfully bridging the gap between education and industry and now knowing about AI and the speed that AI is developing in, I feel if we don't start upskilling young people now, specifically around tech that's focused around empathy, which is at the core of UX, we're going to have a problem. So I can see it in real time and I'm just trying to make people aware of this and hopefully get some champions in the design community that believe in what we're doing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I want to come to what you're doing there with Digital Influx shortly, but I want to go back briefly if we may, to East London and life in East London because I've heard you speak about this before. And one of the things that you've said previously, and I'll quote about this is, and here's the quote. I've noticed that there's a lot of wealth inequality, particularly in East London and in the suburbs within London. Now, I'm wondering, when was it that you first noticed this?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I'll tell you exactly when I figured this out. When I went to university, I was studying in the University of Arts, which is somewhat of a privileged universities, like a lot of rich arts students and me walking around trying to learn what I could. And when I left uni, I got into recruitment, so I was always doing quite well. Even though I lived in this area, I never really hung around here. I was always in Central London and going out, going on holiday and things like that. But one year I quit. I quit my job to go travelling for a little while, and within that time I spent the most amount of time in London, in East London, specifically my area, my turf. And that's where I started noticing it because I got to see the other side people that were a little bit more affluent going to award shows and recruitment party.
- I got to see the other side, but then when I was here, I would bump into people that went to school with and the exact same age as me, and they look a hell of a lot older. And I'm like, look, tough times have hit you because you look around 55 and we're the same age. So that was one of the things I noticed. But then the second part of it was the level of crime specifically with kids two months ago, right On this very road that I live, live, two 16 year olds were stabbed to death with Samurai Swords, samurai swords, bigs, swords of Samurai. And I was just like, oh my God, this is the best way to describe it. But at the same time, you go 15 minutes down the road towards the Olympic Village and it's like a completely different world.
- So there is a massive issue around wealth inequality, not just in East London, but in London as a whole. And that's driven mainly by the political class. There's no way around it, and I don't want to get too political around it, but essentially my personal belief about the political system, whether it's in the uk, US or wherever, they both belong to separate parties, but they all go to the same parties, they go to the same functions, their kids go to the same schools, they know what's going on in this country, but something is not being addressed. And my personal belief is the empowerment of young people around the technology that they use every single day. They're born into this iPhone, Android world. The parents are giving them a phone. As soon as they start crying too much, the children are already subconsciously understanding the functions of user experience. And it's about giving these young people an opportunity to capitalise on that and empower their communities by understanding how to use this tech.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned your mother a little earlier and being someone who comes from a sole parent household as well, also my mother for example, raised me. I know at least in my own experience, just how important that relationship has been in my life. I understand that your mom is also an educator, she's a teacher. What is it that your mum teaches?
- Suj Premachandran:
- She teaches health and social care in a college based also in East London called Tower Hamlets College. She's been in education for the majority of her life and she's like my God hero, basically. She's helped me through the majority of my life, gave me great advice, and education was literally nothing that she asked me to go into. It was the complete opposite, but for some reason it's kicked in the education gene has kicked in somewhere along the line, and I'm like, right, I want to be like you now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, because what you were saying about the inequality you've observed and just outside your doorstep, you're seeing or you're experiencing what it's like to live in a suburb where people are literally killing themselves with swords. I understand knife crime is a big thing in London as well. It's
- Suj Premachandran:
- A goddamn damn war zone every day. Something is going on every day. So yeah, it's a bit nuts.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was curious about that link between where you found yourself growing up, the type of environment in terms of the household that you grew up in and your mother's influence as a teacher. Is this some sort of coincidence that you're doing what you're trying to do with Digital Influx like this education of children primarily in teens, trying to give them a different skillset in a way of seeing the world?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I think I've had some advantages in my family dynamic and my friendship circle, and that influenced me to do these things, but are there's an alternative version of me walking around this area that didn't have those opportunities and probably isn't doing these positive things. So there's definitely a want in me to try to help communities. The work that I've done is awesome. We've managed to get into Texas, to Australia. I've helped these kids all around the world still struggling to get this into the education system here. So the UK is a little behind in terms of how they can change the system. But it's ironic, right? You put a British flag on any piece of education software or tech, and you stick it out in Asia, people are like, oh my God, it's British,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It must be good.
- Suj Premachandran:
- It must be good. They created that language. But
- Over here, if you look at the actual system itself, it's fallen apart. And the other thing with the rise of artificial intelligence, ai chat, gbt and all the other alternatives around it, I put myself in the mind of a teenager, would I use chat GBT to cheat? Of course I would. I'd cheat every single day at school. And so how does that affect the teachers? How does that affect the cognitive abilities of these young people? So I think we need to start changing education. That is the main goal, bridging that gap between education and industry sooner with ai, especially around development, your idea doesn't have to be just an idea anymore. You design something in the next few years, there'll be technology available for you to develop it without the use of developers. So we're in exciting times.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We do. And I don't want to labour too long on the past, but I'm curious to understand your thinking as to why the UK education system, why it's been such a brick wall for you to introduce what it is that you're trying to introduce. You've had more success when it comes to the likes of Australia and Texas in particular in the United States. Why is this? What is holding the UK's education system back?
- Suj Premachandran:
- There's a subject in the UK called design technology. It's best defined as wood shop in the us. So it's be like building a radio or making a chair, literal physical stuff. It's the fastest declining subject in England, which is the main regulator are trying to get rid of it. Okay. There's a perfect spot for UX, which is essentially design technology to go in. I have contacted schools, I've contacted the design technology board, and I remember having this conversation with them to say, look, this is design technology. This is what's in at the moment. And their response has always been, look, this is how we've done it. This is what the regulatory boards are like. There's too many hurdles, blah, blah, this and blah, blah that. And one part of me is like, right, I'll just give the course away for free. But then the other part of me is like, I'm running a business, I've got a team, I've got bills.
- If I keep giving things away for free, what am I going to get out of this? So I'm basically building a case study around the work we've done in OZ and the work we've done in Texas, and then I want to present it to the UK government and see if we can go through those hurdles. The only other thing that we're doing at the moment in the UK is with something called the Mayor's Academy. So the mayor of London is supporting underprivileged communities, get back into work. So it might be like a 60-year-old retired bus driver as a persona here, right back into work. So we've created foundation level adults UX course, and we support older people get back into work in design. But just going back to your original question, it's the hierarchy here. There is a certain level of people that do not want to change, and I'm pretty sure there must be some kind of financial incentive there for them not to change because it doesn't make sense.
- Even if you meet a graduate, I'll give you a prime example. There are students that I know that have got a master's in UX spent, God knows how many thousands, especially if they're like an international student, have not got a clue, right? We'll come out of uni and be at the same level as someone that's done a six month bootcamp. So whatever we're doing, we're basically forcing people to retrain forever. It doesn't make sense to me. So my solution is get this into the system earlier and get them to collaborate. Do you remember pen pals?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes.
- Suj Premachandran:
- When the pandemic was going on, I thought to myself, how the hell were people communicating before the internet? And I've just stumbled on pen pals. So we get our students, our younger students to create digital portfolios around the United Nations. Sustainable development goals. Are you familiar with that?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I have. As a result of researching for today, I did have a look at those. I believe there's 17 of them.
- Suj Premachandran:
- There's 17 goals. The UN, in their infinite wisdom create these goals to solve global problems. But as you can tell from watching the news, I don't think they're getting round to solving all of these. So my solution is to get our young students to create digital solutions around each of these problems and then create a pen pal system where they're able to collaborate between schools. So if you have a problem in New Zealand and some of the kids can't figure out the solution for this, it doesn't mean that another child sitting in the US or sitting in Nigeria or seeing in the UK can't figure out that solution. We can create businesses through these young people. They're already collaborating, playing cooler duty or Minecraft doing whatever. So why can't we get them to focus that energy on innovation?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How did this happen such how did you go from recruitment to talking to me here about helping children to collaborate across the world on solutions for the United Nations sustainable development goals. This seems to me at least quite a leap that that's gone on. How did it come to be?
- Suj Premachandran:
- So I was never meant to be a recruiter. I wasn't meant to be a creative. So I came out of university with a degree in creative advertising and I was like, oh my God, I'm going to go and make adverts. That's what I thought. And then when I came out of uni, I fell into the last recession and I was literally everyone else from my generation, what do we do? What do I end up getting to do? And then that's when I fell into recruitment and realised that I could make quite a lot of money by just having conversations with people. That was literally it. And from there, I did quite well and travelled around for a bit. And then when I ended up in design recruitment specifically, a penny just dropped where I was just like, number one, I'm looking at portfolios again just as what I was doing in uni.
- And when I took my brain away from recruitment and started looking at design quite holistically, I was like, like UX, these people, these designers, I don't even think they understand the true potential of what this actually is. You can push this into bloody anything, right? Healthcare, finance, you can change the mentality of people and if you really believe in the power of empathy, you can do some global change of this. That was the human side of me. The business side of me was like, hold a minute. We're always looking for in recruitment forever. We're looking for people every week. These companies are always paying us to find good people, and this cycle is not going to change because we're not introducing this at a young enough age. We're taking too long. This pipeline of talent should be created at a younger age, but recruiters, the majority of them don't even look at it from this angle. They're just like, oh, we'll just make our commission and keep sending CVS for the next 48 hours. And in my mind I was like, right, I'm going to have conversations with everyone, so forget the designers. I'm going to start speaking to the heads of UX, product directors, product managers, and I'm going to figure out how to do a startup. And that was literally it. I just had a bunch of conversations, made a few notes, and started a company.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a much longer term perspective than the cadence that's inherent in the recruitment business. You have a job to fill. You need to find suitable candidates, ideally your candidate, the one that's chosen, you get paid where what you're doing here is you are trying to approach things, at least from my view, from a much longer term systemic point of view. What gives you or what continues maybe to give you the confidence given the obstacles that you've encountered both at home with the education system and no doubt abroad as well. What gives you the confidence that what you are trying to do will be successful?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Technology is changing, technology is changing, and you've got a young child yourself. One of the things that I've started to not started to notice that I've noticed from the past five, six years is that these kids, this technology Zuckerberg's getting taken to court right now saying that bloody Facebook or meta or something is destroying young kids' brains. You could see this in real time. This scrolling continuously is messing with their brains. They're slowly being desensitised to a lot things. They're also having a drop in their social emotional intelligence and the general drop in empathy. There has to be a way to empower this empathetic side of it. The other side of it is a little bit more spiritual, which is essentially what I touched base with you earlier on when we start the conversation. I don't think design or UX is new. I think it's very old and we've just rebranded it.
- So you had Don Norman on a little while back and I was like, it's Don. I always use this example when I do talks around the door going up to door. I also think that's a really poor example of empathy because me and you going up to a door, depending on what the sign is, we'll still just pull the handle, go through or push the handle go through. But if you are blind or you're in a wheelchair or you are not human, are a giraffe, you have to redesign the entire experience of that door. So for me, going through this journey of understanding design, I've linked it around eastern philosophies of design. So if you look at China, you look at something like shui, moving things around to control the energy in a room that is a user experience and to a certain degree you're like, yeah, feng shui is a little bit arty, but if you go to Hong Kong, they designed the entire city around these FEI principles.
- This has been something that's been going on for thousands of years. If you dig deeper and you look at India, India had a system of education called the Vedic education System. It had its own science, it had its own maths, it had everything that you can think of. And at the crux of it, again, was empathy. It was very closely linked to yoga, meditation, breath work, and martial arts. It's about understanding yourself, understanding your opponent, understanding your environment, understanding animals. But again, it's linked to this empathy piece. So what I'm doing is I guess following up from my ancestors, this is what they were doing, and I'm digitalizing that process. And as we're going into this age of where we're sticking headsets on our faces and walking the street and having relationships with artificial intelligence, I think it's very important that we realise that we're human, that we can start integrating different practises around design thinking and UX. That's a mission for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've talked about a few things there about the decline of social emotional health of children. You've pointed to a general decline of empathy there. You've talked about how you are trying to bring through some, I suppose, more eastern philosophy or at least a philosophy of education into how you're delivering that. I'm wondering, do you see any irony at all that what Digital Influx is doing is providing education for the design of largely screen-based experiences where it's the current design of those screen-based experiences that some may point to and say these are the source of some of the decline that we've seen in children's emotional and social wellbeing?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. But I have to work with the system, and unfortunately there are these rules that I have to stick by, but the system that we're teaching, the curriculum that we're teaching these young people is getting them away from these screens. Like we teach breath work and yoga and meditation as part of the design thinking process. All of this stuff from these ancient wisdoms are all essentially linked around mental health, yoga, meditation, and breath work. And martial arts isn't all just to be stretchy, it's to clear your mind, to have clarity of thoughts. So I think the way we're teaching UX to build an app for FinTech or something is great, but what we really need to be doing is reprogramming the way we think around global problems.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think I see where maybe some of the reluctance for the UK system to adopt this way of thinking might be coming from, at least from my outsider's perspective, the English, or at least primarily the English. Of course, the UK's got the Welsh, the Northern Irish and the Scottish as well. So their cultures are slightly different, but the English and body, this sort of stiff upper lip mentality, I can't imagine that teaching breathing exercises and yoga, things like this may seem very foreign to educators that have been brought up and continue to perpetuate that older or perhaps more traditional English way of educating.
- Suj Premachandran:
- I think things are changing, but things aren't changing quick enough. And again, it comes to the speed of technology. It's not matching up to the speed of education. And I think when we get to a point where shit really hits the fan, that's when people will decide that things need to change. The current prime minister Rishi Sak, his solution to this problem was just to get kids to do more maths. So that was breaking news, said kids must study maths or another three years. I was like, poor dyslexic kids, they're not going to be happy about this at all. I mean, I always great at maths. So yeah, there's definitely some barriers around it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've pointed to previously, I think it was South Korea and some other potential other places in Asia in particular that have taken a different approach to educating children. Perhaps there's debate here to be had about the merits of the approach as a whole. But I understand that one of the things in particular in South Korea that they're doing is teaching children as young as five robotics, coding and design thinking. Has this been part of the influence for you and designing Digital Influx? What role have other education systems from non-Western or non UK based systems played in the development of your curriculum?
- Suj Premachandran:
- This is linking back to recruitment really, because if you are teaching kids robotics and coding at the age of five, and they continue this throughout their curriculum until they get to around 18, the level of talent in that part of the world is going to be growing astronomically. Where are we going to be hiring our people from? If we're not generating this talent at home, we are basically going to be outsourcing everything. And that from an economic standpoint is a bit of a risk, right? There's no way around this. I don't understand how in these leadership roles are not figuring this out. We're in for a rude awakening, specifically countries in the west. I think we're stuck in our ways and not really taking into account what's happening in all these other countries. Countries like Korea, even in the uae, they're massively focusing on digitalized education. So again, as I said, it links back into recruitment. Where are these people going to get jobs? Who are the people that are going to be earning the most amount of money? The youth unemployment in this specific borrower where I'm at is super high, so what's that going to be like in the next 30 years? So there's a lot of factors behind that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why do you suspect that Rishi Sun was pointing at maths in particular doing extra maths? He's
- Suj Premachandran:
- Got a background in finance, he probably has his own thought process behind this. He was good at maths that everyone else should be. I don't personally know, but what I do know is that, as I said to you earlier, AI is here. This GBT algorithm world is part of everyone's life now. We don't need to memorise, well, I'll go back to this Vedic education in India. When the British, the people with this accent showed up, they abolished that education system. India had one of the highest literacy rates in the entire world. They got there and basically destroyed the education system and changed it into the industrial revolution model of education. So memorising answers. So essentially it's training for you to go work in a factory who remembers the best? And at that point in time, that was great, but now I don't need to remember all these answers because I've got something on my phone that will bring up these answers straight away. Yeah, mine, I've got no idea is, I dunno what any of these political leaders are doing for the planet. Really not eco warrior here, but the news and I'm like right of war, lot of destruction. They're cutting down the rainforest, they're basically doing everything that's negative. I can't see any solution around positive change in this world without changing the mindset of kids.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's talk a little bit about changing that mindset because I understand that as part of one of the courses that you offer for children, you ask them to describe how they feel when playing on a swing set. Tell me a bit about that.
- Suj Premachandran:
- It's going back to the door example of Don Norman, right? So one of the examples that we ask children to look at is an example around usability. So one of the examples is we ask children how they feel when they go to a park and they play on a swing set. We give them multiple choice answers and they'll click happy or excited or sad, whatever they like. The following image is a picture of a child in a wheelchair and another child next to them. We asked the student, how do you feel, or how would your friend in a wheelchair feel if you both went to a park and got up to a swing set and you could use the swing, but they're unable to use the swing and give them multiple choice answers again and they would go for sad or upset. This is building that emotional connection around we're all human. So the next slide would say to the kids, students redesign a swing just on paper for a wheelchair and they kids. So they'll draw all of these crazy ideas and then you then show them real life examples of swings that have been adapted for wheelchair users. And that's to demonstrate that UX isn't just for the digital world, for the physical world as well, and that there's no design that's perfect. There's always room for improvement based around the empathy that you have for a user.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What surprised you about delivering this to children in terms of the response that you've seen from them?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Curiosity, creativity are two things. So if you try out one of our lessons, our demo lesson, there's a video game built within the course and it's about a library. The first question on the game is there's a lady with a stuck behind a revolving door, and the question is, why is this lady stuck behind this revolving door? She's an older person, doors are spinning too quickly. How would you solve this problem? It would be putting another door in an or made door rather than a revolving door. And once the kids played this game through the library, a lot of them started analysing stores. So when they started going into a store, they started looking about the usability of the doors. But I know that's not a major thing, but it's a major thing because that has sparked some kind of curiosity and creativity within their brains immediately from playing one game. So it works. The other things that we started looking at was how these portfolios are picked up by different communities. So if we look at animal welfare in the uk, that might be around dog or a cat or something. But if you do it somewhere else, that might be a completely different ball game. It might be looking at wild animals. So there's different ways that we can interpret it depending on the socialeconomic situation of the school or this child. So it's quite interesting to see what everyone's working on, how they think.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, so this is really about how children are thinking. I was thinking as you were telling that story, and I'm not an educator and I'm also not an academic, so potentially similar to you in terms of the level of higher education we've had, it's on par, right? So I'm probably a little off base here on what I'm about to say, but it seems like one of the other outcomes that are being delivered through the courses that you are providing is the emergence of an ethical foundation from which children can start to think about the immediate design problem that's in front of them. But also touching on what you were saying earlier about empathy, about considering the people in the community around them and what their experiences are like. There's not, to my knowledge, and it's been a while since I've been in the education system, we are the same age. It's not to my knowledge taught in any other subject. I can't think of another subject that I took or that I've heard of children take. And I now have a school age child, a five and a half year old where they're actually learning that type of thing.
- Suj Premachandran:
- There are lessons specifically focused around design thinking. So empathy is part of the design thinking framework, but that is there. Social emotional learning can be pushed through with other classes. So you can look at things like drama as an example or sociology. You can kind of embed it there, but there's nothing that kind of bridges that gap. Gap like gap, connecting all the dots between the education, the social emotional intelligence, and also industry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, that's it, right? Because it's more than theory. It's showing children that they can have an immediate impact on the world around them. That's the hands-on part of design. There's the thinking part that we've talked about and clearly has become very popular around the world, but then there's the actual craft application of the design, which flows from that.
- Suj Premachandran:
- Yeah, it's all changing essentially. One of the things that I'm looking at right now is portfolios. So my background in recruitment, I was very lucky. I got to see portfolios from all over the world, literally all over the world, and it was looking at portfolios from junior level all the way up to design directors in the us, the uk, Asia. And what's happening now in the industry is pure boredom. People are bored of seeing the same types of portfolios, all the God time, design thinking process, these are my personas, this is that, this is this. It's not really standing out anymore. And what we are looking at is how can we build more creative around the creation of our portfolios? The TikTok generation, they're a perfect example of this. What we're doing now is creating a new style of portfolio, which is fully immersed around the student interactivity within the portfolio.
- How can they make it more visual? How can they make it more audio led? How can we take the minds around creativity from that age group and push it into a new generation of portfolios? We're also looking at how the Apple headset, you've seen iron. Yes, there's scenes in Ironman and also the Avengers where Ironman is looking at this augmented reality office. You can go into the screen and move things around and go into it. And I always thought to myself, that's the way you should be looking at portfolio. Not bloody looking at it as a bloody PDF, but you should be physically able to go into a portfolio and press play on a persona. You should be able to hear those people talking to you. And that's what we're looking at now. So with the students that we're working with, we're looking at creating a new way of viewing portfolios, a new way of solving problems, not the traditional mindset that we have now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So given that pace of change, and given, you mentioned Call of Duty earlier, so given the fact that there's so much digital candy, I suppose around for children to get hooked on, it doesn't often leave education as an attractive way of spending their spare time. What has that meant for the design that you've had to bring to bear on your courses?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Money. So I dunno if you know this, all these kids they know are about money. They know that things cost money. They know that they want to be financially successful, they know they want to buy things. And what I'm trying to be very transparent about to young people is how much you can earn within the design field in this current moment in time. But also the fact that they can create their own businesses, they can be entrepreneurial, that they don't have to go to university, they don't want to go to university, that you can create an idea from your mind and monetize it if you really wanted to. And some people are like, no, why are you teaching kids about bloody money that's not worth it. I'm like, they are watching YouTube every day. All of them, every single one of them is watching YouTube.
- They know that these people like Mr. Beast having loads of fun every day is monetizing his content and making money out of it. So what I'm looking at is not turning kids into some greedy, money hungry like Wolf on Wall Street type here, but I need them to start creating these solutions. One part of this is you can monetize some of these solutions, but the other part of it's, I think the planet is dying. I don't know if people are really addressing this, but I think the planet is dying. We're in a recession and I'm fairly sure World War III is happening right now. We're just not addressing it as World War iii. We need some goddamn solutions here. We can't have these people that are running the world carrying on with this mindset. We need to start focusing around innovation and empathy. This is in my mind, there's no way around this, right? Otherwise we're going to be in for a rude awakening.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is an intentionally well potentially provocative question. So if the planet is dying and we're seeing all these things play out with conflict in the Middle East, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, climate change, the list is getting a bit longer, especially in recent years. We've been through a pandemic and so on and so on. Why focus on children as young as five and not on adults who are in the immediate position to make decisions that could impact the present?
- Suj Premachandran:
- We do both. So we teach adults and we teach children, but essentially that seed of creativity, that seed of innovation has to be applied younger. When you are in school, when you are a kid, your creative juices are flowing. I remember I dismantle things. I just dismantle a remote control car and then I plug in a calculator or something into it, I'll take the wires out and I'll be like, oh my God, I've created a bloody time machine. I used to think things like that and it's crazy, but when you get older, they take that creativity away from you in school, they start focusing on the pure academics. And I think we need to start harnessing that creativity. Don't let that go. That's what I'm looking at. But from what you said around the adults, we do do that as well. But what I noticed from teaching adults and teaching kids is you've got a completely blank canvas with these kids, completely blank. When they get to adulthood, they've got assumptions and thoughts that have been created around their social situations. And with children, they're fairly innocent. There's no racism or sexism or worried about how much a trainers cost when you are like nine years old. They are a complete blank canvas. And if we can focus that empathetic education around them, they could potentially change the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a very lofty, and I'm getting slightly inspired here, thought it's a thought that perhaps rubs up against the status quo a little bit, hence some of the difficulties you've had when trying to get the programme into your home education system. What is it about trying to take on such a well-established, well-entrenched system that you believe is worth it? I mean, clearly you've talked about the planet being at stake, but this is a vision that seems to me will be very difficult to achieve. Why are you dedicating so much energy to it?
- Suj Premachandran:
- You say this right, but it's approved in the state of Texas, right? We've got it in the education system over there. We're in schools over there and that was not in my mind. If you asked me five years ago, you've got to set up a business in Texas, I'll be like, okay, that would be my immediate reaction. But they're doing it. It's happening over there. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What did they see? What did you help them to see that others have not?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I think it might have been my accent somewhere along the line,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The union Jack,
- Suj Premachandran:
- It could have been my accent. I think Ed Alba opened some doors for us, I don't know, but we worked with some great educators out there. They introduced us to people within the Texas Education Agency and they valued it. Texas is not what I would've perceived it as from watching TV growing up and stuff, right when I actually started meeting people from Texas. It is super cool. There's a lot of great tech companies that are moving into Texas as well, right? They've also got great rules on tax, on corporation tax. So a lot of these big companies are moving over there and I think within Texas itself, they want to upskill their community so they can work for these companies as well. And geographically, Texas is bigger than England, bloody huge. So I've managed to do it over there. So for me, it's not a lofty dream. I've managed to get this done and we've got no funding, absolutely nothing. Still managed to do it. We're in Australia right now in New South Wales. We're doing the same process, getting this approved in New South Wales south. And I'm like, I can do this halfway across the world with my laptop and a few colleagues and I still can't penetrate the system here. It's absolutely heartbreaking, but I can't give up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to ask you about that, those two things you've just told me. One, how does it feel not to be able to do what you had intended to do in East London, for example, with those kids, the kind of kids that you were one of once not that long ago, and secondly, whether or not you'd given up on attempting that. And clearly the answer is no, you haven't, which is really encouraging to hear. I was curious to know a little bit more about your experience setting things up in the us. I understand part of the reason why you've established the foundation is to enable more organisations to work with you. What can you tell me about the foundation and in particular, if people are listening who are in the United States that are in a position or are curious to engage with Digital Influx and understand how they might be able to get on board with supporting it, what do they need to know?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Essentially schools don't have money, right? The reason why a lot of EdTech companies fail is that they target the schools. The schools get around bloody 20,000 emails a week from random companies saying, do you want to buy my product? They haven't got the time, they haven't got the resources, and it's difficult for them as a whole. So what we've done is eliminate the cost. So companies such as one of our largest sponsors, PepsiCo worked with us and we worked through corporate social responsibility. We know that companies, whether in the US or internationally, have got money set aside for social good, whether that's through CSR or ESG. There is pots of money there to support people. And what we do is we partner with companies to support the schools. So if there are anyone listening right now that wants to help create the new generation of innovators within design, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or my email, which I can provide later, and we can have a conversation about how we can support schools.
- At the same time, because we are bridging this gap, we are creating a full curriculum. So right now our courses are aimed at a certain age group, but we want to get this done all the way up to 19, 18 to 19. So I dunno what I know for a fact that this has never been done before. A full curriculum, like starting from 10 years old up to 18, completely focus on the study of design, starting with UX but also integrating other elements, looking at product design, service design, game design. We just want to focus completely on design and then this leads to the new pipeline of talent for the companies as well. So their sponsorship is not only supporting underprivileged schools, is also creating the new pipeline of candidates that they're looking for, that they're desperately looking
- Brendan Jarvis:
- For. And if there's one thing that has been a constant in the design conversation over the, as long as I've been participating in it, which is most actively over the last three to four years, it's been the will, the desire, but perhaps not the reality of making the field of design more inclusive. And I noticed on your LinkedIn profile in particular, the part that speaks to your role and the foundation, you've said, and I'll just quote you here, you've said, we believe that design education should be accessible to all children regardless of their background or socioeconomic status. We understand that the future lies in the hands of today's youth and by equipping them with the tools and knowledge of user experience design, we can help to shape a more inclusive and innovative world. So it seemed to me that you also have noticed, or there's something in here in what you're trying to do that's recognise that UX or design more broadly speaking here, the education and therefore the field of design is out of reach for some people.
- Suj Premachandran:
- People don't even know it exists. Some people even know what it is. Even now you go to a bar and say you're a UX designer, they'll be like, what? What's an ux? Right? You dunno what it's, if you look at design from a recruiter perspective, design is more inclusive than a lot of other sectors within tech. There's a lot more female leadership, there's a lot more people from ethnic backgrounds, but I still think there's a long way to go. A lot of people dunno what UX is and particular kids dunno what UX is. So what we're doing is embedding this into the of young people to make them aware that this is a career option. This is a path for you to understand the technology that you're using every day. And it's also a path to empower you to become an innovator, a business leader. You don't have to wait till you get to university before you start making decisions about your life. You can start creating technology to impact the planet today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm not sure if you're familiar with Kevin Bethune. He's been a guest on the podcast before. He's ex Nike and he's got a wonderful both in terms of physical product design and digital experience design. He's a real leader. He runs a practise called Dreams Design and Life. And he and I were talking him being a black American, talking about the glaring gap that exists in particular for black Americans in design where the latest A IGA census, I believe put it at 3% of the design is that responded were black and the general population in America of black people is around 12 point half to 13%. And I was curious in particular with your will to make design more inclusive and of course having a beachhead in America in Texas, what emphasis, if any, are you placing on bringing more people of colour in particular and to the field?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I mean, I am a person of colour unless you are like, has he got a tan? No,
- This has been something in the forefront of my brain for a very long time, right? Working in recruitment, I got to see this firsthand. When you go into the leadership circles of a lot of these tech companies, it's very glaringly obvious that there's not a lot of space for a diversity. When you get to the higher ranks, that's obvious. There's no way around this. And I personally feel that. Again, I've got to go back to the same thing, which is you have to change the mindsets of young people because the older generation isn't really going to change anytime soon. But I think what design does give you the chance to do is innovate yourself. You can be a business leader, you can create an app, you can create a business, you can create a new process for someone. You don't always have to climb that corporate ladder, you don't want to.
- People are making money through all different ways all the time, every day. And I think UX is just a switch that can change that mindset. But with regards to diversity in particular, there's the reality of the situation that we're in. There's no way around it. It's just about giving more transparency about what's out there. What is UX? How can this impact your life? What is data science? We should be giving access to this information to more people. But when you're giving it to kids, this relays to the parents as well, the parents, the families. This is how these things grow and create this murmur, this ripple effect. Once it goes through the kids, it'll pass on other people because doing it the other way around seems like it's not working Quick enough.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- While we're on the subject, I have to ask you, is it true that somewhere between three and 5% of global venture capital goes to people of colour and women?
- Suj Premachandran:
- I'm glad you brought that up. That is a hundred percent true. So when I started this journey, I knew this statistic and me being a little bit arrogant, I was like, screw that. That doesn't apply to me. So when I started Digital Influx, I knew that going and essentially begging for money is probably not going to go anywhere. So I used Digital Influx as an incubator for the business. So I created a recruitment business for one year. So Digital Influx started as a UX recruitment business. We created a hundred grand in a year, just me and one of my colleagues. And we used that money to essentially move into the EdTech space. So we created our own money to do it. But the reality is this story that I've given you setting up in Texas, partnerships with PepsiCo, growing into Australia, creating a recruitment platform that all of these things should correlate to at least a couple of angel investors or something coming up to us and saying like, Hey, you guys are doing something cool, let's do it.
- You hear all this stuff about diversity and inclusion and everything else, but the reality is I don't think they're coming to help and it's a hundred percent something to do with race. I don't want to pull out the race card because I don't think it's a valid thing to do. But these stats don't lie. Three to 5% is crazy. It's absolutely nuts. And I remember putting out this LinkedIn status saying, why is it that the VC world is not embracing these communities? What is it? And I remember a VC saying, yes, we've still got more work to do. And I thought to myself, that's great. So that's something that I think a lot of startups are aware of and we're actively still looking for funding. I'll give you a personal story. For me. The business was going really couple of years. We did the recruitment stuff, pandemic happened, we did a lot of user research, figured out this kids course 2022, we launched the kids course, got a partnership with Pepsi, got corporate sponsorship here, and then as soon as 2023 hit, I had some really bad news, my mom got diagnosed with cancer.
- Once that happened, I realised something, the emails don't matter. None of this shit matters. Got to concentrate on my mom. So I took six months essentially to stay with her and sort out my mental health essentially because I'm like, you can't try to manage a business and look after people you love. It's difficult to do. And once I did that, I was like, right, I've got to restart all over again. So now we're doing this adult UX bootcamp. I've had to restart the recruitment business just to try to make up the money that I've done to support my family. And it's like this journey's beginning all over again and I'm like, oh my God, someone just give me a goddamn break, right? Because I'm like, I was sitting here thinking this the other day. I was like, I've thrown away this recruitment life where I was earning really good money, having a hell of a good time all the time.
- And I've gone through this journey of struggles because I believe so passionately about the future of these kids. I'm like, there's absolutely no way that this isn't a solution or part of a solution. But trying to find people that believe in this has been near enough impossible. And the only people that really understand this is the goddamn designers. The designers know what I'm saying is true. They all know it From looking at the eastern philosophy piece to bridging the gap between education and industry, looking at social emotional learning. They know, right? All of them from the heads of UX all the way down to the bloody junior designers, they know what I'm saying is true, but no one's rallying around this course. So I guess it's just me against the world, I guess like Tupac Shakur,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like that the trials not to downplay them, they've been significant, particularly with your mum. I just thinking about how I would feel if I had the same news about mine. It sounds like even though you haven't managed to secure funding or you've been through these ups and some big downs, that it's tightened your resolved, it's firmed it up rather than it's unravelled it.
- Suj Premachandran:
- I'm from this community in Kerala called the Panic, and they are the originators of martial arts. So martial arts comes from Kerala and it's spread out to southeast Asia and China and things like that, weapons based combats. So my ancestors were going into war, travelling all over the world, doing all this stuff. When the British invaded India, the longest conflict was in Kerala. It was not a 10, 12 year war against the British because they believed in their values and their culture. And me sitting here with all these luxuries, I'm thinking to myself, I'm just going to give up. When my ancestors had to go through living on a ship for six months to get off and go fight someone with a sword, I'm like, no, definitely a little bit better than this. So I know that sounds a little bit farfetched, but I believe in that. I'm like, we're all coming round on this earth. We're the result of someone that's gone through a struggle to get us here. So even knowing that my mom's gone through a hard time, I know that what I'm doing is inspiring someone. Even if this business was to fail, right? As long as I've able to impact someone, if I'm able to impact some child to spark something in their brain to create some kind of positive change on the planet, then my work here is done.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Suj, I think that is a wonderful place for us to leave this conversation. I've really appreciated you going and sharing so much personal insight into what it's been like for you to run, set up and run Digital Influx. And I want to thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Suj Premachandran:
- Thank you for taking the time to speak to me. Appreciate it mate.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's been my pleasure. My pleasure. Suj, if people want to connect with you, inspired by what they've heard and they would like to know more about Digital Influx perhaps either to participate or to contribute in some way to your mission, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Suj Premachandran:
- Please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I am literally the only Suj Premachandran on LinkedIn, so you can reach out to me there. If you want to see a little bit more about the work that we're doing, please visit DigitalIinflux.com. You'll see links to our YouTube page on there as well where you can see a few of the events that we've done and a few cool videos around some of the webinars that we've done as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great, thanks Suj! And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been wonderful having you with us as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes. They'll be chaptered on YouTube in particular, so you can jump around to the parts of the conversation that you want to hear. Again, you'll also be able to find Suj and a Digital Influx, all the places that he's mentioned, and perhaps a few others will be in the show notes too.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe as well, so it turns up every two weeks and tell perhaps just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find a link to my LinkedIn profile on the show notes or just search for Brendan Jarvis. You'll find me there. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.