Karthi Subbaraman

June 2021 marks 21 years of my exemplary design career. What a ride❣️ For almost 18 years of those 21 years, I was a practitioner. I solved problems (creatively) for a living. The world used many labels to describe my job. User Experience Designer, Innovator, Design Thinker, Senior Consultant, User

Are you wondering what the hell is UNK UNKs? It is a short form for unknown-unknowns. In other words these are the blindspots we deal with. Things we don't know, we don't know are UNK-UNKs. > Every innovator knows that "It is what they don&

Disclaimer: Longish post than usual because it has a life story. Life 1.0: a fairy tale It was June 2011. I retired from (corporate) work. I was financially independent. I lived and worked across the globe.  I was fit enough to trek to Himalayas. I could go around MacRitchie

If you are anything like me, you give reasons for your unproductivity. It is human to be reasonable. When you are wasting time and loitering around stuff, you want give a sensible reason behind the time waste. For creatives like me that reason usually is motivation. We take it one

The last person who should write about work and life is me because I don't see them separetely. There are three perspectives about life I want to share today. Integrated & Holistic To me life happens and everything happens inside. We cannot separate them as work or life

To become smarter than yesterday look at how you solve problems everyday. Some problems are best solved forward. Some problems are best solved backwards. Some problems are best solved sidewards. Some problems are best avoided. Seeking brilliance is one way to look at things. Avoiding stupidity is another way to

If I did not fall in love with design this lifetime I would have been a chef. Only because I met design first, I am staying married to that profession. Nevertheless I went ahead and started a restaurant along with my high end le cordon bleu co-founder to take care

Sometimes what you say in 1000 words is replaced by one image. I don't have to say anything today I guess. Keep at it 🙌

As a cognitive science student, I was not formally trained in Typography during my masters. For that matter nothing about visual communication was a part of our curriculum. We were busy knocking anthropometry, ergonomics, cognitive psychology, social research, anthropology, HCI and the likes. I did my dissertation on sleep and

Today I had a longish chat with Arjun (my co-founder) about creative expression, typography, writing and more. Our discussion slipped into a critical analysis of why he is unable to write as much as he wants to despite having an amazing blog setup in his site. [http://phlox.life/] We