Teaching

Exciting news! My book “Karmic Design Thinking” is available on Kindle for just 129 INR, but only today (January 16th, 2025). Don’t miss this one-day opportunity to grab your copy at a special price!

As someone passionate about design thinking, I’m thrilled to see over 100,000 learners enrolled in my NPTEL course in the last 5 years. This book complements the course material and offers deeper insights into the world of design thinking.

2024 Emacs Conference Talk: Survival of the skillest: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Learning

in Teaching

2024-12-18

We live in a world overflowing with opportunities to learn and grow. Yet, with so many demands on our time and attention, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and struggle to acquire new skills. This post will outline some key principles and a step-by-step method, inspired by productivity experts David Allen and Tiago Forte, to help you navigate the learning jungle and emerge victorious.

This blog post presents a guide to navigating the abundance of learning opportunities in the modern world. The post suggests applying a modified version of the “Get Things Done” method by David Allen and the “PARA” method by Tiago Forte. The first step is to “empty your teacup” by creating an inbox and a TODO list. Next, process each item in your TODO list by either deleting it, deferring it, delegating it, or doing it. Organise your work into projects, areas, resources and archives. For each project, define the success criteria, goals, deadline, and tasks, and identify the next action. The post also recommends scheduling regular weekly, quarterly, and yearly reviews to reflect and plan. For future planning, it suggests using the “Nine Windows” technique.

Innovate Like a Boss - Projects: Exploring Creative Solutions to Everyday Challenges

in Teaching

2024-11-26

Innovation thrives when creativity meets structured problem-solving methodologies. Recently, fifth-year students from Universidad Panamericana presented a series of inventive projects that tackled real-world issues. These projects were part of a specialized course designed to teach systematic innovation techniques, combining theoretical frameworks with practical applications. Below, we explore these projects and the rigorous process that guided their development.

Ask the Design Thinking Doc - How might we How might we

in Teaching

2023-10-02

Everyone, Happy Gandhi Jayanti (His birthday today!!!)

If this was year 1921 and if Mahatma Gandhi were to communicate to all us today using Design Thinking parlance, what would he say?

How might we attain independence from the British rule while not physically hurting anyone?

How to incorporate handwritten notes into Emacs Orgmode

in Teaching

2023-01-18

This is the video I made for the Emacs conference 2022 on my own experiences with trying to include handwritten notes in to my workflow.

Special thanks to the organizers of the Emacs conference for giving me the opportunity to present my experiences with a really old, but rock solid and awesome software. As they say, I wish Emacs had a text editor too!

Abstract of my talk:

Ask the Design Thinking Doc - Not so heavy books to read

in Teaching

2022-11-30

What are some books one could read to learn Design Thinking? The answer can be contradictory. Since, Design Thinking is a skill, is best learnt from on-field experience. However, without knowing what Design Thinking can do, the on-field experience may not be so rewarding after all.

So, what books must one read and not read to attain expertise in Design Thinking?

This post will answer that.

Design Thinking, as a skill, can be learnt by practicing the methodology on real world problems. I run an online course on Design Thinking on a Govt. of India platform called SWAYAM where close to 40,000 learners have learnt Design Thinking already.

What I have got in return (apart from lots of love 😍) is the variety of questions that have been asked by so many curious learners. This Ask the DT Doc series can be helpful to anyone – a beginner, intermediate or advanced learner of Design Thinking. (Also checkout https://dt.balaramadurai.net for the book on Design Thinking)

This post will cover the question “Please suggest some awesome and not that heavy books to read?”

Ask the Design Thinking Doc - Be an idea Ninja

in Teaching

2022-10-12

Creativity is elusive when you want it the most. When we asked in a classroom “Who is the most creative person that you know?”. None of them said it was themselves. Because all of us think we don’t have in us what it takes to be creative. So, how does one become more creative? Even better, how does one become a Ninja in creativity? I wake you up in the middle of your sleep and still you are able to generate ideas just like that. How is this possible?

Design Thinking, as a skill, can be learnt by practicing the methodology on real world problems. I run an online course on Design Thinking on a Govt. of India platform called SWAYAM where close to 40,000 learners have learnt Design Thinking already.

What I have got in return (apart from lots of love 😍) is the variety of questions that have been asked by so many curious learners. This Ask the DT Doc series can be helpful to anyone – a beginner, intermediate or advanced learner of Design Thinking. (Also checkout https://dt.balaramadurai.net for the book on Design Thinking)

This post will cover the question “Genrich Altsheller’s 40 inventive principles and 76 stan[d]ard solutions”

Solving the assignment vs learning problem - A design thinking case

By bodi in Teaching

2022-09-28

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Sowmya Rajendran and her team worked on an interesting and pressing problem with the students. I invited her to write a guest post on the topic - Assignment vs Learning.

Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Analyze

By rajib in Teaching

2022-09-21

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Empathize

By rajib in Teaching

2022-09-14

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.