How CUA helped Sandesh Subedi achieve his boyhood ambition of making a better world through design

Sandesh Subedi was always fascinated by computers. As a kid growing up in a small town in Nepal, computers were not a part of everyday life. But they did have a PC in his school, and Sandesh spent many hours messing about with early versions of Adobe Photoshop and other design tools. “Ï used to photoshop pictures of my dad next to the Eiffel Tower. Stuff like that. What we call ‘'Photoshop Fails today” he laughs. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with design that shaped the young man’s career.

Today, as the co-founder of Procreator, a cutting edge design company in Mumbai that counts giants like Godrej and Skoda amongst its clients, Sandesh recounts how the CUA course helped him channel his innate passion, curiosity, and talent into a potent design force. “I was always curious by nature. I was always looking at the world around me and tinkering with stuff to see how things work. But I lacked the tools to understand and articulate why certain things happen the way they do” he says. When a friend recommended the CUA course from HFI, Sandesh thought long and hard before deciding to invest in the certification. “It didn’t come cheap” he grins.

“The course gave me a structured way to understand myself as a user. Throughout the course, I’d keep thinking “Yeah, that happens to me” and find myself nodding. This helped me then gain better empathy with users and made me a much better designer. If not for the course, there would be a lot of things happening around me that I wouldn’t notice or learn from”. Sandesh is today a designer with a better structured and conscious awareness of the world around him and his interactions with that world - which give him a richer experiential designer’s toolkit.

“The CUA course also helped me gain a better vocabulary to communicate design concepts and ideas to my clients and coworkers in a deeper and more scientific way,” he says.

Using a military metaphor, Sandesh smiles and says “Earlier I was a soldier, today I’d say I’m a lieutenant.”

Sandesh Subedi believes that design can create a better world. With a little help from HFI, he’s walking the talk today, creating solutions that make the lives of users a little better.