Ms. Arti Jain

An independent film maker and media consultant, Ms. Arti Jain has worked as an independent producer in India and in US. She started her journey in this field from MCRC Jamia University, Delhi. She have been an executive producer, director, editor and script writer for films, as well as as worked for co-orporate videos and fund raising films for non-profit organisation.

Working on both sides of fiction and non-fiction divide, her films have won numerous awards. She has travelled to film festivals, which have been broadcasted on television both in India and US. Her recent work include CSR films for GAIL, and training films for the UNICEF. She won a programme coordinator of independent lens in a weekly show aired on PBS in the US and apart form this many different awards for her excellent work.

The major take away from her for me would be how to make change in the existing system by creating influential and smart piece of work. Documentaries are supposed to be boring, she could show us  how we can make them interesting and witty more than fiction and non-fiction; for example she showed us one award winning documentary film in which small kids changed the way of thinking of people of China, in terms of politics. Media plays a very vital role to create a social setup within a country. Hence, it is a very important medium to handle with all necessary care and precision.

Ms. Jain, has a lot of knowledge and experience which motivated us to a great level in terms of making films which interest people.

Ms. Satabdi Jena

Ms. Satabdi Jena graduated form Pearl in 2009, the third batch of Communication Design at Pearl Academy, Naraina. She believes in 'Everyone needs a laboratory and Amazing things only come from Experimentation' and 'Travel as much as and as frequent as you can'.

She was an average student and belonging to a non-business oriented family where she had to take up Science just because of the family pressure, but then she could not take up science and hence switched to commerce along with mathematics. After completing her school life, she had to decide on to her college. She applied for Architecture (because of her mother), and cleared it, she moved to Manipal for her graduation, but soon dropped it and came back to Delhi. She was then counselled by her parents and then finally walked down to Pearl Academy for doing her graduation in Communication Design. While at Pearl, she took up various client projects as well as started as a freelancer.

Then soon after her graduation, she realised that Printing, Packaging and Editing was her major field of interest. She moved to the Boston University for doing her Masters there, while studying she took up 4 jobs (an TA at the university campus, College tour guide, made subs at Subway and Panda Express) as well as started taking Creative writing classes and learnt violin (as a hobby). She faced a lot of problems like cultural change, food and accent. After completing her graduation she took up a job at a TV company in New York City, where she had to do Graphic Design, Set Design and work in the Production Team; she left the job after 8 months and then moved down to India (New Delhi).

She opened up a studio here but did not know how to go about it. Later realised that she had to get everything in correct order before pitching for clients. She then converted a room at her home in to her office place, got her company's name registered, then decided on the company's goals, created a team, fetched for good vendors and began pitching for clients. This is how she started her life from Pearl to the outside World.

She now owns a Design Studio AKAAR at Mehar Chand Market, Lodhi Road. She even got her work exhibited at various exhibitions and also came to the CMF Festival'15 at Pearl to showcase her work.

She has definitely inspired me and I'm sure most of us. Her ideas have been creative and inspiring. Her thoughts have a clean and vast showcase of her qualifications.

Mr. Gopal Meena

“It feels good to be lost in the right direction” this works very well for Mr.Gopal Meena who started working with an NGO for animals and in process, came across NID where he persued experience design as his specialisation under Communication design.   

He has a great knowledge of design and by his way of talking one could easily make out his interest and passion. He expressed himself really well and motivated us for pushing ourselves to attain higher goals. Other than his speech about Experience Design he also showed us his immensely creative work which gave us a lot of motivation.

His 1st project was IIJS signature goa, in which he was the head experience designer and did the graphics part as well, despite the fact that he is not a formally trained graphic designer, he believes that 'Design process is the key to everything with the right process you can design with or without training'. He has always worked as a freelancer and never restricted his work to a particular field. He has experimented and explored in several fields like weddings, retail stores (future group), museums (swami vivekananda museum-pune). He showed us the different perspective and a better understanding of the experience design. It was an interactive session which kept us engaged throughout. 

In a nut shell, what I came across after his lecture was 'In the end its an experience that counts and not the method or training.'

Mr. Saibal Datta

Mr. Saibal Datta is a UX Designer. He is a Design Manager at Adobe India, and now runs his own company named Gaia Digital Design as a Design Entrepreneur.

In his two hour session, he tried to connect us students to UX and familiarised us with different aspects of UX design which is an integration of technology, business and design, which covers sociology, psychology, graphics, industrial design & cognitive science. He conducted a very effective activity to help us identify what role do we want to play in the design process, i.e.:

• explorers discover
• artists design
• scientists develop/prototype
• warriors deliver

Now the question is, what are you? And how to train yourself to be the other remaining 3. 

What we take away from his experience and sharing is,

• have passion for craft
• be curios about people and technology
• find the ability to learn quickly
• have a detail oriented nature
• have a receptive approach toward feedback (willingness to accept constructive criticism & act on it)

All these ingredients are essential to be an effective UX Designer.