Many students who aspire to be designers think that designing is the only aspect they need to excel and ignore the importance of leadership, problem-solving, networking, visualising and communication skills. Social Beat, an ROI Driven Digital Marketing Company is organising the Design Beat not only to harness the power of creative solutions but also help them develop these skills. While the first edition of Design Beat took place in Chennai, the second edition is happening in tech city, Bengaluru on January 25.
Panisa Shah, Creative Head, Social Beat thinks that designs should be used to make a social impact and convey the right message across society instead of using to show different colours. She says," Last year, it was more about coming up with solutions to particular problems. There were around 40 participants and we gave problem statements to them and asked them to come up with ideas. For example, traffic jam is the main problems in metro cities. We asked the participants to come up with design solutions that can change the behaviour of the mindset of people to use public transport. This year, it is going to be a little different as we not only want the participants to come up with design solutions but also visualise and implement them."
When we asked her about what they expect the participants to learn from this design beat edition, she says, "The primary thing that we expect to have them learnt after this edition is not to just to make fancy designs but how to visualise a solution to the problem. A lot of designers don't bother to develop leadership skills or networking skills. Therefore, we have kept this edition open for working professionals so that they can network with each other."
The main motto of digital design is to market the products and services. Hence Panisa believes that companies should explore and invest enough time on the social media platforms. She says, "It is through videos in vernacular languages that many start-ups can reach people across India. The Design Beat will include this module also for the participants."
Like any other educational programme or stream, India has followed the same conventional method of teaching a set of software to design advertisements or create videos. Panisa says, "When compared to the United Kingdom and the USA, we are far behind them in terms of learning design concepts creatively. While it is necessary to know the software that involves learning design etc, I think that educational institutions must teach the importance of conceptualising, leaderships skills, how to use real-life experience in designing, etc. They must tell students that design plays a key role in the growth of the business rather than seeing it as a tertiary factor only."
