Kapil Kaul's Linkedin Analytics

I have been fascinated by human behavior for as long as I can remember, It started with reading Dale Carnegie's seminal work 'How to Make Friends and Influence People' during my school days and later dense psychology textbooks in our college library when in reality, I was training in Computer Science Engineering. I decided that I wanted to make ads, since advertising seemed an ideal mix of persuasion and creativity, stuff I was fascinated by. While my engineering degree didn't get me anything apart from bemused looks in ad agencies,this curiosity about human motivation and decision making eventually shaped the direction of my career as I have since then taken up 4 different careers that have their moorings in Behavioral Sciences. A few years ago, while working on yet another technology driven 'new ways of working' project, I realized 'bad design' is the main reason my job exists in the first place. My work essentially was becoming something between a firefighter and a used car salesman, driving the adoption of soul-numbing enterprise applications. Around that time I had also been getting deeper into Human-Centered Design, as it gave a vocabulary to all that I had been doing throughout my career. I eventually realized that 'Design is the most effective way of influencing behavior change'. I now wanted to make my job redundant, so I decided to formally acquire the skills while distancing myself from the solution-centric approach consultants excel at. I applied to and got admitted to Parsons School of Design which is counted among the world's best design schools. There I got to formally learn how Human-Centered Design can be used to build great products, services, and experiences. Today, I lead a large team of designers, working on imagining and simplifying complex enterprise applications.