We dive deep into the creative process, and our roadblocks and success there, before pivoting into game design, and the wealth of games that came up in Divya's conversation with Anurati Srivastva and the fascinating ideas from Kahran's conversation with Katieann Vogel.

A fascinating discussion of different games, game design, and approach to creation with Anurati Srivastva.

Katieann Vogel, an ocean poet, speaks with Kahran this week on the path from computer science to becoming an ocean poet, what it means to spend your life in nature and creating, and how to find a sense of stability and centeredness.

Divya & Kahran come back together on the interesting ideas we learned from Meghana Srinivas & Samhita Arni in episodes 7 & 8 of this season 4: rituals, success, perception and identity.

Divya and Meghana discuss about Meghana's journey from being a cancer researcher to a startup founder, and her experience of working in an industry that requires a lot of emotional labour and how she finds her balance through rituals. They also discuss her uncanny ability to bring the most nurturing and safe groups together.

When you write your first NY Times bestseller at the age of 8, do you feel successful all your life? Is there a successful identity? Or is chasing success a Sisyphean task?
Kahran and Sam Arni have an incredible conversation, talking about culture, what it means to add value, and how you feel successful, for yourself and also for those around you.

Kahran and Divya come back together to share their thoughts on our two remarkable guests -- Aditi Dimri and Fran Dunaway -- and how both seem to share a very different view of the notion of identity, and how that has shaped their lives.

Divya talks this week with Aditi Dimri, co-founder of http://cranberry.fit, about starting her career in academia and microeconomics before finding her desire to for fulfillment took her to more direct desires to help — first to more actionable projects, and then to starting a company herself! Fascinating to see how small a role a sense of identity played a role in her life, as different then computational mama or Manasi K in our first two episodes this season!

Kahran talks this week with Fran Dunaway about her careers before she she started her company, TomboyX, and how she has found her identity outside of her career, or perhaps, better said, found her identity in all of her careers.

Divya and Kahran come together to share their insights from the interviews with Manasi Khare in episode 31, and Computational Mama in episode 32.

Divya talks with Computational Mama about her journey into coding; finding herself as a coder after being a designer; ideas of identity; how art, culture and coding intersect, as well as Computational Mama's journey in the moniker being born, having a son, and introducing coding and design to many others, from museums to live streams to workshops in GenAI and also to teaching other mothers about coding and the possibilities for fun within the coding world

Kahran & Manasi Khare have a sweeping conversation about law, pretending to be someone else, systemic thinking in the Indian context, and what it means to be a patriot. Manasi Khare is an in-house advocate and formerly was a practicing litigator at a law firm. She has been involved in public policy research with a standing parliamentarian. She is a lover of the mountains, and lives in Bangalore with her husband Harsh.

As engineers we do not learn to take responsibility for our users' attention -- and in fact we learn the opposite -- grab more market share at all costs! Where has this perspective taken us? We explore this idea from the view of Meta's choices, but also from the perspective of defaults, and how when we perceive something as a constant, it completely changes our frame of reference when we problem solve.

We've started to seeing difference in the way we think and create since we started using LLMs. From tactical things like remembering ear-worms, to abstract things like how we value ideas, we've found ChatGPT & Midjourney & GenAI have changed the way we think, work and create.
Kahran and Divya also discuss thieves cant, translation, learning, curating and accessibility of information. It's one of our first impromptu recordings, and we hope you love it as much as we did recording it!

Motivating yourself, especially on self-driven projects, can be hard. Once you finally have something works, how do you keep evolving it? We talk this week on breaking out of creative ruts and how to evolve, using the podcast as a meta example.

How do different understandings of 'what you do' affect the course of a company? How do they affect you as a person? Kahran and Divya talk about how they got to joyus studio's single line vision, and share ideas to help others get there with their learnings.

How do you create pre-experiences to put people in the right mindset for your experience? How do those create expectations you can exceed? In this wide reaching conversation we discuss Seth Godin, activation energy, fine dining (including Mesa, Eleven Madison Park, and other Michelin 3-star restaurants, tho not by name!) and what it means to create expectations (and how we as designers create them for other people).

We know different learners learn differently, but how do different learners create works, get inspiration, or decide products or services are right for them? The customer journey changes for different types of learners. This week we look at how we use wish lists, how we solve problems, and how we buy things, both products, goods, and services.

Is it right to have work from home when not everyone can? How do we resolve moral questions about fairness in a post-COVID world? This week we explore post-COVID work, thinking about how local governments, small businesses, and larger businesses, including tech companies, can navigate questions of costs, morals and what values are worth paying for.

How do things work out for successful people? How do you make things work out for yourself? Is it positive psychology, or can you actually influence outcomes just by trying to make it happen? We explore these questions, and others, in this episode -- though we start off with Divya doing an amazing job of explaining nuclear physics! Like who knew that every element with an atomic number higher than lead was likely to eventually break down into lead! :-)