God created Humans, Humans created problems, Problems created a demand for solutions, This gave birth to Design Thinkers.

With the intention and belief for advocating the idea that - Design research at core can accelerate the impact that organizations and social enterprises are making and help them grow whilst preserving the quality of impact.

God created Humans, Humans created problems, Problems created a demand for solutions, This gave birth to Design Thinkers.

Ankita Mirani, a curious soul, found fulfilment in serving others with the help of design thinking. She later combined it by integrating it within social impact and working with purpose driven businesses by establishing the one-of-a-kind studio in India, The Social Innovation Studio.

Always being an out of the box thinker and having a knack for creativity and driven by purpose to do good. Ankita knew she wanted to create an impact by taking an innovative route, hence she enrolled herself in various projects and courses involving visual communication, interaction design, and service design during her initial years of exploration. Soon after this, she realized that working with people and creating impact through design was what intrigued her.

By now she knew it was very little about the “WHAT” but rather the “WHY” of the problem and exploring the complexity within it to come up with innovative solutions. 

Ankita found her sweet spot when she was able to interweave design and social impact. To get a holistic understanding she further pursued her master's degree in Research, Health Care, and Design from the Royal College of Art, London, with a vision of creating social impact in this world through design. 

After graduating she immediately returned to India with a burning desire to Start Social Innovation Studio in an effort to change the world one collaboration at a time!

The Gap and the Eureka Moment.

After a great amount of sensing the market and the sector she realized there was a huge gap between what design can actually do and what it has been used for in India. She figured out that India needs design thinking more than any other country because it has the potential to enhance the basic quality of life for people. Some of the world’s most influential companies like Apple, IBM, and Cred, have moved the design to the very heart of their operation. But there are very few players addressing first-world problems through design. Having realized that there is a micro-niche of organizations that work towards scaling social impact led to Ankita’s “Eureka” moment.

The Initiative - Social Innovation Studio

With the intention and belief for advocating the idea that - Design research at core can accelerate the impact that organizations and social enterprises are making and help them grow whilst preserving the quality of impact.

Ankita believes design thinking is one of the most powerful tools that can change the world. It is not about making things look aesthetically pleasing but the approach of keeping your user at the centre as you design solutions for them, it’s not just a tool but a concept, hence the term “design thinking”. It expands the canvas for design to address the challenges facing business and society; it shows how a human-centred creative problem-solving approach offers the promise of new and more effective solutions.

The process demands that you ask the right questions in order to identify the right problem to address before you even start thinking of the solution.  We must use it to solve complex social issues more often and the only way to do it is to collaborate with people who are already creating social impact. And that’s what the intention and vision is for Social Innovation Studio.

How big is the problem and how are we approaching it?

It's not just a big problem, but it's a "wicked one". The challenges that low-income communities face isn’t just big, they are quite complex too. These challenges are at an intersection of four paradigms: society, technology, economy, and ecology. Thus, making it difficult to find simple scalable solutions. Furthermore, the results and impacts of these complex problems are hard to document and quantify. Due to this, there are only a handful of people attempting to scale social impact in the first place. This reinforces Ankita’s idea of changing the world through design at Social Innovation Studio. No matter what the challenges might be, Ankita keeps pushing forward, having unshakeable faith in herself and her team to solve these challenges.

So how do we really build a well-researched design thinking based ecosystem?

We collaborate with non-profits, social enterprises, and purpose-driven organizations for projects around:

  • Design research to understand problems faced by their stakeholders. 
  • Intervention Design to solve problems across various mediums (program/workshops/apps/toolkits etc) to enhance & scale the impact the organizations are creating.
  • Communication Design to help organizations stitch their story by designing their website, social media, campaigns & fundraising events.

Furthermore, we hope to build a community of change-makers through our collaborations who will be able to solve problems with their design thinking skills.

People at SIS > Our existence!

At the core of our being, we are a curious bunch, always busy researching and hunting for the right problems to solve.

We’re empathetic and we really care about solving these problems, to do so we make sure we keep the people we are solving for in the centre.

We invite not just the stakeholders to co-create the solution but also organizations and experts like doctors, educators, or anyone who is a part of the ecosystem that can add value to the process. When it’s about maintaining a holistic approach and delivering solutions that are viable, feasible and desirable; we leave no stones unturned.  Ambitious as we are, we never stop until we have found effective solutions for our collaborators and stakeholders. 

Journey Ahead

To expand our tribe of changemakers, we are seeking to collaborate with experts from different domains and thematic areas working on innovative solutions. Our mission is to change the world one solution at a time by working with the best researchers, doctors, educators, engineers, artists, and other changemakers who are making a difference.

By designing great experiences, you won't just create an impact, but the highest possible impact. Moreover, using design thinking to create social impact is uncharted territory which Ankita and her team of Design Thinkers have already set sail for the land of social impact on their pretty little sailboat a.k.a The Social Innovation Studio.

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