Meet Kiran Jesudasan | Head of design

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kiran Jesudasan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kiran, what habits do you feel helped you succeed?
Running and cooking.

Immigrant life isn’t easy. Navigating the isolation, the existential dread of visas, paired with the uncertainty of working in a startup albeit an extremely well-managed one is extremely stressful. I’m not the most extroverted person and tend to prefer being in my little corner. Drawing the line between the things you can control and can’t wasn’t the easiest of tasks for me and all of these put together for me can become a bit much – it was very easy for me to get stuck in my head filled with anxiety-riddled worry. Running has been one of the most positive things I’ve ever stumbled into, it helped me feel a bit more connected to my community, imparted a love of exploration, and was a great way to burn through the anxiety. Of course, when I got into it, I was horrible. But it was never about being faster or being able to finish a marathon or anything like that, it was just a great thing for me to do and a wonderful way to experience a new place, a new street, or a new city.

Also cooking. Being able to craft a meal, from scratch for me is a great form of therapy, and helped me be in the moment, especially after a long day. It’s something my mom had drilled into me since I was a kid. She’d cook but it was my job to cut all the veggies. It doesn’t matter if they were perfectly cut or not, it just needed to be done. It helps me contextualize the day and is a great way to just pause.

Finally my cat, Meeshka. Not a habit but taking care of her has turned my life upside down. Meesh was a stray, barely surviving in the parking lot of a Panda Express. And when I found her I fell in love instantly. Being very introverted something just clicked when I met her and she’s become a best friend.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I lead design at a start-up – drisk.ai. We make a tool that allows you to control the data that ultimately controls any AI. You do that by controlling the data it’s been trained on. I’ve been here for 5 years, and it’s been one hell of a journey. Startups are complicated beasts. They provide new challenges every day, and it always keeps me on my toes. Getting to be creative with some of the smartest AI engineers out there is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve gone through. But like everything the road was not straightforward.

My background was in transportation systems design – ie working with massive, complicated organizations and ideas. I’d worked with Uber’s advanced design team, a few civic transportation authorities around LA, – very large established organizations with very established ideas of design, research, and how they all fit together in the larger picture. When you are at the inception of the company what do you do? What’s most relevant? I felt like there was a lot I could offer but which would be most relevant at this super early stage?

Work can range from outreach materials, illustrations for presentations or working deeply with the product and imagining what new features ought to be implemented and working through the experience of using that. I was fortunate through school to learn this process intimately for mobility, – study people, see what problems they have, and build solutions for them, not yourself. But how does it transfer to the AI space, something so ethereal? Personally, this has been the toughest set of questions I’ve had to navigate but what’s helped ultimately is having a very creative and supportive team who are always open to having a quick ideation session. Being someone with both dyslexia and dysgraphia, a lot of the AI concepts were very much beyond me, but the team and ultimately taking a few online courses continue to help me overcome that hurdle.

I think being able to ask yourself the question, how can I most contribute, and be very honest about where you feel the direction of the professional space is moving towards is an important consideration in the intersection of 2 fields – design and AI development. Everything is new and things are evolving so fast and there’s a lot of opportunity for creatives to shape how things can evolve!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Several people have helped me along my journey, and it would be almost impossible to list them all but a few do stand out. So, let’s start from the beginning.

I loved drawing and making things with Legos as a kid, we didn’t have much growing up but there was always an abundance of Legos, drawing books, and non-drawing books too. It was just my mom and I for most of my childhood, my dad passed away when I super young. She recognized that I would lose myself in making things or sketching out every little thing I saw at a train station, or while boarding a plane, all the little vehicles scurrying around, all part of a much larger system doing their thing so that we get to fly around. Into my teens, I wasn’t a really great student and most of my textbooks were covered in doodles of spaceships, planes, and really anything other than what I was supposed to be learning about. I was never pressured to do better but just to try my best. I was given enough space to try and figure out what I wanted to do and ultimately made my way into the design field, and even though I was raised by doctors in a very medical-oriented community, and my mom – not knowing a thing about design, did her best to educate herself about it and supported me in any way she could.

I was super fortunate to have gotten into the Artcenter College of Design in Pasadena in CA for grad school. This super prestigious institute was the place I had dreamed about getting into since hearing about it. For a kid coming from rural India though it wasn’t cheap and my family moved mountains allowing me to come here. But a couple of professors and schoolmates also helped a ton. The program I got into was transportation systems and design. This was a very new program looking at much larger questions than what transportation design typically looked at. Instead of just pretty cars, we were looking at what the role of accessibility is for communities facing imminent gentrification, how negligent infrastructure prevented public transport adoption, how cities evolved, and what the different modes of transport allowed a person to do within that city. Hell, even how would cities look like when flying cars are around? But navigating it for someone who had a much narrower worldview of design was hard. My fellow student cohorts provided invaluable advice and a way of structuring something so amorphous.

And finally my colleagues at dRISK.ai where I currently work. I joined an AI start-up right after graduating, with literally 2 other people. And this was the biggest learning crucible I’ve ever faced. I’d only ever worked with designers till then and now this was something completely different. What was design’s role in an early-stage start-up? Do all the processes and techniques I’ve learned, ideal for working in large teams have a place where everything is so fluid? Where what you’re making can change tomorrow, whether there will even be a tomorrow or not. Over the last 5 years being able to examine these questions surrounded by such an intelligent yet kind team is something that I’m extremely grateful for.

Finally, Lord of the rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the most powerful forces in my life. It taught me no matter how small you think you are, or inconsequential, you can stand up to any height and strive for things that otherwise may seem impossible. Great read, great movies, and all in all, an amazing universe that I’d recommend for everyone.

Website: drisk.ai

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kiranjesudasan/?hl=en

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiran-jesudasan-96486ba0/