Design Better · 2026-06-25 · 44 min
Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment - deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as a personal learning loop. That instinct took her from a bachelor’s in design inside one of India’s most prestigious engineering colleges, where almost nobody understood what design was, to a research role at Carnegie Mellon where she studied health info needs for low-literacy users in rural India, to Autodesk’s bio-nano innovation lab building molecular visualization tools for scientists - and eventually to Google, where she joined the Next Billion Users team. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: That team’s mission was to ask an open question: where would the next wave of users come from, what did they need, and what products didn’t exist yet to serve them? Niyati ran immersion sprints in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Mexico - shadowing users, building prototypes in the field, testing them in the wild, and bringing those insights back to a team that was building products like Camera Go and Google Files from the ground up.
Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens: authors of WAIL on the constraints that led to timeless designs for Prestige Records58 / 100Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haulBonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard NoteTina Roth Eisenberg: Creative Mornings founder on building communities that run on trustPaul Ford: Writer, developer & "fun Cassandra" on why everything is changing (but not how you think)