Manmeet Singh

Every gurudwara has an open kitchen. Anyone who walks in gets fed, and everyone sits on the floor at the same height to eat. The part I grew up watching was the back of it. Onions being chopped at five in the morning. One person washing steel plates for two hundred. Nobody's name on any of it. The kitchen is called langar. The work is called seva: service you give without payment, without credit, and without asking who deserves it. Sikhi is built on it. It is also the first service I ever studied.

My first job was experiential marketing, over 80 brand experience curations: Zomaland, Myntra, Himalaya and more. I was designing entries, queues, crew briefings, and the feeling of a crowd, with the customer at the centre of all of it, and I did not know the industry had a name for that. Comic Con ran alongside, eight years as a volunteer. A fan walks in and the day feels effortless. Behind it, a hundred volunteers, a briefing rewritten twice, and a badge queue somebody fixed three times before doors. Service design, before I knew the words.

Once I knew the words, I went and got them properly. Two years at MIT Institute of Design, and soon I was already doing more projects: a longevity centre, global health programs across four countries, internal tools, product design, and a learning platform I co-founded. Physical spaces and digital products, designed as one experience. Some people would see chaos and ambiguity and I'd see the next version of something. The industry has a few names for what I do and I don't fight any of them.

Research stayed the core because of where this page started. People first is not a method I picked up, it is the kitchen. It runs through everything I have done: contextual inquiries in people's homes in rural Karnataka, field studies from Haryana to Maharashtra, walkthroughs of services before they open, workshops where I take teams through design thinking and user research or just design sprints for co-creation. And because the problems arrive vague, I hold the outcome open. A bit of futures thinking, then whatever the work points to: a report, a tool, a prototype, a working application. The artefact is decided by the problem, not by habit.

Vague problems, researched, shipped.

Vague problems, researched, shipped.

Where the seven years went

Noora Health

Ultrahuman

Morff.io

MIT Institute of Design, Pune

Livtaar

Springboard India

Tessarakt Experiential

St Joseph's College of Commerce