22: Kyoorius Designyatra Case study with Rajesh Kejriwal

Today I have Rajesh Kejriwal with us on Audiogyan. Rajesh is the Founder CEO of Kyoorius Group and a global director at Saffron, a brand consultancy founded by Wally Olins and Jacob Benbunan. Rajesh is a regular speaker at industry forums, panels and jury sessions at various festivals and awards. He started a platform to fuel a design movement in India, Kyoorius Designyatra, hosted and curated by him. It is now India’s largest design conference and has been rated as the best curated annual conference in the world since 2013. Today we are here to document Design Yatra as a case study and what has gone behind the scenes in the last 12+ years. I am sure you must have answered this thousand times, but just to set context for Audiogyan listeners, how was DesignYatra conceived and what made you conceive it? How did the name "DesignYatra" come about? What according to you is the importance of these design events and gatherings apart from empowering creatives to showcase their work and making attendees feel inspired? How do you decide on each year's theme? From "Design Empowers Businesses." in 2007 to "On the contrary" in 2019. and what the these for this year? What is the over all process of curating the speakers? What are few metrics on which a particular speaker is selected? I attended my first DesignYatra last year and it was really wonderful. Full of inspiration to do great work. However 70% of the speakers were non-Indian which made the work less relatable and more utopian for Indian developing country. What is going on when you wish to showcase this kind of work Design is a such a broad discipline. From Interior to textile to illustrations to industrial products. What sort of brief is given to speakers to make their work relatable to such wide ranging audience? Can you share few big challenges to organise this sort of an event when design has not reached that tangible projected outcomes which is possible in may be few other domains? You also don't have concurrent talks going around. Which is very unlike regular conferences. This seems to be a conscious call? Can you share your thought behind it? I was personally in awe when you spoke about how DesignYatra is handling the carbon footprint of such a massive 2 day long event. Can you tell us it in detail? What is the process and how do you reconcile it? Have you got any plans of making Designyatra more accessible to the design community? A wonderful talk last year by Ayaaz has less than 1K views, which is sad according to me. Lastly i would like to conclude by asking what's the story with changing venues and then finally in Goa? :) What are your future plans with DesignYatra and whom can we expect this year?