Hello Humblebee.

My name is Bharadwaj Kulkarni, but my friends have called me “Bawa” since I can remember. So please, call me Bawa. I’m very excited to be applying to the Service Designer position at Humblebee!

Three years ago, I moved to Munich to do my masters in industrial design at TUM after having studied mechanical engineering in India. The course was challenging—especially because the medium of instruction was German that I had to learn quickly—but it was life-changing. I’ve seen myself evolve from a mechanical engineer to an industrial designer to an experience designer to what I can only call a “holistic designer”. Aside from the regular lectures and courses, every semester we were encouraged to work with real world start-ups and companies, on real world problems. During the evaluation of our projects, the question asked was often not what we designed, but why we designed it.

In the last three years, I’ve worked on multiple projects that have been wide-ranging in terms of their deliverables. Each project had its own requirements, and I was encouraged to push past the competencies I came in with. I’ve worked on a film/augmented reality museum installation, the industrial design of a robot arm, an animated product explainer video for a robotics company, the user interface of a web app for an IoT startup and developing a methodology for researching the emotional aspects of sustainability. I’m currently working on the UI/UX design of a podcast app for “power listeners”. I had to learn most of the hard skills required for these projects on the go. But when I look back, I realise that the common thread was that it was always about communication. Design is all about storytelling.

In 1966, Marshall McLuhan (one of my favourite old-school intellectuals) predicted that products would become services, that would people care about consequences after the impact, as McLuhan put it. Instead of people caring about just buying and selling products, they have begun caring about the consequences of the products. Ever since, I decided to move away from mechanical engineering, I’ve noticed that I’ve been constantly climbing the Ladder of Abstraction: from hardware engineering to industrial design to exhibition design to UX design and communication design. The logical next rung of that ladder is Service Design and I hope to climb it with Humblebee.

All of these projects that I’ve talked about doing were done in multi-disciplinary teams (except Highlighting Audio). I’m a naturally curious person, which I find almost always leads to empathy. I enjoy seeing patterns in other fields and spotting the same ones in my interests. This means that I’m drawn to not only understand other points of view but also to help people voice these points of view. I like being in a culture where everybody looks to succeed together. From going through your work and talking to my friends in the design community, this is the culture that I expect to find, and I’m very excited about it. Ever since I’ve considered moving to Sweden, I’ve been following Humblebee. I even sent in a speculative application in February. So I’m really glad that you are now looking to expand, especially because I’ve moved to Gothenburg.

I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you soon. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Best regards,

Bawa Kulkarni