Prior to TED, I've been a part of the IDEO CoLab community as a Fellow during their second and third cohorts. There, diverse creatives team up to dream the future of emerging technologies. Prototyping is a required skill. I also interned at Facebook as their first "Design engineering" intern. On the AI Design team, I blurred the line between engineering and design with my quirky, talented design team. At Stanford, I was able to work with and even lead teams inside large organizations such as the Ford Innovation Center, Hyatt Regency, Pear VC, and Cinder.

When I'm not learning a new JS tool or interviewing users, I'm cooking, playing trumpet, or listening to music. Read more...

I started my journey in design as an engineering student at Stanford. I did the startup thing: TAed for the Lean Startup class in the business school, built a project in the Pear VC garage program, worked at a YC-backed startup called Cinder, and finally interning at one of the large tech companies. Disillusioned with design thinking and looking to learn more about Design, I moved to Denmark to work at a traditional design agency. The danes taught me a lot about joy, cosiness, and the power of ritualistic celebration. Then, allured by NYC and the inspirational non-profit world of TED, I decided to move to Brooklyn to lead design on a new misinformation project being incubated there.

Going back further, my grandparents immigrated to the US from India in the 60s with less than $20 to their name. Both my grandmas often worked 3 jobs at a time and are a constant reminder of my privilege and how hard humans can work to make their family. Anand, means joy in Gujarati, and is also the town my mother grew up in. We are an interdependent family unit who expresses love through cooking and incessant worrying about each other.

Speaking & facilitation

• TED Design Sprint, Facilitator, 2020

• UXCamp DC, UX and Misinformation, 2020

• SCIDR Design Thinking Symposium, Designing a Healthier Internet, 2020

• FoodInno, Host and Director, 2019

• InnoSchool Austria, Mentor and Workshop Facilitator, 2019

• Frontiers in Education, Research Presentation, 2018

• Hongik University Korea, Food design research presentation, 2018

• TEDxWinstonChurchillHighSchool, Host and Organizer, 2014

About this site

This site is the culmination of two years of backburner pondering. Tools used to create this site include paper, pencil and Figma for design, Gulp for dev workflow automation, Sass for css preprocessing, Tilt.js for fun motion, aos.js for cutting edge animations, and swup.js for page animations. Typography is set in Fraunces and Roboto. Much of the interactions are handmade from the cursor-tracking face to the physics engine behind the magnets. This site was recently featured as a best website design by Design Rush for its experimental interaction features.

Thank yous

Thank yous: I'm humbled to have worked with amazing thinkers, professors, students, and mentors including but not limited to Barbara Karanian, Michael McWatters, Ge Wang, Eric Norman, William Ngan, Nadine Levin, Gavin McDermott, Joel Kwartler, Daniel Chan, Ashwin Agarwal, Jordan Collins and many other amazing thinkers.