Life & Work with Ajay Menon

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ajay Menon.

Hi Ajay, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in the city of Mumbai in India, where I grew up with monsoons, festivals, and a huge sea of people who never sleep. I grew up reading tons of comics and encyclopedias, geeking over new TV shows and movies, and learning to play the piano at a very young age. Growing up in Mumbai is definitely a big part of who I am, and has helped me develop curiosity, understand religious tolerance, question and accept diverse points of view or difference in opinions, and naturally motivated me to keep experimenting in life. There is this running joke in India that – ‘you first become an engineer, doctor, or a lawyer, before discovering what you really want to do in life’. That’s exactly what happened to me, I started off as an electronics engineer in 2014. But as a kid, I was also good at making creative artworks, sketching, painting, and used to be involved in organizing cultural festivals and designing magazines in my college in India.

So after I graduated engineering, I wanted to explore my creative side and discover myself, which eventually brought me to California in 2015. I was searching for the perfect blend between my technical problem-solving skills and my passion in art, and I found the answer in Design. I joined a master’s program called ‘Transportation Systems and Design’ at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. It was a new field which was accepting students with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. Through various academic and sponsored projects, I ended up amassing a blend of knowledge ranging from industrial design know-how to user research and interaction design skills. As a designer, I was always drawn to challenges touching on AR/VR, mixed reality, transportation, logistics, aerospace, and solving complex user experience problems. The beauty of design is that there are lots of commonalities between the different design fields, and the base knowledge and principles are often similar.

In fact, you can often draw multiple parallels between industrial design, transportation design, and interaction design, and even from fields like animation, entertainment or game design. After graduating, I worked freelance and contract for multiple mobility startups in and around LA, and overtime, I decided to specialize in experience design for products and emerging technologies. I currently work as a Sr. Experience Designer at Autodesk to shape the future of emerging technologies like AR, VR, etc. and design new extended reality (XR) workflows for multiple product offerings.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I believe that there is no such thing as a smooth road, especially when it comes to discovering yourself and your true passion and purpose in life. You as a person is always living through ups and downs, evolving, learning, failing, failing, growing, and improving. The only way to achieve any goal is to work hard, embrace whatever life throws at you, learn from your failures, and keep pushing forward! A few milestones which have helped me shape my career and life at various points are – feeling utterly lost after engineering and having to do a ton of soul-searching to find what I exactly wanted to do in my life, learning to believe in myself and trust the process when it comes to any new design project or work, learning to work in a multidisciplinary and multi-cultural environment and knowing where and how I fit in, hustling multiple jobs to manage my finances while paying back my student loans and taking care of my family back in India, discovering what kind of designer I am and which work environment fits me best, being an international on a Visa in the US and loosing my stable full-time job to Covid-19 in 2020, and then having to find another full-time gig in less than three months, and finally adjusting to work from home as a designer which is a challenge in itself!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Professionally, I consider myself to be a multifaceted and flexible designer drawn to challenges touching on AR/VR, mixed reality, transportation, logistics, aerospace, and complex user experience problems. I love sketching, and I have a real passion for just visualizing things. I have done a diverse range of projects, mainly because I was fortunate enough to be involved in many different fields and industries. During my academic times, most of my projects were transportation related. To name a few, I did a sponsored project with Uber, where my team was tasked with envisioning the future of on-demand urban air transportation. My master’s thesis project was based around aerospace, where I explored ways to mitigate the social isolation that astronauts face in space because of being so secluded and disconnected from Earth.

I ended up designing a virtual reality environment for them to connect with their loved ones and friends back on Earth. I did a DesignMatters fellowship where I got to work with the City of Los Angeles’s Innovation team, which is an in-house design team working directly for the Mayor of Los Angeles and funded by Bloomberg. It was a truly interesting project based around designing for a 21st-century police force and reforming the LAPD. Another internship I did was with BMW Designworks, where I worked on multiple projects for internal clients like BMW, as well as external clients ranging from John Deere to Northface to Boeing. Since graduating, I have worked for a couple of mobility based startups and design consultancies in and around the west coast. Most recently, I was associated with MagicLeap where I worked as a product experienced designer to shape the future of augmented reality (AR) and spatial computing.

And after I lost my job to Covid-19 in April, I fortunately found a new home. I currently work remotely as a Sr. Experience Designer for emerging technologies at Autodesk, as a part of their XR Core team. I work with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, developers, project managers, designers, and artists on a daily basis. Some of my main responsibilities would be to craft design directions and specifications that support an iterative development process for designing AR/VR experiences, come up with new ideas and concept and visualize them, generate design artifacts like user stories, ideation sketches, wireframes, high-fidelity mock-ups, task flows, storyboards and prototypes to support the communication, evaluation and implementation of new design solutions, assist in customer research and analytical activities, and often present the design to a wide range of audiences including users, management, engineering, and managers. As a designer, I believe that good visuals combined with great story-telling can be immensely powerful and immersive to an extent that they can easily influence change in the world when used properly. The favorite part of my job is getting to do collaborative brainstorms with my team for coming up with new ideas and concepts and then visualizing those concepts using different design tools to tell a story.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
Some of the most important lessons that the whole Covid-19 crisis taught me is to value the people in your life, appreciate the small things, and not take anything for granted. Covid forced the tech industry and many others into complete work-from-home mode since March, and everyone expects it to stay that way at least for another couple of months. As a designer, it felt very weird at first to work remotely and not be in the same room with your colleagues to brainstorm and ideate or user test an idea. And worse than that was dealing with the inevitable blending of work, personal, and family life. Therefore, Covid also taught me to cultivate some balance in my life and not let work devour everything else in my day. And I believe it also taught me better time management and personal hygiene!

Contact Info:

• Email: contact@ajmenon.com
• Website: www.ajmenon.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aj_menon_official/