COBALT+ International

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

Sudebi Thakurata Co-founder SUDEBI THAKURATA IS A NARRATIVE DESIGNER, CREATIVE FACILITATOR, EDUCATOR, FUTURIST & WRITER.

SHE DESIGNS EXPERIENCES, ENGAGEMENT & ENVIRONMENT THAT ALLOW PEOPLE TO THINK, HAVE DIALOGUE, MAKE THEIR THINKING & INTERACTION VISIBLE

CO-FOUNDERS Probal Banerjee Co-founder Probal Banerjee is the co-founder & CEO of the transdisciplinary design-led collective, D.epicentre. He works on the interfaces of business, learning, design, analytics, innovation & storytelling.

“What exactly is your favourite subject?” was the most difficult question for Sudebi when she was a child, as the world never seemed to be disjointed, fragmented with boxes of subjects, disciplines or domains.

A true polymath, one who loves to travel between the parts and the whole and one who constantly transcends boundaries of all kinds, to Sudebi everything is interconnected.

As a trans-disciplinary practitioner who seamlessly keeps wearing many hats, her challenge remains the same: to answer the question “What exactly do you do?” Someone who truly embraces the VUCAness of the world, much before the term started being used, Sudebi always loved to imagine possibilities and inter-weave perspectives, practices and processes when she met Probal.

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Passion & Business Sudebi always loved to imagine possibilities and inter-weave perspectives, practices and processes when she met Probal.

Sudebi Thakurata

“Why can’t businesses consider emotions, ethics and experiences?” was the quintessential question that drove Probal all his corporate life.

Being conflicted between purpose and profit, and questioning the limitations of this duality, once he met Sudebi, his quest for answers became a search for more questions and together they started walking towards the inquiry, on a difficult path of curiosity, discovery, unlearning and transformation.

It was their mutual love for “meta”, the mutual aversion to follow formulas and templates, the joy of noticing little details, the affinity for narratives, the thrill of challenging wicked problems, empathy for people and most importantly an urge to help create some impact in many walks of life, that led to D.epicentre Consulting.

D.epicentre is a unique collective that the couple started to break boundaries of all kinds, while struggling against all odds, on top of one person pursuing a full-time job, one quitting a highly paid job, both pursuing higher studies, both facing a lot of personal challenges and very few people understanding or even supporting the vision.

Probal Banerjee

D.epicentre is a four –year old collective that brings people together, sharing a common vision about bringing in shifts. The shifts could be in patterns of thinking and behaving and ways of seeing oneself and the world.

LEARNING AND INQUIRY This happens by connecting the dots and looking at the larger picture while not overlooking the small, delving into a process of inquiry in an experiential, context-specific, transformational way that can blend economy with ecology, self with the society, past with the future, content with context and concept.

At D.epicentre, they see narratives everywhere and all their work is a way of storytelling: systemic, service-oriented, visual, performative, product-based, experiential or digital.

They believe in being and doing, practice as a method of research, body as a site of learning, design as a process of facilitation and not just an outcome with fixed forms. People, especially the users of their design, are the most important to them and so is their context. For no two individuals or organisations, do they design the same experience. Process and aesthetics are woven into their practice.

D.epicentre is a true un-organisation that really believes in the power of learning and inquiry, being a collective that crafts experiences from a variety of signature pedagogies, methodologies and philosophies.

Their uniqueness is in many aspects.

One of them is not having a fixed team which has only a rigid signature style or aesthetics. They believe in diversity and customise or individualise the design based on the need of the users, clients and the context. So their strength lies in the plurality of thoughts, multiplicity of perspectives and diversity of creative approaches, which help in maintaining each project to have its unique characteristics, completely different from any other project that the team has done before, and yet their network of members are all handpicked and their common principles, values and philosophy have an underlying similarity, enabling their work to maintain its quality and standard.

That’s why it is important for them to understand the requirements of a project frame the problem the project is addressing and therefore create the most appropriate mix of diverse people who would pursue an inquiry instead of fixing a problem. They want to avoid homogeneity or uniformity not only in terms of style, form, solution but also thinking. Building upon collaborative feed back where they involve the users in the storytelling is an integral part of D.epicentre’s process. Their design journey is not user-centred but userinvolved and user-driven, not rigid and templatised but emergent.

Process and methods are very important for D.epicentre which help in bringing in clarity and coherence. Often they engage in radical collaborations, where they bring together people with varied backgrounds and viewpoints, to create insights. They focus on conveying meaning in their work narratively and emotionally,

ENGLISH & DEVANAGARI

contextualize it so that the design becomes a journey from information to emotion, whether it is in systems, services or something else.

The name D.epicentre with the D being both English and Devanagari (a script in India), symbolising both global and local every character including the “.” symbolises a core aspect of this movement. Through the process of ‘D’esign, they walk towards gaining ‘e’mpathy, see and listen to multiple ‘p’erspectives, as they ‘i’nterweave various elements with the hope of creating ‘i’mpact / ‘e’pics of our times, as metaphors, ‘i’mmersing in the ‘c’ontext, the background in mind, while finding experiential ‘n’arratives, bringing in ‘t’hinking, ‘r’esponsibility/’r’egeneration and ‘e’nquiry’ at the heart, through a process of creative collaborations.

The ‘.’ is the metaphor of a pause, slowness: reflective and reflexive inquiry that focuses on the self, the individual, situating it within the world. ‘Epic’is a metaphor of the kind of ‘i’mpact that can be ‘i’magined or ‘i’nter-woven while ‘Depic’ting the ‘centre’ of any problem, visualising and framing problems before designing solutions.

Vision The vision is to become: ‘the epicentre of design ’depicting the centre, the core of everything, keeping ‘epic’ (the eternally relevant-timeless) in the ‘centre’ of their work. While they aim to connect the dots, and believe in a creative unity, which the “maatra” of the Devnagari “Da”, a line signifies.

Universality of design is embedded in their ways of bringing in inclusion and wellness, but local, traditional wisdom is what they draw upon.

Depicentre loves framing, speculating and innovating about the futures, while unpacking the past, driven by a process crafted in the present where design is used as an approach as opposed to an outcome, with deep immersion in experiences. It is strengthened by complex systems thinking by navigating seamlessly between the parts and the whole, by observation, visualisation, interconnections, collective sensemaking and co-sensing. Art is used for its power to make sense through metaphors and not just sequential, logical and Cartesian ways.

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If you want to know more about D.epicentre please follow them on LinkedIn