Designing audience oriented innovations
Prashant Coakley is a Graphic Designer currently located in Helsinki, Southern Finland, Finland working in SOK. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design from National Institute of Design in India, a Master’s Degree in Design and Visual Communications from University of Art and Design Helsinki and a Minor in International Design Business Management from Aalto Yliopisto in Espoo, Finland. He has worked in key roles of a UX Designer, Strategic Designer, Brand and Web Designer, Typeface Designer, Art Director with various enterprises like SOK, Documill, Airbus Operations, Aalto Ventures Program, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Idea Works Design and Strategy Pvt. Ltd and ArunVerma Designs respectively.
His speciality includes branding, user testing, information architecture, user research, customer journey mapping, visual design, wireframing and prototyping. The diversity of his roles allows him to understand product development from various stages of Design, Business and Technology. Coming from a small town in Chaibasa (Jharkhand, India), Prashant grew up interested in art and craft, curious about building things. Design to him means making things functional, practical and being able to cater to a larger audience. A firm believer in bottom-up approach, he is open to various perspectives. As a designer he feels being empathetic to the user is crucial to bring in innovation. His thesis at NID was about creating the OlChiki script for endangered Santali language which created a ripple among the research community about a tribal language in need of a script. For many years now, his thesis has gotten many working around Santali language script. The project helped him realise the importance of developing scripts for indigenous languages as a medium of knowledge sharing and documentation that might get lost or diluted with time.