Karya
Director of Design & Storytelling
2022 — 2025
Poverty disproportionately affects communities denied access to opportunity due to language, caste, gender, and geography. AI offers the possibility of large-scale work and wealth distribution by leveraging these very factors — multilinguality, hyperlocal knowledge, and context-specific skill.
Karya brings high paying, AI-enabled micro-tasks to communities who need them most — directly on their phones, in their mother tongue. At its core is a platform that supports complex task creation and deployment at scale, paired with storytelling systems designed for multilingual and multi-stakeholder contexts.
I joined the founding team and contributions included building the design practice and team around product design, User experience, testing & research, communication and storytelling from 0→1.
Stakeholders
Target Communities— Ensuring the mobile app is usable and accessible to people with low digital literacy in their own language.
Tech Clients— Strategic brand placement to demonstrate our technical prowess while placing impact and ethics at the centre of it all.
Funders & HNIs— Key communication efforts for fundraising and impact reporting.
Partners & NGOs— Training and outreach material that helped us partner with organisations already working with our target communities.
Government— Aligning with government initiatives and positioning Karya as a technical & operational partner.
Our Team— Designing material that brought about. a sense of Brand ownership and culture for the team as we grew from a team of 4 to 100 (and counting)
Key Outcomes Building an inclusive digital work platform grounded in multilingual design, field-tested UX, and context-sensitive communication
The Karya App — A Digital Work Platform Designed for Bharat
The Karya app was designed for users with limited digital literacy, combining multilingual interaction patterns, audio-assisted onboarding, and a task-creation system that supported diverse micro-tasks at scale. It became a reliable digital workspace for communities across India and grew to serve more than 100,000 users.
Field-Driven Research & Testing
Product decisions were grounded in structured field research, including four tests a year across in-person and remote sessions. A quantitative scoring matrix assessed heuristics, interactions, accessibility, and error prevention, supported by a field-testing guide that enabled consistent, decentralised user testing.
Brand & Storytelling
Karya’s communication system was built to work across languages and stakeholder groups—from global technology events to training sessions in remote villages. This included clear narratives, visual systems, and AI-enabled multilingual training flows that helped the organisation communicate with both partners and communities.
Check out the Karya App on Google Play Store-
