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How To Build A Great Design Team: Lessons From Indian Mythology
A definitive interview guide to finding the right designers to build an incredible design team.
We have been storytellers since the time it was fashionable to call caves ‘home’. We used stories as a medium to find not only meaning in life but our place in the cosmos. And we passed on the stories of mythical righteous characters from one generation to another so that people could imbibe their traits.
We use the same imagination — the one we used for mythological storytelling — to design, and create a better world for us.
“Design and Mythology are both media for storytelling that represent general cultural truths and their human meaning. Like design, mythology is a universal language by which to decode human culture.”¹
Design and mythology’s inter-twined cultural ancestry’s proof is that ancient Greeks even had a God for artisans, sculptors, or anyone with a feigned interest in artistic creation — Hephaestus²
But hey, this post isn’t about ancient Greek Gods. I want to stay closer to my cultural heritage and share the kind of designers we all need.
Lord Shiva, the destroyer & the transformer
When people hear ‘Shiva’, they visualize a blue skin ascetic with long dreadlocks, wearing tiger-skin clothes, and living in the snow-clad Himalayas.
But that would be staying on the surface of what Lord Shiva is all about. He is a powerhouse of energy, the protector, and has the power to transform the universe by destroying it.
A destroyer? Isn’t ‘destroyer’ a frightening trait for a designer? Not really, because transformation isn’t possible without an act of destruction first.
What I mean in the context of a designer is this: A designer with the ‘Shiva’ personality doesn’t get attached to their creation. They create designs, seek feedback, and don’t shy away from discarding their entire creation to start all over again. And that too…
