Gaurav Singh

N2 screening room

In 2013, during the first semester of our postgraduation in Innovation and Experience Design at Srishti, Prakhar, Swati, and I worked on our first project together. We finished a working concept in a few days, and we were proud of it. What mattered most only became clear later: the team and the way we collaborated were the real start. We spent two years at Srishti exploring what it means to design and having long, meaningful conversations. Our undergraduate backgrounds were different, but our energies synced, and we became a collective. By March 2015, close to finishing, we were talking through each other's plans. One of us was thinking about a job; the rest of us were unhappy with how interaction and experience design, and design in general, were treated in the country. There was an opening there worth taking.

Attempt one. The idea of M56 took shape, and we started by rethinking how design is perceived in India and beyond, and questioning the methods behind it. Over the next couple of years we worked out a philosophy and tried to turn it into a company, running several projects, some that worked and some that didn't. Our first effort was a learning space, started in late 2015, to open up new avenues in learning and design thinking for creatives. Its first program ran creative-coding workshops for about six weeks, with little to show for it. We discussed and questioned everything but struggled to hold an audience. After trying several ways of running the space, we gave it up and decided to start again. We could see our own mistakes: we didn't coordinate well, and we often had different plans in our heads.

Attempt two. In 2016 we started fresh with an experience-design studio in Jaipur, aimed at designing digital experiences for small and medium enterprises. We began through personal connections, and the people we met had little sense of what design was for; there was hardly any appreciation for it. I soon realised we were heading the same way as before, though we kept hoping. We were on different pages again, each trying to sustain it our own way. It ran for a year and got us little.

Reorienting. We did learn something. We started asking whether we could take business out of design altogether. Doesn't too much business-driven design defeat the point of it? How far can you push design so it genuinely answers needs rather than a business motive? We had personal challenges too, tried to keep them off M56, and ended up working from three different cities with clashing schedules. Even so, we were more sure than ever about rebuilding it from scratch. We were never short of ideas, and we never struggled to accept each other's. Where we failed as a team was the logistics: we couldn't anticipate them, and we couldn't execute the way we needed to.