2020 Year-End Notes to Self

Siddarth Kengadaran
3 min readJan 9, 2021

😷🧴👏✌️

Last year I started writing year end notes as reminder to myself about the things that happened in the year.

After a productive 2019, I had no clue that 2020 would be a unique year that would turn the whole world upside down. For 2020 I planned to rethink what I was spending time on earlier to more strategic. One of the plans was to make my community contributions more effective; I was planning to move the events I organize more into digital format to reach a wider audience and also to make it stay longer. Along with Sesha Devarajan we started Interactions where we wanted to capture candid discussions with people we admire.

We captured discussions with three awesome people from the design community,

We are planning to make more such conversations this year do follow and subscribe to interactions.

Blogs

Design Sprint

Understand Human Anatomy before XR Experience Design

Designing Spatial UI: Part 1

What is an Extended reality?

Designing Spatial UI: Part 2

UX is getting a seat at the SEO table

Designing Spatial UI: Part 3

Designing for Phone-based VR

Is the apple ecosystem getting ready for the glass?

An MR dream for the next billion

Using InVision for AR prototyping

Designing Spatial UI: Part 4

Designing Spatial UI: Part 5

Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction and where spatial computing is taking us to.

Designing Spatial UI: Part 6

Talks

Product Thinking

Why “Why” in Products? with @leanpitch

From looking into the box to out of the box at India HCI 2020

Designing for XR at UX-India

Learning

Books I read

“Design Values” by Balaram S

“Human Compatible” by Stuart Russell

“Indistractable” by Nir Eyal

“Life 3.0” by Max Tegmark

“Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear

Courses / Workshops

Product Manager Nanodegree program at Udacity

Manipal Innovation and Design (MIND)

How to Design for Augmented and Virtual Reality at the Interaction Design Foundation

Introduction to Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality

IT Ethics: Professionalism and Ethics in Computing

UX Design Masterclass

Transparency and Accountability for Robots and Artificial Intelligence Systems

Product Masterclass: How to Build Digital Products

Values by Design in the Algorithmic Era

Travel

There was not much travel this year due to COVID, but I had a couple of memorable trips both at the beginning and end of this year.

And after the lockdown and spending, most of the year at home ended this year with a trek to Sandakphu. For more travel stories follow me on Instagram.

As always, stepping into 2021 with a lot of hope. The journey continues……

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Siddarth Kengadaran

Product Consultant, Enabling teams to strategize and build with conscious intention. Currently exploring Spatial Computing (XR) and AI.