Unique Processes: Seeing Your Creative Way of Doing Through Analogies

What if we could interpret our creative process the way we interpret data?

We often document outcomes, but the real story of a project lives in the messy middle- the false starts, the sudden breakthroughs, the detours, and the moments of serendipity. What if we could see those moments more clearly? This session introduces a small part of the Unique Processes, a simple reflective tool that helps translate the invisible phases of a project into something tangible using analogy systems like recipes, films, and journeys.

Outline

We’ve all finished a project that felt like a "failed dosa", it looked good on the pan but it refused to come off the pan the moment you started pressing the spatula. But in the professional kitchen, a dish sent back isn't a catastrophe, it’s a data point.

Together, we will try a short 10-minute live exercise where participants take one completed project and map it through an analogy lens of a chef. No drawing skills or preparation needed- just a willingness to reflect and cook.

This talk moves away from "feeling" like we did a bad project and toward quantifying the work patterns of our creative and technical selves. We will explore how to treat our personal performance as a dataset, using analogies from the culinary world to map out our strengths, our "burn rates," and our “favourite recipe”.

We will explore how anomalies like friction points, unexpected shifts, and breakthroughs, can be used as anchors for reflection. Instead of analysing them directly, we translate them into analogies. Was your project like slow cooking a meal? or replicating Reynold Poernomo's dessert recipes. These metaphor frames help reveal what was overdeveloped, what was missing, and where transformation actually happened.

Using analogies helps you treat your mistakes or failures at stepping stones and rungs in a ladder for the next project.

Requirements

None. Just bring a memory of a project you’ve worked on- finished, abandoned, or ongoing.

Speaker Bio

Kasturi Katale is a design researcher and strategist interested in how people make sense of complexity, form unique approaches, and translate invisible processes into tangible systems. Her work sits at the intersection of design, behavioural thinking, and visual sensemaking, often exploring how reflection can become a creative practice in itself. This project has been done in collaboration with Aayush M. , Sooraj S under the guidance of Praveen Nahar, at NID Ahmedabad.