Impact Interview: Mansi Gupta
Name: Mansi Gupta
Role/Function: Founder, Unconform Studio
What She’s Currently Working On:
I am currently building Unconform Studio – a design firm making Design for Women mainstream. Having been at the intersection of women, impact, and design for several years, I realised that while there are so many initiatives to close gender gaps across the world, there isn’t an active design practice for women. Today, most products and services that are designed for women target them as consumers (such as beauty, clothing, or reproductive healthcare apps). But, there is potential for much more. Through Unconform, I hope to provide insights, tools, and resources so that all of us, including men, can actively and intentionally Design for Women. At the moment, in addition to supporting client and project teams committed to designing for women, I’m moving this work forward in a few ways:
I write Unconforming, a newsletter about design and women
I host Design for Women Conversations – a monthly, learning series in which practitioners share insights exploring one central question: how might we actively and intentionally Design for Women?
I listen to a lot of women via our Labs projects – design research is foundational to Unconform. I launch crowd-sourced research projects from time to time to make sure all women’s voices can be heard.
1. What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social impact?
Having grown up privileged in India, I am not sure I had an aha moment. Rather, it has always been "a knowing” – that since I have grown up with so much in a country where more than half the population has a tiny fraction of what I have, giving back would be an important value in my life. And yet, I went to work for Google right out of college, so I guess social impact wasn’t on my radar right away. But, it came back to me during design school, and many of my projects often had a women’s and/or social impact lens. A couple of years later, when I launched TRMTAB, a sustainable goods brand, I used part of the funds to send ten factory employees’ daughters to school for a year. Also having seen my father start a non-profit in his 50s, 20 years into being a businessman, showed me that we can live many professional lives. So, when I moved back to India in my mid-20s, I knew that I wanted social impact to play an even bigger role in my life and I decided to give up tech to work in social impact.
2. How did you break into the social impact space?
When I was looking for my first job in social impact, I had recently moved back to a country I hadn’t lived in for over eight years and had never had a professional network in. All I knew was that I wanted an impact role. Reflecting on it now, there were a few factors that helped me move forward:
One of my mentors at the time asked me: do you want to be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond? For me, it was the latter, and through that conversation, she pushed me to look for spaces that weren’t already saturated with design-led impact. This is a question I always carry close to my heart. (There’s no one right answer!)
Sometimes I would feel so passionate about wanting to work in social impact that I would apply for any role that came my way. That was unfortunately not a great strategy for me. Once I became clear about the who, what, and why, I was much more intentional in where I applied and was able to find the right role.
Finally, since I was in a new place and was surveying potential employers anyway, I decided to write an article about the design-led social impact in India. This gave me a reason to reach out to folks for coffee chats and helped me build the relationships that eventually led to my first role.
3. What most excites you about the social impact space right now?
I am really excited about the ways the social impact space is growing. When I was in college, it was largely called “working with NGOs or non-profits” and since then, it has transitioned from social change to social impact to social innovation and led to a rise in social enterprises. It is wonderful to see the traction social impact has gained in just a decade and this gives me a lot of hope. There can always be a downside to this popularity, and I have often been among those who question, “but is it really impactful?”, or among those who might criticize companies that hide behind greenwashing. And while we always have to be careful of this, it’s exciting to see the new ways in which it is manifesting. Specifically, in the women’s space – which is so diverse and can always use more support – Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Women, has given rise to new perspectives in the ways the women’s space is being discussed. That the book was an eye-opener even for women, shows me that there is so much room for us to experiment, and that is really exciting.
FOR MORE “5 QUESTIONS” INTERVIEWS ALONG WITH CURATED NEWS, JOBS AND INSIGHTS FROM THE WORLD OF CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY, SUSTAINABILITY AND SOCIAL IMPACT, SIGN UP FOR THE RECONSIDERED NEWSLETTER.