DHABA

experience artisan

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Society & Culture
Biweekly

Inspired by the punjabi roadside resting place, DHABA is a podcast that invites pause, perspective, and peppered wisdom. Each episode brings together cooks, caretakers, bridge-builders and makers whose craft speaks louder than credentials. DHABA is a resting place for restless minds, where experience is the spice and conversation the fuel.

11h ago

Akanksha D, Ritika Krishnan and Joel Mathew Designing With AI Abroad

Send us Fan Mail AI is moving fast, but the more interesting question is what it does to us as designers. I sit down with, Akanksha (now Lead Product Designer in Toronto), Ritika (now studying Strategic Product Design at TU Delft in the Netherlands), and Joel Matthew (now in London after an MSc in Creative Computing). All three started their design journeys in India, and all three have chosen to shape their careers abroad, which makes their perspective on culture, technology, and identity unusually grounded. We talk about what changes when you stop designing for a place on a slide deck and start living in it: different mental models, different levels of trust in technology, and different expectations of safety. From responsible AI to the practical reality of regulation and governance, we explore how culture shapes adoption, and why “trustworthy AI” is not a slogan but a set of design decisions users can actually feel. Akangsha shares how agentic experiences push design beyond UI into permissions, approvals, oversight, error recovery, and consistent governance patterns that can scale across an organisation. Then we get honest about the messy middle: tool overload, frustrating AI outputs, hallucinations, and the temptation to use a model for constant validation. We unpack why speed is not the whole value of AI-assisted prototyping, how polished results can hide weak thinking, and why critical judgement, context, and collaboration still decide whether a product works. There’s also the human side of moving abroad, including stereotypes, belonging, and how to tell the difference between unfamiliarity and unfairness. If you care about AI in design, product design foundations, service design, agentic AI UX, and building a global design career from India to Europe or North America, this conversation will give you practical language and sharper questions. Subscribe, share this with a designer friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway: what do you think still matters most in design when AI gets more capable? Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Sep 21

Hakka Girl Keeping the Chinese-Indian Story Alive

Send us Fan Mail A face that gets called “not Indian”, a childhood rooted in Kolkata, and a culture that can vanish without anyone announcing it. I’m joined by Joanna, better known as Hakka Girl, to talk about what it means to be Chinese-Indian and to grow up with one foot in Tangra and the other in the wider world that keeps trying to simplify you. We dig into identity and belonging in a way that goes beyond food content. Joanna explains how Hakka language, traditions, and community memory are fading as families move and younger generations stop speaking. She shares why she started recording stories online, and why social media can act like a modern oral history, especially while she is also navigating the emotional reality of being a caregiver for her mum. We also face the parts people avoid: racism, sexism, and the history of the 1962 Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan, where Chinese-Indians were detained because of fear and prejudice. From there we return to Indian Chinese food, tracing how classics like Manchurian chicken took shape, and why Tangra chilli chicken tastes different at home, right down to technique and that unmistakable aroma. If you care about diaspora stories, Kolkata Chinatown, Hakka culture, and the real roots of Indian Chinese cuisine, this conversation will stay with you. Subscribe, share the episode with someone who loves food and history, and leave us a review with the story you think deserves to be preserved. Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Sep 4

Karen Jones Design That Actually Works

Send us Fan Mail Pretty screens are easy. Designing for reality is harder. We sit down with Karen to talk about what changes when you stop treating design as decoration and start treating it as the connective tissue of an organisation, especially in financial services where internal processes, regulation, and risk are part of the product whether you like it or not. You’ll hear why partnering with legal, risk, and compliance early can save months of churn, build trust, and create better outcomes for customers and staff. We also go personal, tracing the roots of great design back to books, libraries, and the craft of writing. Nostalgia turns into something practical: storytelling is how we translate deep user research into decisions that stakeholders can actually act on. Karen shares how art education opened doors, how identity and belonging shaped her path, and why creative work still gets pushed aside when budgets tighten, even though experience design is what people feel every day. Then we get into the messy present: AI in UX design, the race to shiny tools, and the dangerous comfort of fast answers. We challenge the idea of AI “hallucinations” as a quirky bug and look instead at what they often reveal: poor data quality, duplicated systems, bias, and a lack of critical thinking. If you care about service design, data governance, technical debt, and sustainable product strategy, there are hard truths here, plus practical ways to stay grounded. If this conversation hits home, subscribe for more, share it with a designer or product leader who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What part of modern work do you want us to unpack next? Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Aug 21

Brian Hoadley What Happens When You Remove The Boxes

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to stall your career and your creativity is to split yourself into neat little boxes and then defend the walls. We sit down with Brian Hodley, a former telecoms engineer turned design and product leader, who now balances organisational design and digital transformation consulting with publishing urban fantasy novels as B Scott Hodley. The thread running through it all is delivery: doing the work, learning in public, and staying grounded in outcomes rather than appearances. We dig into how Brian’s engineering mindset shaped his approach to problem solving, why early web days rewarded broad skills, and what he’s learned from years of turning around teams in distress. Then we switch gears into the writing craft: why “pantsing” left him with unfinished manuscripts, how plotting and a clear story arc helped him finish, and how UX and information architecture transfer surprisingly well into building a series. If you’ve ever wondered how to protect time, find balance, or turn a long-held creative ambition into something real, the practical lessons are here. From there, the conversation widens into modern delivery culture: innovation theatre, product teams drifting into pure delivery management, and agile ways of working that can remove the satisfaction of finishing something meaningful. Finally, we tackle AI strategy, generative AI, agentic AI, and the expensive reality of token costs. The message is blunt and useful: AI accelerates whatever you already have, so process debt, tech debt, and design debt will surface faster unless leaders define real use cases, redesign workflows, and maintain oversight. If this resonates, subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a colleague who’s wrestling with purpose and delivery, and leave a review with the biggest idea you’re taking away. What’s one “box” you’re ready to tear down this week? Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Jul 6

Charmaine Wyland Customer Journey Fixes That Actually Stick

Send us Fan Mail AI is the new shiny object, but shiny does not equal useful. We sit down with Charmaine Wyland, a customer journey optimisation consultant with a career spanning e-learning, early e-commerce, advertising art direction, product design and major rebrands, to unpack what actually makes experiences work for real people over the long term. We dig into what end-to-end customer experience means beyond the interface: ownership across teams, operational hand-offs, retention, loyalty, and the small bits of friction that quietly haemorrhage money. Charmaine explains why rebrands can be a rare chance to fix the whole system, not just the visuals, and why so many organisations still misunderstand UX as “moving pixels” rather than shaping behaviour, trust and outcomes. Then we tackle generative AI and agentic AI with a clear-eyed lens: the hype cycle, the profit imperative, and the human cost when trust collapses under AI-generated content. We talk governance, data integrity, security, compliance and accessibility as the guardrails that make AI worth building at all. One line sums it up: stop decorating your house with AI if you have not sorted the foundations. We also zoom out to careers and the design job market, including cycles, differentiation, moving countries, freelancing to learn a new market, and why gaps on a CV are normal in unstable industries. If you’re building digital products, leading design, or trying to stay employable while the industry “winters”, this conversation will help you reset your priorities. Subscribe, share with a mate, and leave a review: what’s the one foundation you’d fix before adding AI? Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
May 14

Johnson Kanjirathingal A Traveller’s Guide To Indian Football Culture

Send us Fan Mail Indian football doesn’t feel like one story, it feels like thousands of local ones happening at once. That’s why we sat down with Johnson Kanjrethingal, founder of Sportfolio Productions, to trace the game where it actually lives: in schools, village tournaments, crowded stands, and communities that keep playing even when the system makes it hard. If you’ve ever wondered what “football culture in India” really means beyond highlights and hot takes, this conversation gives you a vivid, on-the-ground answer. We dig into Sportfolio’s documentary series Traveller’s Guide to Indian Football, filmed over nearly two years across multiple states. Johnson breaks down what makes each place distinct: Kolkata’s deep identity and history, Punjab’s athlete-first mindset and academy pipeline, Hyderabad’s fading heritage that still refuses to disappear, Kashmir’s football as escape and opportunity, and Sikkim’s festival-like tournaments plus a rare look at Baichung Bhutia’s journey. One of the most memorable moments comes from a plan that fell apart and turned into the purest footage they captured: a group of 40+ mums in Sikkim training for an Independence Day final created so they could have fun and compete. We also get straight into the difficult questions around the Indian football ecosystem: the confusing pyramid, league uncertainty, sponsorship hesitation, and the leadership vacuum that leaves clubs, federation, and commercial partners pulling in different directions. Johnson shares why youth wins like Minerva Academy’s international results matter, but also why the real test is converting talent into senior success. If you care about grassroots football, Indian football documentaries, football sponsorship in India, and what it will actually take to build a sustainable future, you’ll leave with sharper context and more hope than you expect. If this conversation adds something to your view of the game, subscribe, share it with a football friend, and leave a review so more people find these stories. Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Apr 22

Vito Turitto Reading The Pulse Of Prices

Send us Fan Mail Most people glance at a price and move on. Vito Turito looks at that same number and sees a heartbeat: volatility, risk, and the hidden story of how markets actually feel. From our shared days around energy benchmarks to his work as a quant strategist and published researcher, Vito breaks down why the “vibration” around price often matters more than the price level itself. We get practical about what it takes to turn modern market data into decisions you can stand behind. There’s no shortage of information in crude oil, diesel, LNG, freight rates and derivatives, but there is a shortage of interpretation. We talk about statistics, econometrics, options implied volatility and why volatility is both threat and opportunity for commodity trading, hedging strategies and real-world risk management. We also tackle AI in finance head-on: what machine learning is great at, what large language models cannot do without training, and why paywalls and intellectual property make a fully open “all-knowing” model unlikely. Vito shares a more realistic future: internal analytics, private agents, and humans staying responsible for the “why” when things go wrong. If energy and shipping markets feel more chaotic than ever, this is a clear guide to thinking about uncertainty with sharper tools and stronger discipline. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who lives with price risk, and leave a review with your biggest question about volatility. Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Apr 6

Shriya Lohia - India’s Teen Formula 4 Trailblazer

Send us Fan Mail A 17-year-old racing driver from India looks you in the eye and says her goal is Formula One and suddenly your idea of what “normal” looks like changes. I’m incredibly proud to be joined by Shriya Lohia, a female Formula 4 driver who started racing at nine after a family road trip detour into a go-karting track and never looked back. She’s already made history in Indian F4, and she talks with refreshing honesty about what it takes to keep progressing when the sport is expensive, the pathway is uncertain, and the stereotypes still hang around. We get into the real craft of racing, not just the headlines. Shriya explains why driver-engineer communication is a competitive weapon, how small set-up changes matter in a spec series like Formula 4, and why her dad’s best advice is to “go annoy the engineer”. Off track, she shares the routines that keep her steady on race weekends: music that flips her mindset from pressure to focus, plus meditation and journalling to clear mental clutter before she straps in. Then we zoom out to the bigger question: what would it take for motorsport in India to truly scale and for Formula One to return? We talk fan culture, sponsorship, investment, the Buddh International Circuit dream, and why backing Indian drivers can be the catalyst for an entire ecosystem. If you care about Formula 1, Formula 4, women in motorsport, or the future of Indian sport, this one will stick with you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves racing, and leave a review with your take: what’s the single biggest thing India needs to unlock its motorsport potential? Support the show DHABA Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care

Inspired by the punjabi roadside resting place, DHABA is a podcast that invites pause, perspective, and peppered wisdom. Each episode brings together cooks, caretakers, bridge-builders and makers whose craft speaks louder than credentials. DHABA is a resting place for restless minds, where experience is the spice and conversation the fuel.

Creator

experience artisan
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

23
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2026 © 2025 Experience Artisan Ltd. All rights reserved.
Show Website

DHABA