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In conversation with Editor Ankur Sharma, The News Strike, Shanoo Bhatia, Founder and Director at EuMo, highlights how “design intelligence” is emerging as a core business strategy by integrating strategic thinking, behavioural science, and experience design to drive tangible outcomes beyond aesthetics. She explains that when design begins with defining the brand, decoding human behaviour, and is executed as a scalable system, it transforms from a cost center into a lever for growth, perception, and valuation.
Citing projects like Destination Manipal’s visitor experience centre and workspace design for Reliance Jio, she notes that immersive, multi-sensory environments can directly influence engagement, conversions, and cultural alignment. According to her, the future of design lies not in aesthetics alone but in its ability to deliver measurable business results through intentional, outcome-driven experience systems.
How is design intelligence emerging as a core business strategy, beyond aesthetics and branding?
At EuMo, we've always operated on an applied process we call Design Intelligence: design is most powerful when it begins with strategic thinking, is decoded through behavioural science and activated through experience. The sequence matters. Define the brand, decode human behaviour, design the experience, enable the system at scale. When you work this way, design stops being a cost and starts being a lever for growth, perception and valuation.
The organisations that understand this are asking us to make intelligence visible.
"Design that begins with strategy and ends with experience moves a business towards its ambition."
How can organisations translate customer, employee, and visitor experiences into measurable business impact?
This is the question that separates EuMo from less experienced design firms. Experience is an ecosystem and systems produce outcomes.
When we designed the Destination Manipal visitor experience centre in Jaipur, the brief was directly about conversion, turning curious visitors into committed students. We built an immersive, multi-sensory narrative environment that placed prospective students inside the Manipal story. The result was a measurable rise in engagement and a proportionate increase in applications. Academicians began calling it a benchmark.
When we worked with Reliance Jio to translate their brand into physical workspaces, the metric was whether Jio's own teams could feel the ambition of the brand they were building daily. On completion of our intervention, the MD who spearheaded this project told us that the response from teams was extremely positive. That cultural alignment made it tangible.
There is no ready formula, but a tenacious belief that every touchpoint, physical, digital, human must be designed with an outcome in mind. Not aesthetics. Outcomes.
As a woman leader, how do you see women shaping organisational culture and driving systemic change?
I'll be honest, I never set out to be "a woman leader." I never even considered gender as a barrier to leadership. However, as the conversation about women in leadership positions has found traction, I have also begun to see that the two are inseparable in ways I didn't fully understand when I started.
Women in leadership tend to bring something that organisations desperately need but rarely name: the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it. To read a room beyond its stated agenda, to its undercurrents. To build systems that are both strong and humane. These are strategic competencies.
At EuMo, our culture is built on asking uncomfortable questions before accepting comfortable briefs. That's not a gender trait, but in my experience, it is a deeply feminine instinct to not let the surface answer be the only answer. The organisations I see changing most meaningfully are the ones led by people, men and women, who prioritise listening before directing. That is where systemic change begins.
What are the key lessons from working with India's leading corporates that have stayed with you?
Three lessons.
First: every great brief is hiding a deeper question. The client who walks in asking for a new logo is almost always asking: "Do we still matter?" Your job is to find that question and answer it through strategy and design.
Second: trust is the actual deliverable. When Dr Swati Piramal said our logo had "a soul", that wasn't about the logo. That was about months of listening, probing and refusing to settle for the obvious. The work earned that response because the relationship made the work possible.
Third: scale changes nothing about the fundamentals. Whether the client is a 150-year-old institution or a first-generation entrepreneur like Rahul Bazaz at Stone Shippers, the human desire to be seen, understood, and represented authentically is identical. Design that honours that desire works, at any scale.
How are founders today shaping the future of business in India, particularly in experience-led industries?
India's founder generation is building with an urgency and intentionality I haven't seen before the start-up wave in the industry. Beyond business, they are seeking to build categories. And increasingly, they understand that the experience of their brand is the brand.
The founders I work with who get it right share one trait: they think of design firms as a strategic partner. They show up to briefings with questions. They challenge us and they expect us to challenge them back. The best work we've done at EuMo has come from founders who refused to let anything trite or comfortable be the brief.
India is at an inflection point, where global markets are watching domestic brands with genuine interest. The founders who invest in experience-led differentiation today will win markets and define what their categories look and feel like for the next decade.
"The founders building the future are asking what their company feels like from the inside and from the outside."
In a digital-first world, how can brands ensure human-centred design stays at the core of their strategy?
By remembering that "digital-first" does not mean "human-last."
The risk I see in many organisations is that the speed and scalability of digital tools convinces them they can skip the slow, uncomfortable work of actually understanding people. You cannot. You can automate delivery. You cannot automate empathy.
Human-centered design is not a methodology. It is a discipline of curiosity, a refusal to assume you know what your audience needs before you've genuinely observed, listened and been surprised. At EuMo, our Design Intelligence framework always begins with decoding behaviour. Not surveys. Not assumptions. Actual behavioural patterns. That insight is what makes the digital layer meaningful rather than merely functional.
The brands doing this well are the ones where technology serves the story, not the other way around.
What defines the true essence of EuMo and what sets it apart in the evolving design and experience ecosystem?
EuMo is short for Eureka Moment. That name was a deliberate declaration of intent. Every engagement should produce a moment of sharp clarity for the client. A moment where the organisation sees itself, its audience, and its ambition with new eyes.
What sets us apart is, I believe, the refusal to separate thinking from making. We are strategic enough to sit in boardrooms and challenge long-held assumptions. We are craft-focused enough to obsess over the precise weight of a typeface or the exact texture of a spatial surface. Most importantly we bring experience of over 20 years in multi-disciplinary and integrated design systems. Most firms are one or the other. We insist on being all of the above.
Twenty years in, I still get excited by hard briefs. By clients who don't yet know what they need. By the messy, demanding, deeply human process of making intelligence visible through design. That restlessness, I think, is what EuMo actually is.
If your organisation is standing at an infection point and you're wondering whether design can move the needle, I'd love to have that conversation. Challenges are still my favourite briefs!
