David Schafran

David Schafran is Cofounder, CEO at EyeNetra and Producer & Co-organizer at Game Based Design Events. He was previously Business Strategy Consultant at Catapult Design, Cofounder and President at Net Impact Chennai, and Fellow at Villgro Innovations.
 
David likes to design systems that improve life and collaborate with passionate people on solving big problems. Nothing academic here — he plays in both high level strategy and in the operational weeds. Simply put he makes things happen.
 
His goal is to improve the quality of life of millions of people in a direct, visceral way. In order to achieve this aim, he is striving to understand widespread, systemic problems that affect millions of lives, and then leverage cutting-edge technology, human-centric product and service design, and robust and thoughtful business models to solve these problems.
 
Drawing from a multidisciplinary background in business, anthropology, the environment, and design, David takes a systems approach to improving quality of life and engaging the world. He likes to take a game design lens to creating systems. A simplified version of his process is as follows: Immersion → Awareness of environment and all relevant stakeholders → Identification of problems/opportunities → Brainstorm and map out solutions → Analyze and Select Best Solution → Design, Prototype, and Test Solution → Iterate → Implement → Monitor (and then back to Immersion)
 
David is interested in meeting and collaborating with fearless, passionate, youthful, conscious individuals and teams on scaleable solutions to the world’s biggest problems. He is particularly interested in low cost point of care diagnostic and monitoring technologies that piggyback on mobile devices for consumer healthcare, and game design for health behavior change and education. He’s also interested in haptic organic/digital hybrid interfaces, big data health analytics, anything to do with the eye/perception/AR, cradle-to-cradle product development practices, holistic health, getting people fulfilling jobs, the future hardware app store, and general empowerment.
 
Read My experience as a Villgro Fellow – David Schafran, Practical “Design Thinking” Pointers for (Social) Entrepreneurs – David Schafran, and mHealth India: Untapped Potential & The Innovative Groups Paving the Way. Read his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed.