Tanvi Waghray, Experience Designer, Grainger

ID alum Tanvi Waghray (MDes 2025), Experience Designer at Grainger, shared her job-seeking and career experience with current students in an alumni panel on April 30, 2026. Tanvi provided answers to some additional questions via email. The following thoughts and opinions come from Tanvi and do not represent the views of her employer.

What are you doing professionally today?

I’m a User Experience Designer on the Digital Assistant team at Grainger, where I design AI-powered tools that support thousands of call center team members every day. My work sits at the intersection of AI, interaction design, and workflow strategy, essentially figuring out how humans and intelligent systems can work together with more clarity and confidence.

Can you describe your background and how you decided to come to ID?

I started out with a Bachelor’s in Interaction Design from PES University in India, which gave me a strong foundation in the craft side of design. Early on, I interned at the UNDP and a fintech startup called Prudent.ai, and those experiences opened my eyes to how design operates at very different scales, from policy-level impact to fast-moving product decisions. After a couple of years at Designit, working across industries, I realized I wanted to go deeper, not just execute on design, but understand the strategic systems underneath it. ID felt like the natural next step. The school’s focus on methods, systems thinking, and design at the organizational level was exactly what I was looking for.

How did you land at Grainger? What has surprised you?

Grainger came at an exciting inflection point; they were investing heavily in AI-powered tools for their internal teams, and I wanted to be somewhere that was genuinely grappling with what it means to design for AI, not just applying AI as a surface feature. The role on my current team felt like a direct extension of everything I’d been thinking about at ID.

What’s surprised me most is how much of design work is really about building trust with users, with stakeholders, and across teams. I came in thinking the hardest part would be the execution, but it turns out the most valuable skill has been communication, across the board.

How would you describe UX design today? Both at your organization and in the larger world?

I think UX is in a genuinely interesting and slightly uncomfortable moment. AI is changing what “interaction” even means, the interface is increasingly conversational, adaptive, and invisible. That puts a lot of pressure on designers to think beyond screens and focus on intent, context, and consequence. The field is expanding, as is the responsibility.

What is exciting you now in design? And what do you foresee happening next — for your own future, for design?

What excites me most right now is designing for human-AI collaboration, using AI as a genuine participant in workflows. The question of how you make an intelligent system feel trustworthy, transparent, and appropriately humble is one of the most interesting design challenges I can imagine working on.

For my own future, I want to keep going deeper into that space, understanding not just the interaction layer but the underlying logic of how AI systems make decisions, and how design can shape that. For the field broadly, I think we’re moving toward designers who are comfortable navigating ambiguity, within design problems and within evolving roles.

What would you tell emerging designers, or those graduating from ID today, about navigating their early careers?

The most valuable thing I’ve learned, and am still learning, is how to communicate design. Not just the output, but the thought process behind it. Why you made the decisions you made, not just what you made. That’s what builds confidence, and confidence in your work takes time.

Nobody expects you to walk in knowing everything. There are days you feel like you know exactly what you’re doing, and days where you absolutely don’t, and both are part of the same journey. I’m still on it.

Don’t underestimate cross-functional relationships either. Some of my biggest growth has come from sitting with engineers and ML [machine learning] and genuinely trying to understand their constraints, mental models, and ideas. Design doesn’t happen in isolation.

Lastly, it’s okay to be wrong, it’s okay to say the wrong thing, it’s okay to not know everything, the whole point is to learn as you grow.

What have been some of your biggest challenges, lessons, or proudest moments?

A real challenge has been designing in spaces where the technology is still evolving faster than user needs are understood. Working with AI means you’re often designing for capabilities that don’t fully exist yet, or that behave unpredictably. Learning to design with that uncertainty, rather than waiting for it to resolve has been one of my biggest lessons.

In your mind, what makes a good designer?

Curiosity first. The best designers I’ve worked with and learned from are endlessly interested in how things work, systems, people, organizations, and not just how things look. They know how to see the bigger picture while working the finer details to get everyone there.

What do you most value about your ID experience and why?

ID gave me a vocabulary in design. I learnt what it means to frame and articulate design in a way that’s accessible. Beyond the frameworks, what I found most valuable was walking away with the ability to articulate design decisions and advocate for them while staying rooted in context. I’ve seen firsthand how valuable it is to communicate design, and I learnt that at ID.

Where do you see design increasingly providing value or taking a larger role? How is UX evolving?

Design is increasingly valuable wherever complexity meets people, and that’s most places. Healthcare, financial services, government, enterprise software, these are spaces where the gap between how systems work and how people actually experience them is enormous, and that’s exactly where design can do its most meaningful work.

As for UX specifically, I think the role is shifting from being advocates for the user to being translators between humans and increasingly autonomous systems. That’s a different kind of responsibility. It means understanding not just what people need in the moment, but what they need to trust, to feel in control, and to make good decisions. That’s the work I find most compelling, and I think it’s only going to matter more.

Learn more about ID’s Master of Design (MDes) program.