uncovering what matters.
Hi, we’re Karana! We help higher educational institutions by using Human-Centred Design (HCD) and Pretotyping to gain a deep understanding of customer problems, pain points and overall experience to help you solve your biggest organisational challenges.
what we do.
We take a customer-centric approach to raise the voices of all stakeholders within universities, TAFEs and more, highlighting their experiences to explore solutions that will really make a difference.
How do we do this?
Through co-design (active stakeholder collaboration), we use HCD to identify core issues and generate creative and innovative ideas on how these might be solved. Then, we start the pretotyping process—a form of rapid experimentation—to test ideas before implementing them to make sure that they are worth investing in.
We provide your team with:
HCD & Pretotyping expertise
In-depth training and mentoring in these methods to build your team’s innovation capability
Project management expertise
Professionally managing your project through all stages from planning to execution to deliver change and help your team realise real-life benefits
Practical participation
Confidence and experience as your team learns by actively doing the work and not passively listening to concepts
who we are.
We’re a Canberra based team with 15+ years of experience in higher education and large organisations. With a passion for innovation and getting to the heart of what matters, we absolutely love working with ‘change agents’ — people who want to take action and are committed to solving problems for their customers and people.
about our founder
Our founder and director, Ravinith Prasad, has a profound passion for problem-solving and making a difference. With his extensive background in project management and technical coordination, he has a deep understanding of the systems and nuances of large-scale organisations like universities and the higher education sector. He knows just how these institutions must navigate processes, governance structures, and manage complex stakeholder relationships to get things done.
Rav created Karana with a goal in mind: how can we embed changes in higher educational institutions that truly make a difference to their students, staff and other stakeholders while overcoming the bureaucracy of these medium and large organisations? And how do we achieve this while maintaining our people-centric, collaborative and values-driven mindset?
our values.
At Karana, we like to take action and get things done. After all, ‘Karana’ means ‘doing’ or ‘taking action’. These are the values that drive everything we do to get to the heart of what matters in your business.
relationships are key
HCD is built for people, and ongoing collaboration plays a significant role throughout the process. We focus on not just completing projects but also placing importance on educating our clients through mentoring, coaching and upskilling.
continual impact matters
We don’t just aim to show value and benefits in an immediate sense. Instead, we focus on gaining momentum, driving success and embedding long-term mindset changes within project teams and beyond.
we focus on the work
We understand the challenge of implementing processes in organisations that already have countless new initiatives on top of their core business. We focus on the work so that it doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day, and our projects can be embedded with ease.
HCD and pretotyping in action.
You may be asking, what are HCD and Pretotyping anyway?
HCD, or Human-Centred Design, is all about creating solutions that are (you guessed it) centred around people. It’s about putting aside 'what we know' and instead listening to our customers, staff, peers, or other key people in the organisation to hear and understand their experience.
Pretotyping is the cousin of prototyping, but instead of building a product or service and hoping it works out, we first test to see whether the idea actually has any validity. Pretotyping helps us challenge our assumptions and opinions by collecting our own data and testing ideas with customers to see which ones are worth investing in and which ones are a no-go — saving a lot of time and money in the process!
kind words from those we’ve worked with.
our work.
We know how great HCD and Pretotyping are, but let's give you the evidence! Check out our work below to see how these methods have helped various institutions be the best versions of themselves.
See what our clients had to say about their experience working on a consultation project with us.