The Brief Was Never Just the Brief
What working with Mann Talks, a mental health organisation, taught me about design, care, and the space between them.
Mumbai does not slow down for anyone; it is just the city’s nature. But somewhere between that pace, there are people carrying things quietly, just getting by, thinking that help is unavailable. And Mann Talks exists precisely for that moment when the weight becomes too much to carry alone.
Mann Talks is a Mumbai-based mental health organisation with a few different entry points depending on where you are and what you need. There is Mann Ki Therapy, which connects people with therapists for ongoing support. There is a helpline for when someone needs help right now, not next week. And there is Mindfulness, a separate but connected initiative under the Mann Talks umbrella, focused on building everyday mental wellness practices. Each of these serves a different kind of need, and together they form something closer to an ecosystem than a single platform.
My Community Project placed me inside that ecosystem. And what I thought was a fairly contained design brief; outreach materials, illustrations, branding support- turned out to be something much more layered like a well-bound book with a teaching on every page.
The first thing I noticed was how much was already happening that most people would never see. From the outside, Mann Talks looks like a website and a few social media handles. From the inside, it is a carefully woven structure, each part connected to the next, with different audiences arriving through different doors. Understanding that structure early on changed how I approached everything that followed.
The organisation’s current priority is deceptively simple: making sure people know it exists for them. But that is actually a hard communication problem. A lot of people who could benefit from what Mann Talks offers may not know where to start. Some may not feel like it is meant for someone like them. Some may not even know they need it yet. So every design decision carries a quiet responsibility, not just to an aesthetic purpose, but to feel reachable.
That is where design started to feel like translation to me. Mann Talks already had clarity of purpose. What was needed was a way to carry that purpose into materials that people could actually encounter, on platforms like WhatsApp, on Instagram, in their place of work, and much more.
Our role focused mostly on community outreach, with contributions to branding and illustration. That meant thinking about people who were very far from a therapy waiting room. How do you reach someone in a remote area who may never have heard the word “mindfulness”? How do you write a WhatsApp message that does not feel clinical? How do you make an organisation that works with therapists also feel like something you could stumble into on a Tuesday afternoon? Mental Health does not need to feel like a task to cross off our to-do list.
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The idea we kept returning to was that Mann Talks is for everyone. And the communication had to actually talk for itself, even in the visuals.
One of the constraints that shaped my thinking was the limited access to direct user feedback. Working within a mental health context means that the people most affected are also the most protected, rightfully so. At first, this felt like a gap I could not design across. But over time I started to see it differently. When you cannot talk directly to users, you have to become more observant. You have to listen to the system itself, to the team, to the way the website is navigated, to the questions that keep coming up. You become a fly on the wall, and that is actually a form of research. Sometimes even putting yourself in the shoes of the user themselves; even if it doesn’t fit, there’s a takeaway there as well.
One of the most notable revelations throughout the project was that I was also trying to view the organisation, as well as the user, from a third person’s point of view. When in reality, for an organisation like Mann Talks, everyone is a user, including you and me. The point is to remain human and grounded, to design with and not for.
Speaking with Disket, the Director of Mann Talks, and Wardah, who helped us understand how people move through the organisation, was genuinely instructive. It shifted how we thought about the website, less as a portfolio, more as a first point of contact for someone who may be nervous. And social media, we started to see, was less about broadcasting and more about the hand that reaches out for those who need help or want to learn.
This project also made me realise something I had not quite articulated before: sensitivity is not a soft quality you layer on top of design. It is a structural one. When you are designing for people who may arrive with anxiety, hesitation, or grief, every choice matters differently. The colour. The word. The way an illustration holds itself on the page. Too polished and it feels untouchable. Too casual and it loses trust. The balance is narrow, and it requires more attention than most briefs ask for.
What I kept coming back to, from my first-year design methods learning and through this project, is that good design is often not about what you add. It is about what you hold back. A lot of the best interventions we considered were small. A reworded caption. A different illustration direction. A shift in how the Mindfulness content was framed relative to the therapy services. None of these were dramatic moves, but they were intentional ones. And in a context like this, intention is the work.
There is a line I have been sitting with since the project ended: design is everything people do not say out loud. In mental health communication especially, you are designing for the unsaid, for the person who has not yet typed their question, who is still hovering over their keyboard. Our job is to make it easier for them to land.
Mann Talks is trying to build that landing place. My small role in that was mostly about making sure Mann Talks feels like a hand reaching out to provide support, and that people are inclined to reach out and grab.
I came into this project thinking I would be making deliverables. I left it thinking differently about what design is for. Design is everything people do not say out loud. Its presence is subtle, just like mindfulness.
