About Me

Hi, I'm Shanker Kartik Iyer. Call me Kartik. I'm a product designer and design engineer, presently available for full-time work in Toronto on-site or hybrid, or remote elsewhere.

My design origin story is a Web 2.0 one. The summer of 2007, fresh out of high school and few months from starting my engineering degree, I spent my days tinkering with Photoshop and blogging.

Learning to build and customize Wordpress templates, I discovered Dave Shea's CSS Sprites: Image Slicing's Kiss of Death. Everything clicked into place. And ever since I haven't been able to tell design and engineering apart.

After a decade-long design career in New Delhi, I moved to Toronto in 2023 and joined Spotwork as their lead product designer. A year in, at the recommendation of our departing head of engineering, Ryan, I took on the PM role as well and led the team through a ground-up rebuild of the platform.

In November 2025 I took a break from work and flew to India to marry my partner of three years, most of them spent on opposite sides of the world.

Upon returning to Toronto in February 2026, I made a deliberate choice not to apply for jobs right away. Instead I decided to build, to work out what remains when interfaces assemble themselves on demand.

My bet: Design in the agentic era

As agent-computer interaction becomes as ubiquitous as HCI, the affordances and heuristics must adapt to serve both kinds of users on the shared surface.

That moves the work upstream towards information architecture and error design. Rather than designing the artifact, the designer's job becomes defining the constraints it operates within. Design systems become interface management systems.