Call me a designer, an author, a mentor, a strategist. Strip all four away and something still stays in the room. Call that the aura.

I'm gaurav

Twenty-six years in. Still the same job — I design the thinking, not just the thing.

On the recordThe CHILD Model — a 2026 preprint on the framework

A cleaning company that talks in numbers.A café that sells feelings.A registry that lets strangers verify each other.None of it looks related. All of it is the same job — figuring out what people actually need before they know how to ask for it.

Gaurav Yadav seated in a living room, wearing a CHILDISM t-shirt. A copy of A CHILD in Us stands on the shelf behind him.

That’s the book on the shelf. The framework’s on the shirt.

Twenty-six years in, and the thing I keep relearning is that the best thinking doesn’t look like work. It looks like a five-year-old asking why for the fourth time in a row — and not being embarrassed about it.

Most designers stop at the pixel. I push through to the logic.

  1. 01

    Strategy

    Deconstructing a wicked problem into logic that can actually be solved.

  2. 02

    Design

    Translating that logic into interfaces people don’t have to think about.

  3. 03

    Develop

    Rapid prototyping and front-end architecture that survives contact with the browser.

  4. 04

    Optimize

    Reading heatmaps and analytics to remove cognitive load, not add polish.

  5. 05

    Automate

    Turning what worked into a system that runs without me in the room.

Most projects need two or three of these. Some need all five. I built the CHILD Framework because I got tired of explaining the difference by hand every time.

My Philosophy

Great design isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about understanding people and their needs. I approach every challenge with empathy, innovation, and a commitment to creating solutions that matter.

  • A Human in the Design Loop

    Design begins and ends with people. By keeping humans at the center, I create experiences that truly connect and evolve with their needs.

  • Human-Centered Design

    Design serves humanity. By placing people at the heart of every decision, I ensure my work aligns with their aspirations and challenges.

  • Human-2-Human Empathy

    Empathy isn’t a value on a slide — it’s a mechanism. Seeing a problem through someone else’s eyes is usually where the actual insight was hiding the whole time.

  • Collaboration is Key

    Great ideas come from everywhere. Co-creating with diverse perspectives enriches the design journey and its outcomes.

  • Iterate, Improve, Evolve

    Design is never done. Feedback and iteration drive solutions that stay relevant and impactful in a changing world.

  • Ethical and Inclusive Design

    Integrity isn’t a checklist item, it’s a design constraint. Privacy, inclusivity, and accessibility aren’t things I add at the end — they’re things I design around from the start.

The long way round

2000 — 2010

The Builder

Learning the internet as it was being invented.

  1. 2000

    Micromark Technologies

    Founder, Creative Head

    Aug 2000 – Jan 2016

    Founded it and ran creative for sixteen years.

  2. 2002

    National Gallery of Australia

    Exhibited

    2002

    Designs on Indian miniature paintings, Canberra.

  3. 2003

    Victoria & Albert Museum

    Exhibited

    2003

    The miniature painting work, London.

  4. 2003

    British Library

    Exhibited

    2003

    Same body of work, second venue of three that year.

  5. 2003

    Ashmolean Museum

    Exhibited

    2003

    Oxford. Three institutions, one year, one body of work.

  6. 2004

    Shifted to Bangalore

    Packed the practice into a car and drove south.

  7. 2005

    LERN

    Web Manager

    Jan 2005 – Jun 2013

    Eight years, remote, before that was normal.

  8. 2005

    Got married

  9. 2006

    Cellulartraders.com

    Web Designer & Webmaster

    Feb 2006 – Sep 2009

    A B2B platform on mobile products and ecosystem.

  10. 2007

    Became a father

    The research for the book started here, unknowingly.

2010 — 2020

The Strategist

Where the question changed from “does it look right” to “does it hold together.”

  1. 2010

    Kloudo.com

    Founder, Product Creator

    Feb 2010 – May 2016

    Second company. First one that was a product rather than a service. an Enterprise 2.0 SaaS platform for knowledge management and collaboration.

  2. 2010

    EABS

    Visiting Faculty

    Aug 2010 – Dec 2011

    Teaching forced the vocabulary that later became the framework.

  3. 2013

    Redwood Algorithms

    Product Design Consultant

    Jul 2013 – Jan 2014

  4. 2013

    SiliconIndia

    Recognition

    2013

    Named Top 25 Web Designer of Bangalore and Top 100 Mobile App Designer of India.

  5. 2014

    Manthan Systems

    Creative Consultant

    Nov 2014 – Jan 2016

    Now Algonomy.

  6. 2015

    proveit.in

    Product Creator, Ideator, Strategist

    Feb 2015 – Aug 2018

    A registry that lets strangers verify each other.

2020 — Present

The Alchemist

The thing and the thinking, finally the same practice.

  1. 2016

    idaete innovation

    Founder, Ideator & Creative Director

    Aug 2016 – Present

    a living, always-evolving repository of ideas.

  2. 2019

    The CHILD Framework

    Designed

    2019

    Five cognitive instincts: Curiosity, Heuristics, Imagination, Laconic, Deductive.

    The CHILD Framework mark — five letters, each labelled with one cognitive instinct.

  3. 2025

    IIT Bombay eCell

    Entrepreneur Mentor

    Jan 2025 – Present

    Mentor; Illuminate Workshop, NMAMIT Nitte and other events.

  4. 2025

    A CHILD in Us

    Published

    2025

    The Creative Thinking Handbook. Bestseller in Creativity & Self-Help.

    A CHILD in Us: The Creative Thinking Handbook — front cover, a boy looking up through large yellow letters spelling CHILD.

  5. 2026

    The CHILD Model

    Published — preprint

    Sep 2026

    The framework restated as an argument: five phases as one recursive loop, and which of them AI can actually take. Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22687069.

    The CHILD Model preprint — title page, Zenodo, September 2026.

  6. 2026

    Think Better

    In progress

    2026

    The Thinking Leader’s System.

    Think Better: The Thinking Leader’s System — cover in progress.

The thinking, written down.

A CHILD in Us: The Creative Thinking Handbook is the manuscript version of every “why does this work” conversation I’ve had in twenty-six years of client meetings. It isn’t a design book. It’s the operating system underneath one.

Front cover. A CHILD in Us: The Creative Thinking Handbook by Gaurav Yadav. A boy looks upward through large yellow letters spelling CHILD, each letter labelled with a pillar of the framework — Curiosity, Heuristics, Imagination, Laconic, Deductive.
Contents page, listing the Introduction and the opening Curiosity and Heuristics sections, above a line drawing of seven figures whose shirts spell out the book's title.
Page 3. A scatter chart adapted from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, plotting core skills for 2030 — Creative Thinking, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning, and Empathy and Active Listening all sit in the top-right quadrant.
Page 4, opening the section titled The CHILD Framework: Rediscovering Your Inner Superpower. Below it, a diagram of the CHILD Loop running C-H-I-L-D across the top, through Explore, Spot Patterns, Generate Ideas, Simplify and Refine, and Test and Prototype, then looping back via Repeat, Application, and Reflection.
Page 5, defining the first three pillars — Curiosity as the seed of creative thinking, Heuristics as the art of simplifying complexity, and Imagination as the fuel for creativity and innovation — each illustrated with a portrait of a boy.
Page 6, defining the remaining two pillars — Laconic as the art of eloquence and persuasion, and Deductive as an anchor grounding decisions in logic — followed by a section asking why the inner child is the right metaphor.
Page 7. A circular diagram setting the CHILD Creative Thinking Framework alongside the natural cognitive journey of a child's mind, running curiosity to exploration to creativity to communication to logic around a photograph and line drawing of a boy's head.
Back cover. Endorsements from William A. Draves and Howard Stephen Berg above the line Don't Just Think Harder. Think Smarter., a summary of the CHILD framework, and the five pillars shown as portraits.
A CHILD in Us — eight pages. Drag a corner to turn.

Get the book Read the framework

Preprint · Zenodo · September 2026

The same model, with its homework shown.

A CHILD in Us is the practitioner's version — written to be useful on a Monday morning. This is the other version: the model stated as an argument, positioned against design thinking, dual-process theory, and the stage models that came before it, with its own limitations declared rather than buried. Same five phases. A different burden of proof.

The CHILD Model: A Five-Phase Cognitive Loop for Creative Reasoning and Its Division of Labor with Artificial Intelligence

Five capacities usually studied one at a time — Curiosity, Heuristics, Imagination, Laconic expression, Deductive reasoning — treated not as separate traits but as phases of a single recursive loop, where verification regenerates the curiosity that opens the next cycle. The paper derives a diagnostic vocabulary from the loop's architecture for naming how thinking fails, and argues that generative AI currently performs the two compressive phases and shares the evaluative one, while the two expansive phases stay human-anchored — a division of cognitive labour that predicts a specific, phase-located atrophy risk under heavy reliance.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.22687069
Type
Preprint, version 1.2
Published
10 September 2026
ORCID
0009-0009-0908-0207
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Derived from
A CHILD in Us — ISBN 978-93-343-6149-0

Read the paper Download PDF

Cite this

Yadav, G. (2026). The CHILD Model: A Five-Phase Cognitive Loop for Creative Reasoning and Its Division of Labor with Artificial Intelligence (Version 1.2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22687069

Got a thing? Let’s make it thinking.

What do your friends call you?

Hey {name} — how do I reach you?

What can I help you with?

Pick as many as apply.

When suits for a call?

Pick any. I’ll send an invite, not a booking link.

Anything I should know before we talk?

your Imagination, my Design & thinking.

One slot, Q3