The Caravan Participants

Adrian Cockle is a senior digital professional with twenty years experience leading projects and teams based out of UK. He is now an independent professional after nine years as the Head of Digital at WWF, delivering global campaigns that have helped persuade the Thai Prime Minister to make their ivory trade illegal, kept a British oil company from drilling for oil in Virunga National Park and demonstrated mass public support for action on climate change.

Career highlights include half a million people tweeting about endangered emoji, launching Sony Bravia with 250,000 bouncy balls, winning an effectiveness award for the 2008 WWF-UK web site redesign and creating a global charity partnership with a World Tour professional cycling team with a single well-timed tweet.

Annette Mees is a director and artist based in the UK. She is currently a Creative Fellow of WIRED and The Space. She makes interactive experiences that explore big ideas about how we want to live together and the futures we want to create. She was trained at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Netherlands, while living in the country’s hackers HQ. This combination led to an artistic practice focussed on live connections and digital possibilities, with the audience as its hero.

She is currently developing The Almanac of the Future a global inter-generational project that will work with 15 and 65 year-olds on each of the continents to create a digital almanac planning possible journeys to futures we want 50 years from now. She works as a consultant on interactive projects, advises and speaks nationally and internationally on audience interaction, the integration of live and digital work and how to make beautiful experiences that allow for a real dialogue with audiences.

Bobby Richter’s deep interest in people, interactive design, and art connects him to large, international communities of organizations and volunteers to build and design products, conduct research, run workshops and events, and realize community growth at Mozilla. After nearly 10 years of experience in the software industry, designing and building interactive experiences and content creation tools, Bobby’s focus has shifted to understanding human nature and community. He is working on understanding and analyzing intricate relationships of people and technology around the world as they relate to positive social impact. He truly believes that achieving great success requires having a great time. He is based in Toronto.

David Ascher’s focus for the last several years has been to explore the relationship between technology and society and culture, whether that’s in the field of email and messaging, social media, learning to code or local content creation tools. He currently serves as an executive for the Mozilla Foundation. His previous experience ranges from academic research in cognitive science to software engineering to book author and programming language trainer, and holds French, Canadian and US passports. He advises startups and emerging leaders in a broad range of fields and is based in Vancouver.

Emily Pickett is a mixed media visual artist based in Vancouver. Currently she is using found organic materials such as bones and driftwood in combination with textiles and traditional needlework to explore the recurrence of patterns across the natural world. Combining organic objects with the traditions of needlecraft yields deeply tactile pieces that encourage seeing familiar aspects of nature in a new way. Prior to discovering her artistic vision, Emily earned advanced degrees in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. In an earlier life, she was a C programmer.

Gary Stewart is an artist interested in how socially engaged arts practice can cross international and cultural boundaries, stimulating shared authorship through mixing material created through various encounters across multiple sites. His work explores new models of practice especially those that are investigating the capacity of digital arts to create active citizenship. His sphere of activity is within, between and across the unique spaces emerging in public spaces, art galleries and museums formed by the shifting intersections and blurred boundaries between audiences, authorship and participation.

Gary is senior Creative Associate on new creative projects combining youth and public engagement with experimental media practices and technologies at Proboscis an independent artist-led creative studio involving innovative partnerships in diverse fields based out of London. Within academia he is an external Phd examiner for School of Performance and Screen Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University and Artist Associate at People’s Palace Projects an arts organisation at Queen Mary, University of London who have established a Creative Lab in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Irini Papadimitriou is Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A and responsible for programmes such as the annual Digital Design Weekend, a big-scale event that brings together artists, designers, engineers and scientists presenting intersections of art, design and technology; the monthly Digital Futures and the monthly Digital Design Drop-in, a show & tell and pop up studio event in the V&A galleries presenting projects on the intersections of art, design, craft and technology.

Irini is also Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans, an arts organisation presenting innovative work and supporting artists working with technology, where she is curating the exhibition programme and an annual Digital Performance festival. Irini is also one of the organisers for London’s first Mini Maker Faire and Maker Assembly.

Jayne Wallace is a Digital Jeweller and Reader in Craft Futures at the School of Design, Northumbria University. She belongs to a generation of designers from a contemporary craft background working with digital technologies to redefine conventions of how, why and with what things are made in our digital culture. The ways in which our bodies, and the objects that we associate with them, represent different facets of who we are, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with other people have long been a fascination for her. She develops hybrid forms of physical-digital artefact, such as digital jewellery, to serve as a platform both for the exploration of new ways for the digital to support our sense of self and also as a provocative lens on our current assumptions of the materiality and meaning of the digital. She is co-founder of Praxis and Poetics: Research Through Design conference — an experimental, discursive conference format physically foregrounding the artefacts stemming from design research.

Jon Rogers holds a personal chair in creative technology at the University of Dundee. His work explores the human intersection between digital technologies and the design of physical things. He balances playful technologies with citizenship to find new ways to connect people to each other and to their data. Jon Founded the Product Research Studio located in the North East of Scotland in 2009 and is proud to have worked with some of the world’s best organisations, including BBC R&D, Microsoft, Mozilla, NASA, the Met Office and the Victoria and Albert Museum. With academic collaborations that include MIT Media Labs in the US and the National Institute of Design in India, Jon is excited about how easy the world is to reach and to connect to. Jon has a PhD in neural networks from Imperial College London and built up his knowledge of research at the interface between design and digital technology while being a tutor and researcher at the Royal College of Art. His move to Dundee in 2003 was the start of a new focus of work that is focused on socially relevant and playful physical digital interactions. Outside the studio you might find him at South By South West Festival in the US, in the thick of the London Design Festival in the UK, in the NID HackSpace at the National Institute of Design, or in the café of the Fisheries Museum in his hometown of Anstruther, in Fife.

Laura de Reynal is the principal ethnographic researcher for the Mozilla Foundation, and her work connects her to communities of technologists and humanists who seek to foster positive impact through technology around the world. Her focus on the users, builders, and thinkers of the Internet allows her to play pivotal roles in producing products, conducting research projects, and managing organizational partnerships. Before Mozilla, Laura contributed to the Microsoft YouthSpark program with young social entrepreneurs in France, and helped design and deliver software and curriculum for the OLPC project. Laura, a former resident of France and now based out of London, has an unwavering passion for flowers, creativity, absurdism, and happiness.

Michael Henretty is a long time devotee of the open internet. In the past he has worked on a variety of web-based projects including internet forums, digital currency, HTML gaming, and a mobile operating system. These days he works as an engineer for Mozilla based out of Berlin, on the Connected Devices team, trying to imagine how the internet can make the world a safer more connected place.

Michelle Thorne has created volunteer-led programs that cultivate leaders who teach and advocate for the web during her five years at Mozilla. Through a network of local learning clubs, grassroots teaching campaigns and annual leadership development events, she’s served thousands of professional educators and activists. She’s chairs the annual Mozilla Festival, which includes an expansive facilitator’s training program. She has written web literacy curriculum and conducted train-the-trainer programs to teach the material. Furthermore, she’s been investigated open design and the internet of things in a co-authored book with Peter Bihr “Understanding the Connected Home” and as a contributor to the book “Open Design Now”. Prior to Mozilla, Michelle served as the International Project Manager for Creative Commons, recruiting and coordinating volunteer teams in over 80 jurisdictions to adapt legal licenses and promote the commons. She holds a bachelor of arts summa cum laude in Critical Social Thought and German Studies from Mt. Holyoke College and is based mostly out of Berlin.

Pete Collard is a contemporary design curator, writer and researcher based in London. He graduated from Sussex University in 2005 with a BA in Art History and Italian and went on to complete two MAs, the first in History of Design and Material Culture at Brighton University and the second in Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston. Since then he has worked at several leading museums and institutions in the UK including the V&A, the British Council, the Crafts Council and most recently the Design Museum. Personal projects have taken him to Iceland and Utah, working with remote rural communities to celebrate local skills and histories, using personal objects to tell narratives about place and community. As a curator he is interested in the changing role of museums in the 21st Century, adapting to reflect new digital technologies and communication tools that have altered how society communicates.

Rachel Rayns is Creative Producer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK.
Rachel’s background is in lens based media, creative learning and general lifehackery. Upon graduating Rachel founded Soup Lab: a gallery, co-op project space and motion picture film lab interested in how old and new technologies can work together. Since then she has run workshops at Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art and has shown work at FACT, London Short Film Festival, Glastonbury Music Festival and many others. At RPF she develops themes, topics and projects to introduce people of all ages to computer science through creativity and runs the Creative Technologists programme for 16–21 year olds.

Sean Kingsley is as a technician at DJCAD, University of Dundee. He supports others to make stuff, particularly in ceramics, but also in other materials. He creates safe (physical and psychological) environments in which beginners and practitioners experienced in other disciplines feel excited, while relaxed and unjudged, allowing them to play so projects emerge almost naturally. Sean is a shed man. The shed is a space to “be” and to become centred. His pottery practise looks backwards and forwards, taking inspiration from traditional pottery making, recreating them on smaller scales and investigating how they can be applied in contemporary thinking.

Vladan Joler is an Associate Professor and Chair of New Media Department at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia and the director of the SHARE Foundation, nonprofit organization that is dedicated to protecting the rights of Internet citizens and promoting positive values of openness, decentralization, free access and exchange of knowledge, information and technology.
In last 2 years Vladan is leading Share Lab — a research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical aspects of the intersections between technology and society. Share Lab is using various network topology, data mining and data visualization methods to create a unique Internet Privacy and Transparency Atlas, which is a set of visual representations and methodologies created to map, uncover, visualize and independently monitor different aspects of Internet privacy and transparency.

Akshay Roongta is an industrial designer and design researcher, and has worked in the areas of renewable energy, sanitation and hygiene amongst others. One of his most challenging and rewarding projects was working as a designer and interim project manager for the multi-stakeholder Bill & Melinda Gates Project — Project Sammaan — on sanitation, during his time at Quicksand Design Studio. He also co-founded amrutdhara, a social enterprise in the urban drinking water space. He is currently working on systems for involving grassroots workers in development planning using ICT and researching how organisations working in development planning build and share knowledge. On the side he dabbles with mixtapes, soundscapes and photography and is based out of Mumbai.

Amitesh Grover is a Time-based artist, who lives and works in Delhi. His interdisciplinary, contemporary art projects create ‘performance communities’; he invites people in specially constructed ‘situation rooms’, often connecting participants transnationally, through internet and mobile technology. His works have been shown in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, England, Mexico, China, the Philippines, Romania, Pakistan, Oman and India.

Anirban Ghosh is a graphic designer and visualizer with over thirteen years’ of experience in design studios, advertisement agencies, magazines and a daily newspaper (such as India Today & Times of India). His works, till now, have been diverse, ranging right from advertisements to video installations, performance, product packaging and magazine covers. He has held numerous group exhibitions at Studio 21, CIMA Art Gallery Kolkata. His first solo show was at Studio 21 in 2013 followed by an online live show event there.

His ongoing project sets out to call out the vegetarian hypocrisy in India that has been on a gradual rise mostly to satisfy hidden upper caste religious agenda. The project aims to unmask these so called food fascists who if not stopped are on the path to ruin the culinary diversity and multifarious culture of real India. He is currently Art Director at Open Magazine in New Delhi.

Ankit Daftery loves building interactive objects, embedded devices and fun,quirky electronic projects that cause users to feel something. He loves to mashup hardware, software and data creatively to provide experiences that enrich and tools that empower people. He also enjoys teaching technology and believes in empowering people by giving them the power and tools to build things.

Ankit builds devices, installations and experiences for a living, and take things apart and build other things in his spare time. He also has a general interest in psychology, cultures, travel and understanding people and is currently based in Bangalore. He enjoys reading Isaac Asimov and is trying to find ways to make Sonic screwdrivers and Light Sabers.

Archana Prasad is a visual artist from Bangalore. She is also a co-founder and director at Jaaga.in. Her work is a particular confluence of visual art, technology and urban community-based work, steeped in design and research methodologies. Archana has a unique artist-activist role at Jaaga. She works towards building a stronger arts community and positively impacting public perception of art, artists and art-practices. She seeks to harness the power of the internet in this negotiation. She has a keen interest in documentation and creating public awareness on Bangalore’s socio-cultural heritage.

Ashali Bhandari works at Studio X Mumbai as an Assistant Coordinator of Programming having graduated from Middlebury College in 2014. She is interested in how innovative technology and creative planning can create inclusive spaces in rapidly changing cities. Ashali has designed installations for festivals like the Dharavi Biennale and Celebrate Bandra and is currently working on an exhibition exploring the homeless crisis in Mumbai. Ashali has studied geospatial technology and is working on a project with the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies to create a GIS database for Mumbai. She also writes for urb.im on urban development issues in Mumbai and Bangalore and has been featured in publications like Next City.

Avinash Kumar is one half of BLOT!, or Basic Love Of Things, a one-of-a-kind live mixed media and AV performance ensemble. Since 2007, BLOT! has been exploring various facets of electronic music & urban culture through AV performances, music production, film- making, art, design and installations. They are best known for their playful juxtapositions of trans-media content that seeks to connect the experiences of diverse cultures. Avinash is also a co-founder of Quicksand, a design & innovation consultancy as well as UnBox and is based out of New Delhi. He also anchors the GamesLab at Quicksand, which is a laboratory for play experiences. GamesLab is now working to publish its first indie video game.

Ayaz Basrai is the founder of Busride, an interdisciplinary practice specializing in the construction of built environments based in Mumbai. His practice blends a mix of Industrial design and Architecture to work on insightfully designed spaces, and to achieve a macro-micro balance. Ayaz studied industrial design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Currently dabbling in various projects from Hospitality projects like Bars, Clubs and Restaurants, to Installation Art, from Institutional Architecture to Heritage conservation around his home in Bandra, to working on Illustration and 3D printing projects, he juggles the many diverse schizophrenic projects the city tosses up, in a desperate attempt to make sense of it all. The studio’s work is guided more by chaos than by order, and this reflects in its wide and varied undertakings.

Reuben Jacob is an architect, maker and budding storyteller. He works as the Architect of Things handling built projects at THE Workshop, Bangalore and helps run hands-on workshops for the design fraternity. He has also conducted a collaborative project with Proyecto Asilo, Spain to develop a school for slum-dwelling children in Thanisandra, Bangalore. He often lends his creative skills and speaks to students as a Resource person at St. Josephs College, Bangalore.

UnBox

Aanchal Sodhani is trained in craft design. Her varied work experience includes selling souvenirs on the beaches of Goa, setting up an ethical lifestyle retail chain, managing the design program for British Council and now UnBox, Delhi. She spends her time generating UnBox ideas, planning events, filling budget sheets and finding excuses to travel. Aanchal is a great believer in analog photography, printing her own clothes and public transport.

Babitha George is a partner in Quicksand and a cofounder of UnBox. Babitha believes in the strength of interdisciplinary approaches; her prior work in education prompted her to actively think about non-traditional roles of design thinking, subsequently leading her to steer Quicksand’s social innovation projects out of their Bangalore studio. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Victor Papanek Foundation.

Mahima Swarup is a business strategist who strongly believes in adopting a design-driven approach to create value in today’s rapidly changing contexts. Shifting focus from traditional linear practices encountered in her experience in infrastructure, commodities and consumer goods, Mahima is interested in exploring how iterative and interdisciplinary processes help foster innovation across corporate frameworks.

Sara Legg is a UX designer and ethnographer with formal training in visual anthropology. Her work in design research has been characterised by experimental methods and a holistic, qualitative approach. Sara is interested in implementing creative research practices and experimenting with others as co-creators in their experience of design.

Selvan Thandapani is a user researcher with interests in human-centered design and design for social impact. As a user researcher, he worked with think-tanks, non-profits and social enterprises on designing and making technologies viable for the bottom of the pyramid. He is passionate about understanding users’ needs and behaviour to create effective and impactful solutions.

National Institute of Design

Arjun Raj Kumar is a designer with a formal background in Product Design and Mechatronics and enjoys hacking and tinkering to add value to everyday things. Arjun is excited by the amalgamation of physical and digital spaces and he builds experiences for people around them. Currently a UX Designer at Samsung R&D, Bangalore with hands-on experience on multi-modal interactions in smart connected environments. Designing for Web of things, Smart Home, Future tech keeps him busy.

Mayank Loonker is a Faculty of Exhibition Design at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Mayank has 10 years of experience in design teaching, consultancy and research. He studied Exhibition Design, from the National Institute of Design, India. Prior to joining NID as a Faculty in 2013, Mayank worked as an Exhibition Designer at Lord Cultural Resources where he was responsible for design of exhibitions for Museums. He also run a multidisciplinary design studio in Ahmedabad and worked as a Retail Designer, designing and developing experience for Retail stores, Events, and Exhibitions. He has special interest in the design of mediated spaces exploring ways bridging physical and digital world with focus on content, narrative, interactions and experiences.

Praveen Nahar is a Senior Faculty member in Industrial Design at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He teaches and mentors students in the Product Design and Transportation & Automobile Design Programmes and heads the Design Vision Centre & chairs Knowledge Management Centre at NID. He studied Industrial Design at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) New Delhi, and Sustainable Design at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Praveen has over 17 years of experience in design teaching, consultancy and research. Prior to NID, he was a lecturer in industrial design at IIT Bombay and a research associate in Transportation Research at IIT Delhi. In recent years he has been actively involved with academic projects with students concerning Systems Thinking and Design which involves projects with complex issues/wicked problems ranging from healthcare to mobility.

Tanishka Kachru holds an MA in History of Design and the Decorative Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York and a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from University of Bombay. Tanishka teaches courses in History of Design and guides projects in Museum Design and Design for Public Space, as a faculty in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Some of Tanishka’s recent works include an integrated heritage-based development plan for Taj Ganj, Agra for the Directorate of Tourism, Government of U.P.; participatory planning for setting up of a Community Museum in Banaskantha,Gujarat for the non-profit organisation, SEWA; working on a museum in rural Rajasthan for the Ramakrishna Mission Trust. She serves on the advisory committee of the National Children’s Museum and experiments with ways of making museums fun for children along with her 8 year old daughter. Tanishka also works with several community based organizations in Ahmedabad.

Sahil Thappa is a Mechanical Engineer from Punjab Engineering College currently doing his Masters in Product Design at NID. He is interested in looking at ways to make design more democratic, open and collaborative. He also has varied interests in origami, music, generative art, technology, neuroscience, bikes, toys and a lot of other things.

Sriram Shashank is a product and interface designer with a background in industrial robotics and believes in getting his hands dirty and quick prototyping. He is currently working at Samsung R&D, Bangalore with experience in connected car systems and wearables, and he has a profound interest in Sci-fi, anime and Gaming.

British Council

Debesh Banerjee is the Arts Digital content lead for British Council, India. A print journalist for over nine years, Debesh has worked with various Indian publications like The Pioneer and The Indian Express where he covered news and events related to the arts and culture scene in India. He has an MA in Multimedia Journalism from Bournemouth University, UK, on partial scholarship. After his return to India, Debesh began exploring the scope of digital platforms in covering the arts and culture sector, and created content for The Indian Express website. Besides searching for innovative ways of digital story-telling, he has a passion for travel and learning languages.

Jonathan May is a Programme Manager for the British Council arts team, working in South Asia and the Americas. Before joining British Council six months ago he was at LIFT for five years as the festival’s first Digital Producer. At LIFT Jonathan’s key focus was on devising and producing artistic projects for the festival that use the tools, technologies and spaces of digital culture. Through study and work Jonathan has developed an artistic practice largely informed by performance; he has created work for Shunt, The Yard, Whitechapel Gallery, Brixton Brick-box and Liverpool’s Unity Theatre. He is also a Trustee of the Live Art Development Agency, who he has worked with on multiple projects since 2010 and is a member of the Creative Council for Strike a Light Festival, Gloucester. He also has a radio show called International Airspace on London Fields Radio, a micro-radio station in East London.