Described by Business Week as “one of the great voices on sustainability”, John Thackara is a writer, speaker, and event producer. He is the author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) among thirteen books, and of a widely-read blog, doorsofperception.com, about design for a restorative economy. As founder and director of Doors of Perception (Doors), John organizes festivals ...

VK Madhavan is a rural development professional who has lived in rural parts of the desert in Rajasthan and in the Kumaun Himalayas for twelve of the past nineteen years. After commencing work at Urmul Trust, an integrated development organisation in Rajasthan, where he worked for seven years, Madhavan worked on policy issues with ActionAid as an independent consultant and on women and governance ...

M P Ranjan is a Design thinker and Independent Academic from Ahmedabad. He also authors the blog "Design for India," wrote the book Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India, and co-edited Handmade in India. M P Ranjan was a Professor at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad from 1976 to 2010 where he created numerous courses and written many papers and books, many of which have been made a...

Ashish Rajpal is the co-founder and CEO of iDiscoveri Education. He quit an international corporate career to work in education. Apart from managing iDiscoveri's growing organization, he creates and facilitates programs on teacher development, leadership, and organization culture. A former student of Howard Gardner, his areas of interest include "doing classrooms", self-esteem of children, and...

Lakshmi Murthy is a social communication designer from Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Her studio, Vikalp Design has designed visuals sensitive to cultural and societal norms for non-literate and low-literate audiences. Through interactive communication, Vikalpdesign seeks to encourage individual action and empower young women and men to share their knowledge with others in the community. Her work has ...

Aditi Ranjan is a weaver, textile designer, and design teacher. She has introduced the use of culture as a design resource in education, conducted research on the textile traditions of India, and designed collections for its handloom sector. She has been involved with textile design education at the National Institute of Design since 1972. ...

Nico Macdonald is Head of Innovation of the Creative Industries iNet, a programme based in the South West of the UK that helps the creative industries sector thrive and advance. He has written extensively on innovation, design and society for publications including the Guardian newspaper, the RSA Journal, Eye, Blueprint and Creative Review in the UK, and PRINT, the AIGA Journal and I.D. magazine i...

Harsh Purohit is the co-founder of Cognito, a full service design agency and sustainability advisory. Cognito specializes in seeding and cascading the practice of sustainability in organisations through successful deployment of multi-disciplinary design and communication tools.Harsh is a sustainability strategist and performs at the intersection of sustainability, design, technology, and profits...

Ayush Chauhan is the Founder & Director of Quicksand, a multi-disciplinary innovation consultancy whose clients include Google, IDEO , and Gates Foundation. An IIM-A graduate, with past experience in brand & product management stint for Banking, Ayush is a firm believer in cross-disciplinary collaborations as the means of doing meaningful and impacting work....

Parmesh Shahani is curently based in Mumbai where he works on innovation and culture at Godrej Industries. He is also affiliated with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, a think tank that explores how corporations can understand and profit from the changing media landscape. In the past, he has founded Freshlimesoda.com, India's first online youth expression community, and worked across t...

Richard has worked as a service designer and strategist for over 27 years. Trained as an industrial designer, he has had a range of professional experiences that have given him a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural outlook that he brings to his work as Prospect’s Strategic Director. He enjoys solving tough problems, working from all sides to deliver meaningful solutions that provide business ben...

Apala is a world-renowned expert on Contextual Innovation at Human Factors International, creating breakthrough product concepts and adapting existing products, services, and technologies to new markets. She is also the author of Innovative Solutions: What Designers Need to Know For Today's Emerging Markets. Apala has developed a vast array of data-gathering techniques, including the Bollywood Met...