WDO Research and Education Forum

Dr Geetha Narayanan is an academic, a scholar and an institution builder with over four decades of experience in the fields of education and change. Well known as the Founder Director of Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology Geetha has served on the Board of Icsid (now the World Design Organization; has been a Director’s Fellow at the Media Lab at MIT (USA) and has contributed as a visiting faculty to the Future of Learning Summer Institutes held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (USA).  Geetha currently holds the UNESCO Chair in Culture Habitat and Sustainable Development at Srishti. She is also Principal Investigator of Project Vision, an international research collective.

Rajiv Kumar is the MD of Microsoft India Development Centre (IDC) and CVP of Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices (E+D) India Group. Rajiv’s most recent accomplishment is the incubation and worldwide launch of Kaizala (an enterprise productivity chat app) from India. Rajiv worked for the first 12 years of his career in Redmond (USA) and the latter 15 at IDC, where he was instrumental in transforming IDC from a being a Distributed Center focused on execution excellence to an innovation center that delivers Microsoft products globally. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee and a master’s in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin.

Carla Cipolla is associate professor at COPPE – UFRJ – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Since 2004 her research and design activities have been focused on design for social innovation, emphasizing international cooperative projects. She is also international coordinator of the DESIS Network (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability), a network of Design Labs based in design schools and in other design-oriented universities and operating with local, regional and global partners to promote and support social change towards sustainability in higher education institutions so as to generate useful design knowledge and to create meaningful social changes in collaboration with other stakeholders.

Design director and innovation strategist at Architempo, Alok B. Nandi brings experiences in multiple media (film production, events, exhibitions, interactive media publishing for Tintin’s publisher) as well as R&D combining tech and storytelling (AR, VR, MR): interaction design, exhibition design (red dot design museum, St-Etienne Design Biennale), strategic design and innovation. He is a regular speaker in international conferences (Amsterdam Interaction14 Chair) and frequent jury member (in design, new media, cinema, start ups). Professor at the Institut Paul Bocuse (Lyon, France), he is working on innovation by design with hospitality/culinary professionals. In 2007, he launched PechaKucha Night in Brussels and got engaged with Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He is global president of IxDA (2018-2020).

Prof. Dr. Lou Yongqi is Dean of the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, a Vice President of China Industrial Design Association, and the fellow of Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Lou has been the pioneer in China for design-driven innovation that connect creativity, business, and technology. He is the founder of Design Harvests, a design-driven urban-rural interaction project; Tongji-Huangpu School of Design and Innovation, the first design thinking K12 school in China; and She Ji — the Journal of Design, Innovation, and Economics. Lou is the Editorial Board Member of the journal Design Issues and the chairman of the international advisory board of University of Applied Arts in Vienna.