Adrian Westaway Co-founder & Director of Technology and Magic at Special Projects Adrian is an inventor, engineer and experience designer on a mission to make the human-technology interaction meaningful and delightful. As co-founder of Special Projects he harnesses technology, inclusive research and magic thinking to devise design propositions that feel familiar yet wondrous. A self-taught magician since the age of 11 and full member of the Magic Circle, he relentlessly pursues his conviction that “designers should use magic thinking and try to introduce surprise, delight and fuzzy feeling in the things they create.” After becoming the first ever James Dyson Fellow in 2007, and a Fellow of the Royal Commission of 1851, in 2010, for his work on interactive lighting systems, Adrian built a playground in Peru, had whisky with Derren Brown as a student in Bristol, and tried to make his teachers disappear. His contagious passion for magic and engineering made him a beloved tutor and lecturer in Design & Innovation at Queen Mary University and the Royal College of Art, in London and a visiting faculty member at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. There he teaches ‘Magic and Design’, a nomadic workshop where students are introduced to methods of using design and technology to create enchanted products and experiences.

I'm an artist/ photographer based in London and Mumbai. I'm Interested in history, current affairs and cultural identity. I'm inspired by my immediate surroundings. I travel a lot and always make work in the places I visit. I often turn my attention towards architecture in order to examine the identity of the places I visit. I work intuitively in a documentary manner as it allows me more in depth involvement with my subject. I only use film/analogue processes, mainly mediaum and large formats. These are preferred as they are more precise and slower and aenable me to take time over the composition, to produce a more thoughtful and deliberate image, as compared with the snapshot/hit and run type of photography.

Amanda Eliasson is a Swedish animation director based in London. Her work place primary interest in hand generated processes. She recently graduated with an MA in animation from the Royal College of Art, London. Now she’s a freelance animation director in the UK. “Since I started animating I’ve developed an interest in making flat images transport the viewer into a three dimensional space. I would say my style is playful and naive in contrast to the difficult social subjects I often address in my films”.

Freelance illustrator and Creative Director at Pretty Decent Beer Co

Misha Milovanovich is a Belgrade-born artist living and working in London. Misha works across several mediums, from sculpture to painting and live art. Characterised by vivid colour, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, Misha's visual work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms. She often features discarded shards of consumerism - unloved icons of disposability and careless consumption.   Misha's work is often a symphonic  abstraction. Her colourful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. She combines depth and surface relief, orchestrating bold contrasts of form, texture and space in her pictures. An intimate colour palette of bodily fluids - red, pink, white, black, yellow and brown - animate the writhing forms and the refracted memories of cartoonish cultural production.   A cultural polymath, Misha is constantly engaged in observing society and it’s distortions of desire, lust and attitudes to the body. Traditional techniques have been studied and absorbed and although her work is partly conceptual, it's execution always reflects these hard won technical abilities. Misha's main subject matter is emotion, so naturally her work is highly personal and biographical in ways that create a direct, emotional response from the viewer. Empathy and the universals of human experience - passion, nostalgia, desire and disgust are inescapable in her work.   Misha is herself a ‘displaced’ person, having left Serbia for London in her late teens she still carries within her a ‘stranger’s perspective’ and perceives the world as an outsider, someone ever alert to the non-verbal subtleties of communication.   Misha's artistic progenitors include her mentor Martin Kippenberger, Wassily Kandinsky  and Phillip Guston as well as contemporary artists Gilbert and George, Keith Tyson, Robert Pruitt and Jim Lambie.