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.

Having recently graduated from the University of Brighton, with a First Class Honours in Graphic Design, I have just moved to London to start my new role as a Graphic Designer at Announcement Creative/ The Anonymous Partner.

Vanessa Pelz-Sharpe is a writer and broadcaster. Born and bred in London, she has written for a number of independent magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, Illustrated Ape, and Pen Pusher, and was Contributing Editor for literary magazine Full Moon Empty Sports Bag. She co-hosts Letters You Never Sent, a monthly literary radio show on NTS. Pelz-Sharpe recently won a Cosmopolitan Magazine Blog Award for her blog Nightmares and Boners and is currently working on her first novel.

I was born in the mid 1980's and grow up in London. From always having a fascination with mechanical objects and relentlessly playing with lego as a child becoming a still life photographer seemed like a natural progression. There is something enormously rewarding about creating exactly whats in your head. I try and make my images on first glance look completely perfect but on closer inspection its revealed there are many imperfections, if you look closer at the 'Wrapping Paper Series' you can see all the joins and creases. I think this makes it look and feel like a photograph and not CGI.

Graphic designer working in London with frieze magazine, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Publishing and more.