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.

Art director and designer

Izabela is a German-Polish writer and editor who grew up in Berlin. She graduated with a BA in Communication, Curation and Criticism from Central Saint Martins and completed a masters degree in Critical Writing for Art and Design at the Royal College of Art. Through writing about art, architecture, politics, the media and design, she observes the constructs of everyday life. Izabela cares to be both a boundless enthusiast and a sensitive critic when engaging with contemporary narratives or speaking to current-time visionaries.

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.

For the last six months, I have been a strange tourist in Munich. I came here to work in a studio and had not so much time to visit it properly. But I partly came in Germany because I was interested in its specific creative approach: it’s precision and rigorousity. In it’s system culture in a way. And indeed it’s a very intellectual society, ruled by color codes and order. It was definitely funny to see that these things are visible in many daily aspects of life. Or maybe it’s just me wanting to see them... Very soon, I will move to London - where I would like to do some freelance work, in product, furniture and space design.