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.

Designer at Made Thought

French artist and designer, based in London

Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee is an artist, researcher and writer. Her practice is guided by the iterations of slow violence and the dynamic between the ‘near’ and ‘elsewhere’. In attempting to disarm instruments of knowledge production, her practice shies away from reduction and completion. Steering away from essentialisms, she is interested in once-forgotten micro and muted narratives. By revisioning fractured traditions, she engages with visual and textual interventions to navigate the nuances of perception and retention. Lee also runs XING, a research platform centered on the poetics and politics of Southeast and East Asian art practices. Assuming form of a shapeshifter, it morphs between localities and temporalities; with(in)flux. A domain of not-yet possibilities, the platform attempts to dismantle matrices concerned with the region from non-dominant perspectives.

Milène Larsson is an award-winning, seasoned international news, current affairs and documentary producer/director/reporter covering issues spanning from the environment, gender norms, women’s social status and civil rights, to culture, travel and migration, which she has reported on extensively in the British Media Awards winning documentary series Europe or Die. She’s currently co-Head of Video for VICE and based in London.