Girish Dalvi is faculty at IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay, and co-founder of Ek Type. He studied at the National Institute of Design to obtain a Masters degree in New Media Design, and also received a PhD in Design from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His areas of interest include Typography and Type Design, Play and Games, and methods to understand human behavior. As a type designer he has co-created several typefaces for Indian scripts, prominent amongst these is the open-source Mukta multi-script family, Baloo family, Jaini and the recently released Anek multi-script variable family.

Lauren Celenza is an independent UX designer, writer, and educator based in Seattle. Her work, essays, and commentaries have appeared in Forbes, Fortune, In These Times, and The Economic Times. Through design consulting, team training, and individual coaching, she advises leaders and organizations worldwide, catalyzing their growth in a time of information fatigue and developing technology that thoughtfully considers the relationships to our environments, our communities, and ourselves. She teaches design and ethics at Harbour.Space University in Barcelona and Bangkok and writes the newsletter, https://laurencelenza.substack.com/Formerly, Celenza was a Design Lead at Google, where she led a global team towards making Google Maps inclusive for two-wheelers and public transit, mapping out millions of previously excluded businesses, addresses, routes, and several languages for the first time in Google Maps history. She also served as an early member of the Alphabet Workers Union, advocating for healthier workplace conditions at data centers across the US. In 2022, she petitioned for the Silenced No More Act in Washington state.

Harish Sivaramakrishnan is the lead vocalist and one of the founder members of the band Agam. He is also a playback singer working in Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil languages. Apart from his musical career, he is also working as the Chief Design Officer at CRED, after working for over a decade in Adobe, Snapdeal and Google.

Rahul is a partner with Trilegal and heads its technology practice. His primary focus is on data governance and privacy which are the subject of his most recent book - Privacy 3.0: Unlocking our Data Driven Future. He has a weekly column called Ex Machina in the Mint on issues at the intersection of Technology, Law and Society and a pandemic truncated podcast by the same name.

Meeta Malhotra is a brand consultant and entrepreneur. She was one of two partners at Ray+Keshavan, a brand and design consultancy acquired by WPP. Meeta then co-founded a SaaS startup called Kinetic Glue, which was acquired by BMC Software. In 2020, Meeta started The Hard Copy as a resource for the brand and design community. There is unlikely to ever be a hard copy of the The Hard Copy, but since it is fondly called THC, the name has stuck.

Krish Ashok is a software guy who makes subversive music on violin and cello while attempting to break Indian cooking down to scientific first principles. He also avoids the usage of the expression "non-veg" and prefers to use "regular" instead

Nav is a product & service design expert with nearly 20 years experience in leading teams to deliver strategic and innovative digital products across Asia and Europe. Throughout his career, Nav has founded and led multiple innovation and design studios, including establishing the design practice at the multi-award winning studio, Buuuk as well as their Vietnam operations and leading work for the ex-IDEO team in Singapore. While at Jiva, Nav continues to coach product and design teams across the globe as a guest lecturer and mentor.

Karthik Srinivasan is a communications professional with 2 decades’ experience in creating, building and managing perceptions of brands across agency (Ogilvy, Edelman, Text 100) and client (Flipkart, Subex Systems) environments. In his career, he has been associated with brands like Lenovo, LinkedIn, IBM, BlackBerry, and General Motors among others. He is an independent communications consultant and personal branding coach now and is finding it far more productive and fruitful! Karthik is the author of the book on personal branding using social media, Be Social - Building Brand YOU, published by Westland. Karthik has also been ranked a Power Profile (most-viewed) on LinkedIn for the years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and a Top Voice on LinkedIn in 2020.

He is a former teaching fellow at the Stanford d.school where he has taught classes on design thinking, digital product design and mapmaking. He is also the former head of design at Zomato. He is the author of a new book, Drawing on Courage: Risks Worth Taking and Stands Worth Making, part of a series of guides being published by the Stanford d.school.

He advises companies in the art and science of product design and is drawing on his courage by building Boca, an D2C sparkling water business in India.

Shirish heads Product for Twitter India where his team focuses on experiences and participation for India and other emerging markets. He formerly led Product for Uber in India where his teams were instrumental in building and launching key products like Uber Lite and Uber Bus across India, Latam and the Middle East; igniting opportunity through mobility. With experiences spanning the Bay Area and Bangalore and the “tech” sheep in a family seeped in Art and Art History, Shirish loves bringing cultural and cross functional sensibilities into his products.He is a CS geek with a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Sciences and an MS in Management Sciences from Stanford University.

Ayaz Basrai is Co-founder of The Busride Design Studio, a leading Architecture and Interior design firm in India. Ayaz graduated in Industrial Design, specializing in Product Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in 2003. In 2006, he set up The Busride Design Studio with his architect brother Zameer, as an independent design studio dabbling in the design and creation of built environments. With wide ranging interests in Illustration, Immersive media, Design and Research, Ayaz is constantly dabbling in the ever-expanding latitude of Design expression. More recently, Ayaz heads the studio's research arm, The Busride Lab based in Goa, which works on research and design projects in the domain of Heritage Conservation and Futures Research, messing around with Architecture, Technology, Design and Art.

Ruchita Madhok is a designer, artist and writer. She fell in love with history and heritage at a tender age and it lead her to study Exhibition Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. After a Masters in Scenography from Central Saint Martins London, she landed her dream job working at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. While at the museum, she was researching contemporary design in India when she realised that exhibitions like it should be held in India, not just the West. So she decided to return to India to establish a design practice focussed on collaborating with the arts and culture sector in India. Led by Ruchita and Aditya Palsule, since 2012 their studio Kahani has delved deep into the areas of communications, experiences and publishing. Their team has won the Kyoorius Black Elephant, The CII Design Excellence Award and India’s Best Design Project Awards among many other recognitions. Storycity, the studio’s publishing imprint, leads the way in mapping and interpreting histories of art, design and visual culture in Mumbai.

Neeraj has over 6 years of experience in the field of Design. He has graduated from the MIT Institute of Design, Pune as an Industrial Designer and transitioned into the domain of software Products. He is Currently working as a UX Designer with Factset Research Systems, Hyderabad. Along with Design as a profession, Neeraj has a passion for Music with a keen interest in Percussions and is often found accompanying his father Bhargav and brother Drupad. Neeraj has undergone a formal training in Tabla under the guidance of his guru, Shri Ram Krishna Bose. Apart from the Tabla, he also plays the Hapi Drum and has developed a unique and a very aesthetic combination of both the instruments.

Drupad has spent about 12 years crafting interactive experiences on various platforms for multiple domains across different geographies in both B2B enterprise and B2C spaces. He has worked for various multinationals such as, McKinsey, Mindtree, Unilever, Avis, etc. Currently he is associated with ADP as User Experience Architect, leading the product design strategy for enterprise applications. Drupad has formally studied Industrial Design from Symbiosis Institute of Design in Pune and later gained a masters degree in Interaction design from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. Drupad’s father, being an Industrial designer and a musician, He grew up in design and musical family background in Ahmedabad & Udaipur, India. Drupad embraces all cultures and tries to bring the same in the experiences he crafts. He is a travel freak and a musician. He plays Indian classical music on a beautifully crafted instrument called the Sarod. He loves interacting with different musicians & artists across different cultures. Listening to the sounds of Sarod since childhood, Drupad has had a special zeal towards music ever since. He commenced his formal training at a tender age, under the guidance of his father, Bhargav Mistry. At a later age, he was introduced to Ustad Amjad Ali Khan for further training. Apart from the guru shishya parampara, he has undergone formal training in sarod from Surnandan Bharati, Kolkata and has obtained a gold medal in the final year. Drupad has given numerous performances in various concerts in the country and abroad such as England, France, Hong Kong, Greece, Scotland The fringe festival, South Korea world music festival, and Italy. In Italy he had the privilege to perform in the Indian consulate and numerous other public concerts. Drupad has composed various musical pieces and some have been broadcast as signature tunes and background soundtracks for films and festivals. “Music inspires my design and design inspires my music…” - Drupad

Kriti Monga is a visual artist, creative strategist for brands, graphic designer, illustrator and design educator, with a passion for all things type and hand-crafted. The many hats she has worn over 19 years of professional practice include starting and running Turmeric Design, being a partner at Quick Brown Fox Design (both amongst India’s leading brand design studios), working extensively with lettering and typography, teaching regularly at design schools and independent workshops worldwide, creating public type installations and drawing travel and sketchnotes journals. Having become very good at telling stories for others over the years, Kriti is currently exploring more ways to tell her own.

After bachelors in design from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, he spent the last decade crafting online experiences in sports & fintech. He was the first UX designer to join Dream11 in 2015, and is currently leading the multidisciplinary team of 50+ designers at Dream11. He sincerely believes in spending more time understanding the problem before jumping to solutions. He firmly believes that all innovation comes from understanding a deeper & often a hidden need.

Vikas is a product designer and an entrepreneur. He has spent more than a decade designing experiences for users across a wide range of industries. He loves plants, cats, long walks, and his yearly skiing trips.

Soo Basu is a storyteller and a product designer, crafting inclusive customer-first experiences. She has led design teams for Adobe Document Cloud and Microsoft Edge, Diversity & Inclusion charters for Microsoft's design team, and now leads a design team at Atlassian. Soo’s superpower is connecting business strategy, user goals and human psychology to create innovative new ideas, including a few patents. Outside of work, she helps to curate a newsletter for the DesignUp community. Soo is passionate about drawing and storytelling, and journals her life through drawing, some of which can be seen online at http://inktales.me/

Roshni is passionate about design & travel. At MakeMyTrip, she leads design for the Holidays Vertical which focuses on translating the human hand-holding experience of offline holiday planning into an immersive online experience.Prior to MakeMyTrip, she gained a wide range of experience working across design studios and start-ups. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from MIT Institute of Design & a Master’s degree in Art, Design & Communication from CEPT University

Achyutha, who is currently leading the User Research team at Meesho, has 17+ years' experience in the fields of research, branding, and design. Beyond this, his work in the social and non-profit sectors has equipped Achyutha to understand the Billion people of India (BoP) demographic. Meanwhile, his commercial retail experience has given him invaluable insights on Indian consumers. Achyutha was shortlisted for the British Council's Young Creative Entrepreneur Award in 2011, and an Acumen India fellow. He is also an ex-steering committee member and fellow of the Australia-India Youth Dialogue.

Nishita is a Goa-based artist, writer and Senior Project Manager at brand-strategy & design studio Thought Over Design. She graduated from the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi in 2016 with a gold medal & a lifelong curiosity for all-things-design. More about her at http://www.nishitamohta.com/

Bipin is a user insights professional with close to a decade’s experience in understanding and driving empathy and perceptions of Indian user’s across agency and client environments.He helped setup and scale the user research function at Dreamsports and now leads it. His team is focussed on empowering decision makers to both understand and solve user problems in the areas of gameplay, social and web 3 among others.He helped setup and scale the user research function at Dreamsports and now leads it. He enjoys triangulating user goals with business strategy to drive ideas and create solutions that people love to use. Outside of work he is passionate about football, bollywood movies and travelling

Akshay Kore is a Senior product designer leading the user experience of high-impact AI products at Observe.AI (YC S18) and the author of the book 'Designing Human-Centric AI Experiences: Applied UX Design for Artificial Intelligence.' He frequently writes and talks about designing AI products at conferences, design schools, organizations, and podcasts.He studied Interaction design at IIT Bombay, worked with Microsoft's AI and Research group, and led design for the SME vertical at Cleartax (YC S14).

An Architect by degree, a Service Designer by choice, an Installation Artist by passion!

Shivam Thapliyal is a product illustrator currently working with Swiggy. He has 4+ years of experience working with iconography and product illustrations and had previously worked with Flipkart where he led product illustrations.

Shivani Holkar is a Senior User Experience at Druva. She is involved in designing the user experience for data protection and management of enterprise workloads. Has experience of working with B2B and B2C spent most of her time designing enterprise SaaS.

Hi! I'm Tanvi. I pursue Product design by profession, and Illustrations by heart. I majored in Human Centred Design at Srishti Institute of Design, Bangalore, and am currently working with Postman.I have worked with multiple fast-paced B2B SaaS product startups in the past 4 years. I create stories that connect people with products, keeping illustrations and storytelling at the heart of it!Previously at Razorpay, HackerRank and Playment. Find me on Twitter and Instagram at @tanvi_1699.

NID trained design practitioner currently leading Enterprise UX at Udaan, India's largest and fastest growing B2B Ecommerce platform. With Udaan aiming to grow from 900+ cities currently to 1500+ within few years, its supply chain tech stack is at the core of this growth. I currently spearhead initiatives to make our Supply chain tech more Humane.Prior to this I have helped nurture Capillary's Loyalty/CRM/CDP enterprise ready stack in recent times. Also with Paytm to help simplify their merchant experience via Business with Paytm platform.