Building on her work at Quicksand and her ongoing research in a practice-based PhD, Babitha will share her reflections on how we can cultivate more caring and resilient design practices by actively engaging with the contextual richness, uniqueness, and specificity of people and places. How can we reimagine how we design, to work towards relationality and reciprocity? How can we reimagine our engagement with the communities we work with, to enable relations - collaboration, collectivity, care, sharing, solidarity - rather than solely the production of tangible things?
Babitha George is a director at Quicksand, where she has been developing design methods for research with vulnerable communities in India, focusing on participation and co-design. She is also a co-founder of UnBox Cultural Futures, a platform that brings together efforts around social change, art and culture, thoughtful design, and open research. Additionally, Babitha serves on the Advisory Board of the Victor Papanek Foundation and is a member of the Mozilla Foundation's inaugural cohort of ‘Network50’ for her outstanding work in Internet health.