John Thackara
John Thackara, an expert on design and innovation, is Director of Doors of Perception - the conference and knowledge network based in Amsterdam. He was the first director (until November 1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute; is a member of the 'Virtual Platform' which advises the Dutch government about its media cultural policy; and he sits on expert groups advising the European Commission about its innovation policy. John Thackara studied philosophy and then journalism in the United Kingdom before working in book publishing and journalism, in London and New York, during the 1970s. He was editor of Design for four years. During the 1980s, as founder and managing director of Design Analysis International (DAI), a consulting and production company with offices in London and Tokyo, he organised exhibitions and conferences, and wrote policy studies, for governments and companies. He was also Director of Research at the Royal College of Art for four years. John Thackara has written for many national newspapers in Europe; and among his nine books are: WINNERS! How Today's Successful Companies Innovate By Design (Gower/BIS ,1997); Lost in Space (De Grafische Haarlem,1994); Design After Modernism (ed) (Thames and Hudson 1988; Kajima, in Japanese 1992); Design Masters (series editor) Weidenfeld & Nicolson; and In the Bubble: Design in a Complex World (MIT press, 2002, forthcoming). John Thackara may be contacted at:
email: john@thackara.com website: www.thackara.com

Jogi Panghaal
A graduate of India's National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, where he studied industrial design, Jogi Panghaal co-founded the consultancy Lifetools in Delhi in 1979. Lifetools addressed the needs of activists and institutions working in 'developmental' fields all over the country. It was the first independent consultancy in India to specialise in providing professional product and communications design services to people in artisanal communities to enhance their earning potential, even as they worked within a traditional context. Jogi Panghaal has also worked with disabled children and women in rural communities on health, literacy, and income generation projects. He has extensive experience of working closely with craftspeople and dealing with their methodologies and design sources. Jogi Panghaal has first-hand knowledge of how communication functions within rural communities. Outside India, he has taught and researched extensively with such organisations as the Netherlands Design Institute, Amsterdam; the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam; Les Ateliers, Paris; and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

Kristi van Riet
is Director of Doors of Perception (Doors) in Amsterdam. Kristi began her new media career in 1990, as producer with Mediamatic Interactive Publishing. She produced the DoP1 CDRom which won several prizes, including the ID Magazine Design Award, Wired's "New Voices New Visions Award" and a nomination for the Rotterdam Design Prize. At Mediamatic, she also worked on "Multimedia Graphics I", a book on the best screen designs of 1995, published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and Bis Publishers in the Netherlands. She co-produced the first Doors of Perception conference (1993) and Doors of Perception 2 @ Home (1994). In 1995, she became the Netherlands Design Institute’s webmaster while setting up her own web-publishing company, VanRiet o.p. In 1998, the Design Institutes' website won a Webby Award (the "Oscars of the Internet") in San Francisco. In 2000, VanRiet o.p. merged with Doors of Perception. Kristi is on the steering committee of IM/Wim, a new institute for new media professionals within the University of Professional Education (HvA) in Amsterdam, and is a member of the lecturers’ network of the Domus Academy, Milan. She has written articles for several magazines about design, new media and business.
email: kristi@vanriet.com

Jouke Kleerebezem
is Advising Researcher of the Design Department at post-academic Jan van Eyck institution in Maastricht NL, where he rewrites the design research agenda (2001-2002). He has been involved with Doors since 1994 and was Commissioning Editor of the Netherlands Design Institute's website 1996-1999. He publishes widely on design, arts and media in the professional press (Mediamatic, Mute, Items, Witte Raaf, Metropolis M, AIGA Journal) and lectures in the international design (educational) community. After a formal education in typography and graphic design from 1972-1977, Jouke Kleerebezem produced as an artist/curator until 1993, when he turned to new media and the Internet/W3, both for his organizational and personal artistic activities. His projects include international exhibitions Allocations (1992) and Silicon Rally (1996), and websites Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use (nqpaofu.com, since 1998), Innovation and Design for Information Empowerment (idie.net, since 1999). A selection of his design critiques will be published as 'Omnia Mea in Media', in 2003. Jouke Kleerebezem lives and works from Le Moulin du Merle in Burgundy, France. He may be contacted at:
email: jk@nqpaofu.com website: www.nqpaofu.com

Tue, Nov 6, 2001