John Thackara is Director and first Perceptron of Doors of Perception (Doors) in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Doors organises a celebrated biannual conference about the future of design; it also organises events in which organisations - ranging from cities to universities - explore the consequences of the Internet for their business. John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. An expert on design and innovation, he is a member of the Virtual Platform, a body which advises the Dutch government on media cultural policy, and is Visiting Professor in computer-related design at the Royal College of Art in London. He is on the Steering Committee of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Italy, and on the Scientific Committee of the Interactive Institute in Sweden. He sits on expert groups that advise the European Commission on its innovation policies. john@thackara.com / www.thackara.com

Jogi Panghaal graduated in Product Design from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India in 1977. He co-founded Lifetools in New Delhi to provide product design and communication design services to communities, both rural and urban that needed design help. Projects done include product design work with rural artisans and disabled children and communication design work with rural and urban communities, particularly women in the areas of health and HIV/AIDS. Mr. Panghaal has been a visiting teacher at NID, at Les Ateliers Paris and at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. He has research interests in the area of cultural identity and design and has conducted educational programmes around this theme. In a parallel project he has been involved in the study of food and identity issues. In fact both these projects have informed each other over time. Present intereommunities and resource institutions to establish mutually useful relationships with each other through the help of information technologies.
Experience in Specific Asian Countries/territories :
A : Working with marginalised groups of people in India and also Bangladesh. Work has included design of special aids (mobility, educational, play, income generation) for disabled groups across several areas of disability.
B: Working with women in Rural areas on issues of literacies ( designing primers), health and income generation etc.
C: Working with artisans to use their traditional skills to find new markets for their old/new products.
D: representing a very rich mix of experiences in methodologies, approaches, perspectives and strategies that have learnt from the traditional sector and what was taught in modern educational sector.

Aditya Dev Sood is founder and CEO of the Center for Knowledge Societies. A former Fulbright Scholar, he has published widely and maintains a multidisciplinary interest in social research, education, technology, and design. With foundational training in Design and Critical Theory at the University of Michigan, he is also completing doctorates in Anthropology and South Asian languages from the University of Chicago.
The Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) is a Usability and Design Research organization working in the technology sector. CKS affords insight into the use of Information and Communications Technologies in non-traditional and emerging market environments. They offer research, design and strategy consultancy services to technology houses, international development agencies, and grassroots organizations. Since early 2000, they have worked in partnership with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, n-Logue Communications, UNDP, UNICEF, USAID, the Educational Development Center, and Samuha.Org.The work is directed towards the larger objective of creating commercially viable technology-enabled infrastructure for emerging economies, with a primary focus on South Asia. Through usability research, quantitative analysis, and sectoral intelligence, they drive the development and deployment of emerging technologies for the benefit of non-elite and rural users.

Gillian Crampton Smith is Director of Interaction Design Insitute Ivrea (Italy).
Having studied philosophy and history of art at Cambridge University, Gillian Crampton Smith graduated in 1968 and spent the following decade as a designer - first in book publishing, then on the Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.
In 1981, she designed and implemented a page layout program to help her with magazine design - an early desktop publishing application. This experience convinced her that artists and designers have an important role to play in creating information technologies. She joined St Martin's School of Art in 1983 where she set up a new postgraduate course in graphic design and computers for practising designers. In 1989 she moved to the Royal College of Art (the UK's only purely graduate school of art and design). At the RCA, she established the Computer Related Design Department, where artists and designers apply their traditional skills to interactive products and systems. Under her guidance, the CRD Research Studio achieved an international reputation as a leading centre for interaction design, supported by a wide range of industrial sponsors.

Janneke Berkelbach is General Manager of Doors of Perception (the Netherlands). She has been with the Foundation since it was set up in 2000, and was Conference Manager of Doors 6 Lightness (November 2000), and Doors 7 (Flow November 2002): coordinating and producing this high-profile, three-day conferences with 30-plus speakers and 1500 attendees. Janneke studied Dutch law at the University of Amsterdam, where she specialised in intellectual property rights (IPR). Prior to this, she studied fashion design at the Fashion Academy (Amsterdam). Following the completion of her studies, she worked for five years at the Netherlands Design Institute (NDI), on a variety of international projects.
She spent her last three years at the NDI as Project Coordinator for I3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces), on the Maypole and Presence projects, which were funded by the European Commission. Maypole was concerned with connecting children in small communities using images sent by wireless, while Presence examined network possibilities for senior citizens.
email janneke@doorsofperception.com

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 where she made together with collegue Chris Remie the first Dutch website. 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 1999 she produced the widely admired PLAY CDrom about Doors5, guiding a superb group of Masters-students. In 2000, VanRiet o.p. merged with Doors of Perception. Kristi was on the steering committee of IM/Wim, a new institute for new media professionals within the University of Professional Education (HvA) in Amsterdam (2001), and is a member of the lecturers’ network of the Domus Academy, Milan. Recently she became a member of the advisory board of the brand new department of Media and Information Management of the University of Professional Education (HvA) in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Kristi has written articles for several magazines about design, new media and business and writes fiction and poetry in her spare time.
email: kristi@doorsofperception.com

Zeenat Hasan. As Operations Officer at the Center for Knowledge Societies, Zeenat is coordinating logistics for the Doors East Conference. Her regular responsibilities include mediating between domain experts and the CKS team for user research and design work that results in new kinds of ICT products and services in emerging markets. Prior to her work at CKS, Zeenat conceptualized and designed the structure of web-based applications and websites. Her training includes a Masters in Communications from the Manipal Insitute of Communication.