Advisory Board

Bibiana Oliveira Serpa is designer, researcher and educator based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she is a PhD candidate in Design at ESDI/UERJ. She is an organized feminist militant and a social educator at the Universidade Livre Feminista, a popular education initiative focused on promoting political education among women belonging to social movements in Brazil. Her research interests associates participatory design approaches to politicization actions within social movements and seeks to understand ways for an engaged design practice having as reference popular education and anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminism. She has experience in participatory projects and design for community emancipation in different locations in Latin America. She works as co-editor of the Spanish-Portuguese International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice and Peace which is part of a latin-american network engaged with popular technology and local development. She is a founding member of Design and Oppression Network.

Mahmoud Keshavarz is a Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. He holds a PhD in Design and Readership (Docent) in Cultural Anthropology. His work focuses widely on the politics of design and the design of politics and how different material practices shape everyday perception and possibilities of (un)doing politics. His current research particularly examines intersections between design, anthropology, border politics and the question of (de-)coloniality and addresses the violent yet imaginative capacities of materialities of (im)mobility. His articles and essays have appeared in Design Issues, Borderlands, Design Philosophy Papers, Design and Culture, Journal of Modern Craft, Law Text Culture, and e-flux among others. Keshavarz is the author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (Bloomsbury 2019), Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Design and Culture, and a Research Associate at Engaging Vulnerability, as well as founding member of Decolonizing Design and Critical Border Studies.

Ramia Mazé is Professor in Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, United Kingdom, since Sept 2020. She is also, since 2016, an editor of the leading scholarly journal Design Issues. Previously, in Finland, Ramia was a professor and head of education in the Department of Design at Aalto University and, prior to that,  worked at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the national doctoral school Designfakulteten, and the Interactive Institute in Sweden. A designer and architect by training, her PhD is in interaction design. She has led, published, and exhibited widely through major interdisciplinary and international practice-based design research projects, most recently in social and sustainable design, design activism and design for policy. Ramia specializes in participatory, critical and politically engaged design practices, as well as “research through design” and feminist epistemologies.