Ananya Agrawal
Founder & CEO, Dreamverse Learning Lab
She is the Founder and CEO of Dreamverse Learning Lab, an ed-tech and learning design studio blending instructional design, game design, and conversational agents. Her work spans rural pilots like Call-a-Kahaani and Hunarbaaz in states like Jharkhand, Bihar, Maharashtra and Orissa leveraging interactive voicebots and chatbots; to print based comics and gamified activities for learning and behavior change which have had a global audience including countries like Vietnam and Italy. Currently, She is building SparksDream, a new age ed tech platform for skilling, leveraging AR and AI, presently targeted at aspiring and early stage small business owners.
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Her standout project is Hunarbaaz, piloted across Jharkhand and Bihar, where we leveraged IVR technology and community media to make entrepreneurial learning accessible to 30,000+ learners across 15 states. By combining low-tech media like phone calls and print with human-centered design, we demonstrated how systemic innovation can drive scale in rural contexts.
Another is SparksDream, an ongoing initiative that blends gamified toolkits with AR and AI to help urban and rural youth prototype entrepreneurial ideas. Piloted in the last few months with 150+ aspiring entrepreneurs in 5 cities, it reflects our commitment to design leadership by combining playful learning, cross-sector partnerships, and innovative media for impact.
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Her work has been featured in Forbes as one of 12 Innovators Transforming the Future of Education and invited for a Q&A with Niflink on leveraging IVR for youth voice and skills training. I have spoken as a panelist at WISE Qatar on closing the skills gap through technology and partnerships , and have been invited to speak at Horasis Global Summit 2025 on creators in new realities such as blockchain, the metaverse, and the future of content. My projects have been showcased through podcasts with Collectiwise and Open Design Collective, as well as covered in local newspapers. Awards include Top Innovator at the World Class Education Challenge (Uplink, World Economic Forum & Deloitte Global, 2021) for Call-a-Kahaani (now Hunarbaaz) and Winner of the MIT Covid-19 Challenge: India Turning the Tide (2020) for Shraman, later selected among the Top-27 Projects in the Human Mobility Challenge, Asia-Pacific, co-led by UNDP and Citi Foundation. Additionally, the Lakpar Project was recognized as part of the Wipro Earthian Award won by Jhamtse Gatsal. Paper publications include: IVRs based Storytelling Model for Entrepreneurship Education in Media Dark Zones- Paper Presentation, International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation | 2022, Modeling a Community Innovation Ecosystem- Paper Presentation, RSD9 Symposium, Systemic Design Association | 2020, Digital Education yet to combat Cyber Practices in New India, Co-Author, Cybersecurity and Citizen 2030 Strategy Recommendations | 2019
Gurman Bhatia
Founder, Revisual Labs
She is the founder and director of Revisual Labs, the only agency in India that solely focuses on information design and data visualisation. She is also one of the founding members of VizChitra, a community and annual data visualisation conference. In just two years of existence, Revisual has won the silver for Outstanding studio at Information is Beautiful awards and worked for clients such as the United Nations, WWF, PhonePe, Google and others.
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She has two degrees in journalism and none in design. Her career trajectory went from journalism -> data journalism -> graphic journalism -> data viz -> entrepreneurship. Few highlights of her career - first woman in the extended family to go overseas to study, learning from Simon Scarr, being a pulitzer finalist, winning Outstanding Studio for Revisual, being able to pull off the VizChitra conference."
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Her approach to design starts with this belief: information only matters if it is remembered. Poorly communicated data gets lost in dashboards or reports; well-designed insights linger, provoke thought, and open the door to action. In Journeys of Resilience for the UN, they combined quantitative migration data with human stories, making the experience both contextual and memorable. Through VizChitra, India’s first data-viz community, She has shown that design thrives in collaboration. Together, these projects reflect his commitment to building work that endures in memory and culture, not just on screens.
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Notable Achievements
• Silver medal, Outstanding studio, Information is Beautiful Awards (2025)
• Winner in Technical Innovation, The Webby Awards (May 2021)
• Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling, Online News Association (2020)
• Gold for Breaking News Portfolio , Malofiej International Infographic Awards (Aug 2020)
• Digital Journalist of the Year, South Asia FCC Kalinga Awards (Aug 2019)
• Best use of data in a breaking news story, within the first 36 hours, GEN Data Journalism Awards (Jun 2019)
Pratyush Gupta
Founder & Director, Pratyush Gupta Design
He is an interdisciplinary designer, Hindustani vocalist and the author of Swarpeti, a pop-up book series on Indian classical music. Merging information with music and storytelling, he crafts immersive experiences that celebrate nature and culture. For over 13 years, He has collaborated with diverse organisations, shaping and visualising their communication landscape. His practice spans brand and information design, narrative-driven experiences and cultural education, with a focus on creative formats that blur the line between learning and play. As an art educator, I kindle children's imagination and creativity through workshops on music, papercraft and storytelling.
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A project close to his heart is Swarpeti, a pioneering pop-up book series on Indian classical music. Combining information design, storytelling, paper engineering and sound, it transforms a centuries-old art form into an immersive learning experience. Originally crowdfunded and self-published, the first book received an overwhelming response, reaching hundreds of homes and introducing Hindustani music to new audiences. Building on this success, Roli Books came on board as publisher, expanding its reach further.
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Swarpeti has since grown beyond books into workshops, exhibitions and performances, and has been showcased at major festivals, featured in leading publications and recognised with multiple awards, including the Baby Blue Elephant at the Kyoorius Design Awards. The project reflects his approach as a designer and entrepreneur—initiating independent ideas, building collaborations across craft, music and publishing, and creating experiences that are educational, artistic and commercially viable.
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Notable Achievements
• Book of the Year - Best Production, FICCI Publishing Awards 2025
• Baby Blue Elephant - Book Design, Kyoorius Design Awards 2023
• Silver - Illustration for Social Change, Indigo Design Award, Amsterdam 2020
• First Runner up, Visual Communication Design, Battle of Design Projects, Pune Design Festival 2012
Rasagy Sharma
Senior Design Manager, Capital One
He loves making data meaningful. He is an Information Designer, Design Educator, Data Artist & compulsive Sketchnoter. He currently heads the design team for DataLabs at Capital One and has spent 12+ years leading teams & designing data-heavy products at Microsoft, Sundial, Barclays, Mapbox, Capillary & Gramener. Beyond design, his art practice focuses on expressing data about identity, migration & unusual data around us. In his free time, he teaches cartography, creative coding & tangible visualization at IDC IIT Bombay & his alma mater, NID Bangalore. He also actively supports design communities like DesignUp, VizChitra & Creative Coding Sante, and has done several talks & workshops in India & USA."
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While he has done multiple high impact projects, for DoBeDo he is excited to talk about the impact through teaching two unique courses in the last decade:
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Course: Schematic Hometown Mapping His desire to explore ways to personalize maps to our lived experiences led to him creating a short course around making maps based on personal experiences. After teaching this for 8 years across NID & IIT Bombay, his students have created 150+ unique maps of various cities & towns from India.
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Course: Tangible Data Visualization
In the middle of pandemic-led digital fatigue, he decided to create a new course at NID to focus on representing data in tangible & sensory form. For the last 5 years, students have turned personal data and public data about India & the world into physical installations & material explorations. From a hand-woven blanket of personal Netflix history, sonification of Swiggy orders as burps, green area in cities as dense microgreen plants, to highlighting the impact of different meals on climate through weights — this course has resulted in several award winning projects that break the conventional norms around data visualization.
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His projects have been exhibited at NGMA Bangalore, Swiss Embassy, Goethe Institute, IIT Bombay & Berlin, and won awards like FastCompany Innovation by Design & Information is Beautiful award. He has also been in art fellowship like MoToCo by HyperWerk Institute, Basel and BeFantastic Fellowship by Jaaga. His students have won multiple Information Is Beautiful awards and have exhibited their projects at Science Gallery Bengaluru.
Dr. Taapsi Ramchandani
CEO, Poocho
Dr. Taapsi Ramchandani is an anthropologist and design researcher who leads Poocho, a pioneering research-technology platform built for the Indian market. Her work blends ethnographic inquiry with systems design to make qualitative research faster, simpler, and more human-centred. Drawing from over 15 years of experience across fieldwork, strategy, and tech entrepreneurship, Taapsi focuses on how teams can use AI-assisted tools to ask better questions and discover insights with less friction. At Poocho, she works closely with design and marketing teams to create tools that honor the depth of human understanding while delivering the speed modern business demands
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Her work focuses on designing systems that make human understanding scalable. At Poocho, a research-tech platform built for the Indian market, they use AI-assisted tools to streamline qualitative research while keeping it empathetic and intuitive—helping brands like Unilever, Tata Digital, and CaratLane conduct research with ease and depth. Complementing this, her Impact Persona Framework reframes how teams build user personas—structuring insights around lived experiences, obstacles, boosters, inflection points, and value-added goals. This approach helps researchers and designers move from fragmented observations to actionable design interventions rooted in what truly matters to users.
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Notable Achievements
• Finalist, DELL National Entrepreneur Challenge
• Aspen Ideas Scholar, Aspen Institute
• Affiliate Professor – User Experience Research, Boise State University
• Speaker, DesignUp 2024 and UX India 2024 (on the Impact Persona Framework)
• Former Board Member, National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA)
• Former Board Member, American Anthropological Association (AAA)
• Research Assistant, Cultural Dimensions of Global Business — a pioneering text in business anthropology
Vishal Mardia
First Employee | Chief Design Officer, Simply Wish
He is the first employee at Simply Wish (SWISH) designated as the Chief Design Officer - and believe that he is making ideas, brands, spaces and experiences, interesting through logic, design, emotion and content. His multi-disciplinary design approach, has led to creating in-house innovative original brands (over the years) : Tithi-Tara, Pitara, Boxperience, Awwwfline Games and YNG Eyewear besides curating and creating designs, products and experiences for clients.
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As a non-designer designer - the unknown perspective has enabled him to challenge, craft and create on-ground impact through design, while deeply learning from the design fraternity in the process.
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His brand : YNG Eyewear, India's first natural materials handcrafted eyewear. On a mission to design, develop, disrupt and delight the eyewear industry with products, materials and processes that put planet, people and purpose at the heart of the craft - they have given the world - India's first wooden eyewear, India's first all-jean eyewear and World's first all-jute eyewear. Their eyewear has been tested for ISO 12870-2016, and for a handcrafted brand to meet such standards speaks of the skill, quality and commitment to excellence. A resilient brand that's seen over three inside-out transformations, for him is symbolic of leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Notable Achievements
• India Best Design Award 2021 for Qreative Qick, Simply Wish
• Lexus Design Award Finalist 2021 - Wooden Eyewear under Craft Category
• Lexus Design Award Finalist 2022 - Jean Eyewear under Textile Design Category
• Lexus Design Award Finalist 2023 - Jute Eyewear under Lifestyle Accessory Category
• Business World Future of Design 2025 - Winner - Special Mention under Craft Category
Aakanksha Singh
Design Leader, Expedia
Akanksha Singh is a Design Leader at Expedia Group, where she leads the experience for Insurtech and Fintech products across all Expedia brands, serving millions of global travelers. With over 15 years of experience, she has built and led high-performing design teams across geographies, focusing on creating effective processes, collaborative cultures, and impactful customer experiences.
In her 8+ years at Expedia Group, Akanksha has driven design strategy for complex, global-scale products, ensuring alignment across distributed teams while fostering innovation. Prior to Expedia, she held leadership roles at high-growth Indian organizations such as Paytm, Housing.com, and OLX, where she partnered closely with ML, research, and data analytics teams to advance data-informed design practices. Passionate about the intersection of design, business, and technology, Akanksha is excited about the next wave of AI-driven innovation and its potential to redefine how organizations design for trust, personalization, and global impact.
At DoBeDo Pro 2025, she is looking forward to connecting and listening to the industry leaders young talent in digital experience design. It’s going to be great to hear is how everyone is evolving their work processes and innovation across their teams.
Anirban Ghosh (a.k.a. BAAN G)
Sound Designer | Co-founder, Progress Labs
Anirban Ghosh (a.k.a. BAAN G) is a New Delhi–based interdisciplinary artist with over two decades of experience in music, sound design, composition, and production. Trained in Bass Guitar under Gary Willis and Karl Peters, and currently studying experimental music with Michael Harrison, his practice spans film, theatre, performance, and experimental arts.
Baan has collaborated and performed worldwide with celebrated artists, including Grammy Award winners Ricky Kej, Pt. Rajendra Prasanna, and Bernie Marsden, alongside Rabbi Shergill, Mandeep Raikhy, Navtej Singh Johar, Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, Harkat Studios, and Khwaab Tanha Collective.​
He continues to work globally, collaborating with Fluxus-inspired artists and composers including Michael Harrison and Elliot Cole (Juilliard/New School), exploring intersections of Indian and Western experimental traditions. Currently part of the Creative and Cultural Business Programme at IIM Ahmedabad, Baan G remains committed to pushing artistic boundaries, fostering cross-disciplinary dialogues, and building spaces where design, technology, and the arts converge.
At DoBeDo Pro 2025, he is looking forward to engaging with a vibrant community of design professionals at DoBeDo Pro, especially those pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation. His own focus lies in exploring the commonalities between arts practice, design, and technology, and how these intersectionalities can be applied beyond educational contexts to address wider societal challenges.
Shivani Mehta
Co-founder, Daakroom
​Shivani Mehta is a designer and entrepreneur whose work bridges creativity, sustainability, and the preservation of human connection in an increasingly digital world.
Her journey began in 2013 with a cute little postcard stall at the canteen of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where she was pursuing Product Design. What started as an experiment in celebrating handwritten communication grew into Daakroom - a platform dedicated to reviving the joy of letters and tangible creative experiences.
In 2018, Shivani co-founded bioQ alongside her husband, Saurabh Mehta, to champion eco- friendly and plantable stationery. The venture embodies her belief in design as a force for sustainable change, combining functionality with environmental responsibility. Today, bioQ products are widely recognised in the corporate gifting space for innovatively integrating waste reduction and green practices into everyday products.
At DoBeDo Pro 2025, she is looking forward to connecting with the design community in Delhi and sharing her journey in the hope that even a small part of it resonates and supports someone else’s path. Equally, she is excited to learn from fellow designers - their experiences, insights, and perspectives. The exchange of ideas and stories is what makes gatherings like these so enriching, and she hopes to contribute meaningfully while taking away new inspiration.
Tanu Sinha
Head of Design, PepsiCo India & South Asia
Tanu Sinha is a Design Leader on a mission to leverage Design and Design Thinking as an agent of change for the brands, businesses, consumers and the communities she serves.
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At PepsiCo India, she drives transformative brand experiences through the lens of design, culture, technology and innovation. With a career spanning over 2 decades, Tanu brings a unique fusion of strategic foresight and creative rigor, consistently pushing the boundaries of how brands connect with consumers in a fast-evolving Indian and global landscape. In her current role, she leads breakthrough initiatives across beverage and snack categories, integrating design thinking into core business strategy. Her work not only enhances consumer engagement but also shapes PepsiCo’s narrative around sustainability, youth culture, and inclusivity. While her primary responsibility is towards India and South Asia, she has led and supported various design programs across Middle east, Egypt, Saudi and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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At DoBeDo Pro 2025, she is looking forward to engaging with the amazing talent across our industry - sharing her journey, learning from the experiences of others, and sparking meaningful conversations.
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We are living in extraordinary times, where complexity brings with it endless opportunities to create impact and shape a lasting legacy as designers, storytellers and problem-solvers in this beautiful world.
