Our mentors

Principal Advisor: Elliott P. Montgomery

Elliott P. Montgomery is a design researcher, strategist and educator whose work focuses on speculative inquiries at the confluence of social, technological and environmental impact. He is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, The New School, teaching in the MFA Transdisciplinary Design Program and across the School of Design Strategies. He is also the co-founder of The Extrapolation Factory, an award winning design-futures research studio based in Brooklyn.

He was previously a design research resident at the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy as well receiving the Graham Foundation's Individual Grant and The Shed's Open Call commission. He holds a Master's in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London and a Bachelor's in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

J. Paul Neeley

J. Paul Neeley (b. 1978) is an American Speculative Designer & Researcher based in London. He has a background in Service Design, Speculative Design, Design Research, and Strategy. J. Paul has worked professionally at Mayo Clinic as a Service Designer focusing on the healthcare experience and delivery, and at Unilever in Consumer & Market Insights for brand & product development.

For the past decade J. Paul's design work has explored the social, cultural, economic, and ethical implications of emerging technologies, designing speculative futures that help us engage with possibility as a way of reframing and understanding anew our current state. Projects have covered topics from happiness, healthcare and wellbeing, self quantification, social polarization and civility, future mobility, AI, AR, VR, and synthetic biology, to circular economy, climate change, and issues of complexity and computational irreducibility in design and business.

J. Paul consults in Speculative Design at Neeley Worldwide with a wide range of clients from Government to Fortune 500s to start-ups across various industries, and is the Co-founder of the School of Critical Design, a professional school working to normalize Speculative Design and Futures practice in industry. He is a tutor in Service Design at the Royal College of Art, and has guest lectured at Imperial College: Computer Science, RCA: Design Interactions, NYU: ITP, Köln International School of Design, RISD, The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), the Architectural Association, China Academy of Art, and SVA: Design for Social Innovation.

J. Paul holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art with Distinction where he studied with Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby, and is a graduate of Northwestern University in Communications Studies with a concentration in Economics.

Radha Mistry

Radha has a background in architecture, narrative environments, and strategic foresight — and loves teaching, writing, speaking, and learning about any and all bits related.Radha currently leads the foresight practice at Autodesk, teaches as part-time faculty on the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at The New School (Parsons), and spends most of her time exploring the impact of emerging technologies and how they’ll change the way we design and make things in the future.

Prior to Autodesk, Radha focused on the Future of Work with the Steelcase Applied Research group. Her work sought out ways organizations could drive Innovation through design. Previous to Steelcase, Radha was part of the Arup Foresight + Innovation team in London and San Francisco, crafting speculative futures for global clients; she has also exhibited during the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and worked on design-led community engagement initiatives in cities across Europe.

Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo

Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo (CL-Q) is an Entrepreneur, internationally exhibiting Designer, awarding-winning Director, Writer, Global Speaker and Consultant. Operating on the axis of Design, Politics & Film.

CL-Q is the Director of THE ADV_™, an immersive forum, developing; empathy, insight and foresight through weaponised empathy for; conscious citizens, community builders and world shapers. He is the host of Manoeuvres podcast, a talk series reviewing; power, progress and change through critical events in humanity — where we get to see tactics at work. 

Sitraka Rakotoniaina

Sitraka is an independent artist and designer with an interest in world-building. His work uses design as an exploratory tool to examine and critique dominant socio-technical imaginaries, and explore new relationships between people and technology.

Sitraka is the co-founder of Very Very Far Away (VVFA), a research project concerned with democratising future narratives and entertaining a diversity of imaginations. It explores new modes of collaboration between artists, technologies, scientists, and partner institutions worldwide.

Sitraka is also a lecturer in Narrative Environment at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He holds a Master in Graphics and Multimedia from ENSAD Paris, and a Master in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London.

Paolo Cardini

Paolo Cardini is currently Full Professor and former Graduate Program Director in the Industrial Design department at Rhode Island School of Design. His previous appointment was within the interdisciplinary design graduate program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He studied Industrial design at Politecnico di Milano and Glasgow School of Art and he has been department chair for the bachelor and master courses in Industrial Design at Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin.

Professor Cardini‘s activities range from scientific research to design consultancy and commercial projects; he designs for various international firms and he lectures in conferences and design schools worldwide contributing actively to the field with papers and publications. Among others, recent collaborations are with Nike, Hyundai, Johnson&Johnson. His recent work mostly focuses on the relationship between global market, local identities, and products through the lens of speculative and discursive design.

Carolyn Kirschner

Carolyn is a designer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the growing entanglements of humans, non-humans, emerging technologies and planetary ecologies—using design as an investigative tool to materialise fragments from alternate or expanded worlds. She currently holds teaching positions as Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, and as Adjunct Professor at Parsons School of Design in New York.  

Carolyn was the recipient of a Postdoctoral Sawyer Seminar Fellowship at The New School, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has been a fellow of the Designed Realities Studio, an interdisciplinary research and teaching platform led by Dunne & Raby, and completed a residency at A/D/O in Brooklyn. From 2022, she will be a resident at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from 2022, as part of the European Commission’s Beyond Matter research initiative.  

Carolyn’s work has been published and exhibited internationally. She completed her Master of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London.   

Thomas Thwaites

Thomas Thwaites is a designer interested in the social impacts of science and technology. He holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, and a BSc. in Human Sciences from University College, London.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Banque De France (Cite de l’Economie in Paris), and the Asia Culture Centre in South Korea. His work is exhibited at major galleries and museums worldwide, including at the National Museum of China, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Science Museum (London), the Cooper Hewitt in the USA and La Triennale di Milano (Italy). He has spoken at numerous conferences, including TED and Design Indaba, as well as at universities and businesses worldwide. Press includes features in national newspapers including the New York Times, Sued Detsche and The Financial Times. He has presented a four part television series, aired on Discovery Channel. 

He is the author of two books; The Toaster Project, and GoatMan. The Toaster Project, documents Thwaites’ attempt to make an electric toaster from scratch. Goatman describes his project to take a holiday from being human by becoming a goat. Both are published by Princeton Architectural Press, and have been  translated Korean, Japanese and Norwegian.