social science

With an interdisciplinary background as engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer, Ramesh researched topics as diverse as the relation between indigenous and local knowledge systems and new media or the use of design and social-science perspectives to analyze the impacts of information technology on global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements, and infrastructure.

Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst others he has given talks at the World Bank, UNESCO, Government of India and Microsoft Research. Please find more info on his LIFT profile.

Why LIFT
Ramesh is interested in the divergent notions of futurism and utopia with respect to every layer of media and technology. His thoughts on diverse cultural domains around media and technology presents some very different notions of pastness, and future aspirations, ones that are very much locally grounded in environment, family, cosmology, and landscape.

What Ramesh expects
The 2009 edition will be Ramesh's first LIFT conference and he'll be curiously heading to Geneva in February for an animated exchange on where the future went.