 Having studied in the National Institute of Design in India, which was a Bauhaus-style design school, I think multidisciplinarity has always been an integral part of my work. On one hand, I was very influenced by notable image makers and storytellers who were creating radical visions of the future. But on the other side, I was heavily influenced also by the Eames Report, which was created by Charles Henry Eames, the founders of NID. The Eames Report was regarded almost as a sacred piece of text and it kind of emphasised what was quite obvious at that point, that young designers in India need to be aware of the context within which they are working, which was that of an economically fragile, recently independent state, and that we needed to think about how design could become an essential ingredient in innovation. And so when I came to study interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, I think I was interested in finding a space which would allow both those aspirations to come together, a space for magic, alchemy, provocation on one side and people, communities, making and building on the other. Essentially, we are living in what one might call the black swan country, where chaos and complexity seem to have become the operating parameters of the new normal. Within this, you are starting to see the rise of maker culture from all the way from fact toys and jewelry to making your own sort of autonomous drones and synthesising DNA at home. And there is this whole sort of rising crowdsource funding. These might appear to be sort of weak signals at the moment, especially within our sort of industrialised set of products and services that we use today. But what happens when these weak signals start becoming mainstream? Where does that lead the design profession? Especially when designing, making, manufacturing and distribution starts to get easier. Who is the icon and who is the maker of the iconic products? I think at Superflux, we are really interested in these challenges and we find them extremely exciting because it doesn't remain so much about the big, audio-genius designer, but it's more about the network, about architectures of collaboration and participation. I grew up in the late 70s, early 80s in India, which was very much a sort of socialist yet conservative sort of government where the basic hopes and needs of the community were still being met, whether you're talking about getting a television or a car or a telephone on one side. But then all our sort of community engagements, all our sort of fantasies were built on these ancient mythological scriptures, history around anti-gravitational machines or sort of iconic mythological figures. So this whole sort of juxtaposition of the basic needs of a community with the fantastical has played a key role in shaping my worldview and each time I keep going back and forth between India and the UK, these influences only get stronger. The reason we want to do the lab work alongside consultancy is because it allows us to research, collaborate and partner. It allows us to keep a progressive design agenda, allows us to explore unexpected opportunities and brings vision and freshness to the consulting work as well. And yeah, of course, keeps us creatively and intellectually sustained. And the sweet spot is of course the space when we are able to find projects that start moving from consultancy to the lab and from the lab to the consultancy because that's where often the most relevant and impactful work is created. And finally, it's about rhythm and pacing, I think, by having the mix of projects going on at any one time that can be unexpected collisions and cross-virtualization of ideas and also having a set of multiple projects that have different sorts of clients, that have different sorts of economic and business models bring structural resilience to our studio, allowing us to be flexible in any sort of economic volatility.