About Us

Joshua McVeigh-Schultz earned a PhD in Media Arts and Practice from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Drawing on a hybrid background in media arts and social sciences, his research focuses on the intersection between speculative design and ritual. He is currently a Visiting Researcher in the Social & Emotional Technology Lab (UCSC) and a Project Director for the Mobile & Environmental Media Lab (USC). His latest work leverages virtual and mixed reality to explore speculative forms of creative collaboration. He has published and presented research in a range of venues including: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Social Media & Society, Association of Internet Research (AoIR), Swiss Design Network, and ACM Multimedia. He has researched and consulted for a range of industry partners including Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, BMW, and 5D. He was awarded an Intel PhD Fellowship and an Annenberg Fellowship for his dissertation research. At USC he worked as a design researcher in Scott Fisher’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) and Alex McDowell’s Worldbuilding Media Lab (WbML). He has also been a researcher for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, a member of Henry Jenkins’s Civic Paths research group, and a contributor to the academic blog Culture Digitally. He earned an MFA from UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts & New Media program and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, where he researched identity performance in Japanese social media. He also holds a BA in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between his undergraduate and graduate careers, he lived, studied, and taught in Japan and China.

Elena Márquez Segura is a design researcher specializing in embodied interaction in collocated social settings, with a multidisciplinary background, including a Ph.D and Ph.Lic in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University and Stockholm University (Sweden), and master’s studies in Interactive Systems Engineering at KTH (Sweden). Elena is also a certified trained instructor in several fitness practices, including aerial fitness, barre, and Pilates.
Elena is an expert in novel embodied ideation methods for the design of rich physical and social experiences in collocated settings. She has used her methods to facilitate and lead ideation activities in various domains, including physical rehabilitation, interactive performances, movement-based games and play experiences, and future envisioning workshops.

Elena’s research focuses on movement-based co-located social interaction. She advocates for designing experiences taking an embodied interaction approach, i.e. one that foregrounds and leverages one’s physical and social ways of being. In her dissertation, Elena developed concepts and methods for the design of movement-based co-located social interaction. She has also worked in a variety of application domains, ranging from serious settings (e.g. interactive rehabilitative physical therapy) to non-serious ones (e.g. movement-based games for children), utilizing different technologies including mobile game platforms, wearables, VR, and robots. Elena has published extensively on this work in top tier conferences and journals.

Karl Baumann is a designer, filmmaker, and researcher. His current work lies at the intersection of speculative design and community art. Working across cinema, games, and emerging media, his methodology is based on collaborative design and user participation that explores the future of civic engagement, urbanism, and networked technology.
Karl has shown work at the Guggenheim museum, the IndieCade Game Festival, the Mexico International Film Festival, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently an Annenberg Fellow in the Media Arts + Practice (MAP) Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. Karl works with the World Building Media Lab (WBML), the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML), the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, and the Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL). Recently, he worked for Intel’s Global Production Lab and Google News Lab R&D.

Andres Santanilla is a user experience designer at SAP, focused on designing applications for a broad range of industries. His favorite design practice is “speculative design”, a toolset that aims to spark conversation around possible future scenarios that study the effect of technology and development in our society. He is also a lover of anything that involves bread and is always on the search for the best croissant.