who is arvind venkataramani?

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into

  1. those that belong to the Emperor
  2. embalmed ones,
  3. those that are trained,
  4. suckling pigs,
  5. mermaids,
  6. fabulous ones,
  7. stray dogs,
  8. those that are included in this classification,
  9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
  10. innumerable ones,
  11. those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush,
  12. others,
  13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
  14. those that resemble flies from a distance.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

life is complex, and often resembles the above. as a design researcher at sonicrim, i help people understand and tame this complexity and, hopefully, make better products and lives.

this website collects a set of observations and speculations about the world as viewed through the lenses of the interaction design and design research disciplines. as i learn more about living on earth and being human, both professionally and personally, i continue to document here my syntheses on complexity and designing a more humane world.

my portfolio is not something I can share freely online because of confidentiality constraints, but you can view my resume as a pdf file.

in the meantime, i can be found performing my networked identity on linkedin and facebook. I listen to altogether too many genres of music, and last.fm is where I go to try and make sense of it; a friend and i also blog about world music. Now and then I upload my travel and documentary photography on flickr, but I haven't found a good way of connecting it with my dopplr or tripadvisor accounts yet. I read a lot of blogs and books, but about the only thing I manage to do with them is to share and enjoy - and occasionally they manage to make it into my bibliography. I also manage the workshops team for the Fuse Factory.

you can follow me on twitter here

or email me @ arvind at sensemaya dot org

a note on the origin of this website's name