Prathima Muniyappa

Prathima Muniyappa is a researcher and Elements Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, where her work with the Space Enabled group seeks to use space technology to advance issues of social justice in Earth’s complex Systems. She is a Museum Designer and Heritage conservator and a recent graduate from the Masters in Design Studies in Critical Conservation at the Graduate School of Design under a Fulbright Scholarship (MDes, 2018). Her practice ranges from the realm of Built material heritage as a consultant to UNESCO, World Bank and the Govt of India on several projects and the realm of intangible heritage. In investigating traditional indigenous knowledge, practices and folkways, her design research on Sacred groves and alternative forest practices’ assumes complete synergy between the constructed categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and leverages the philosophy of non-duality as an operational paradigm. It achieves this synergy by investigating cultural identity as an ecological manifestation.