KarBo

Bow (Dr Bow Wu) and Karthik (Dr Kartikeya Acharya) are KarBo, a Sydney based relational design studio and research practice.

They met as doctoral researchers at the Department of Design at Aalto University in Helsinki.

Now Bow is a design researcher and Lecturer specializing in social design at the University of Sydney (USyd), School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Her doctoral research was on the topic of community-based design. Before joining USyd, she worked as post-doc researcher in design fiction at Aalto University, and as a Research Assistant Professor in Service Design for multidisciplinary collaborations at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has worked with and for clients of public sectors, B2B and B2C corporations, NGOs and for local initiatives in the Nordics, China, and Africa.

Karthik is a design researcher, interaction designer and architect. He is the founder and director of Delectro, a Sydney based design-led studio and startup specialising in new relational energy products and services. His doctoral research looked at how by design, data and interpersonal relations can be made to affect each other. Before moving to Australia, he was Assistant Professor of Design Research at Aarhus University in Denmark where he co-founded and led a design lab. He has also worked as a design researcher with the CTO of Fortum, the Finnish state energy utility corporation, and was field researcher at Nokia Research Center, India. His works as design researcher, artist and curator have been exhibited in Finland, France, UK, Italy and India.