About

Mala Siamptani is a lecturer and design practitioner with substantial experience in the research, development and delivery of creative projects in the Fashion, Design and Art sectors. After obtaining two Masters degrees and completing her PhD research, Mala runs her studio specialising in the design and manufacture of products and sculptural objects. Following extensive material research, Mala’s work attempts to connect traditional craft with digital technology. This is evident through her work in education, where she has been providing up-to-date knowledge, expertise and experience in professional practice in a specific 3D/Jewellery specialist subject area. Through her design work and research, Mala demonstrates both the use and need for material research and its acknowledgement of experiential knowledge to advance craft thinking and practice.

Anneleen Swillen is a researcher and lecturer at PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University, Belgium. Her work explores jewellery within a post-digital culture through research in the arts, education, curation, and writing. With a background in Object & Jewellery Design and Curatorial Studies, she established the foundation for her PhD in arts, which she successfully defended in 2019 at PXL-MAD and Hasselt University. Her doctoral research involved exploring interactions between jewellery and presentation through performative installations, active archives, and interdisciplinary publications. In 2020, she co-founded “Artificial Intelligems” with composer and digital artist Greg Scheirlinckx. As a fluid collective working on the intersection of jewellery, graphic design, music, XR-performance, dance, and data science, they explore more-than-human co-creation.

Timothy Veske-McMahon (US/EE) is an American jewellery artist and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Jewelry + Metalsmithing at RISD teaching both studio and seminar-based coursework on the undergraduate and graduate levels. His practice incorporates physical hands-on fabrication techniques with CAD/CAM workflows, whether repurposing waste plastics, building and programing custom CNC machines or scripting algorithms to generate form. Timothy’s most recent exhibition (Vanillaroma, 2023) focused on the potential of jewelry to serve as a medium for social acknowledgement beyond personal identity, contributing to public recognition of social issues and modern complexities.

Wes Nijssen is a lecturer for the graphic design department at PXL-MAD. Approaching graphic design as an expanded artistic practice, where image, typography, and space are set into motion through 3D animation, projections, and interactive installations. His work resists the confines of design as a purely functional discipline, instead embracing speculation, narrative, and experimentation as methods of inquiry. By interweaving digital processes with tactile, material approaches, he explores how design can question, distort, and reshape our perception of reality. In doing so, his practice positions graphic design not merely as a communicative tool, but as a critical and poetic force within the wider field of contemporary artistic research.

Mouhannad Al-Sayegh is the founder of Flair Fashion, and the Creative Technologist and manager of the Digital Learning Lab at London College of Fashion. He has over 20+ years of experience in developing software and extensive experience in fashion technology research and development. He thrives on exploring new ways of fusing technology and fashion, where tech can act as a catalyst for innovation. He has been the technical lead in several EU & UK funded research projects around mass customisation and co-design to manufacturing systems to retailer and consumer applications. He has written several research papers on sizing technology and fashion metadata.