Vaibhav is me. Yes its a tough name. But its easier if you try this: way-baaaaav. I can't figure how to help you pronounce baaaav bit though. alright..

My background is in graphic design and I love it. I am obsessed with typography,grids and breaking them,text,image,colours and not colors. My under-graduate education actually spanned the larger field of communication design where I made short animations, films, radio shows, toys, helped create multi-disciplinary workshops in the area of technology(ICT-badword), health and education. I worked both as a student designer and artist with grassroots communities, NGOs and technologists on a couple of projects. Later in my under-grad I got interested in locative media, personal geography and alternative mapping practices. My final thesis was about creating usage maps of a sub-urb in Bangalore, India with local communities and informal economies. These maps were informed by a mix of urban studies, psychogeography, derives, familiar strangers, cycles, gps technology, open source ethics and collaborative map making techniques. You can find this project and a few others at http://recombine.net

I am in this class to further explore how the mobile phone can be used to markup spaces, create/break/hack social networks, explore text as a medium and create new forms of urban play. If possible I would like to locate some of the work I do in this class back in India. After the first class I am not sure if this would be possible (due to all the problems multiple mobile phone carriers create) but its nevertheless a possibility. I am open to working with people in the class and am looking forward to learn from all of you in a massive manner.

:)

I use a very simple Nokia phone without a camera. My service provider is Cingular.