Nilanjana Mannarprayil (she/her)
Hello!
I am a design thinker, culture explorer & speculative futures researcher. The products & experiences I design demystify the unknown & provide a framework for positive futures.
I like to bring curiosity and a sense of play into everything I create: I transformed my banal business card into an engaging infinite experience. I go by Five Blue Elephants [the literal translation of my name in my native tongue Malayalam- Neela Anja Ana], for my freelance work.
My Regenerative Business Card
LOOPD: Elevated Care Systems for Chronic Illness
Elevating care methods for individuals with lifelong illnesses
More than 50% of the population will be chronically ill by 2030, with the first symptoms emerging from 16 to 19, giving rise to the need for unclinical methods of managing your illness at home.
By analysing people’s home environments and conducting interviews, I discovered that the support system of patients dwindles with time due to a need for more awareness and learning to provide proper care. Through conducting co-design sessions, I developed collaborative solutions involving methods where carers could easily communicate and come together collectively.
My product, Loopd, creates a healthy culture around alternative care methods and helps people vocalise how they feel best supported. The system is also supported by a third public space where individuals or their carers can receive information and get inspired by the community. The services accompanying this experience include packaging the prescriptions to be less clinical and customisable care stickers, which build up to become a visual health artefact with time. By changing these rituals around providing care, we move towards preferable futures with healthier language around caring for lifelong illnesses.
Memory Mapper
People are dynamic, and so are their memories. They deserved to be showcased likewise.
In our future world of 2030, people are more likely to move cities frequently. The age-old question of where you are from becomes increasingly tricky to answer due to the complexity of its answer. Memory Map comes to your aid by showcasing your past through a new format. Unlike traditional methods of describing your past rooted in location, Memory Map places your memories on different tangents beyond just location by segregating them through people, places, objects, and feelings. With every new experience, the proximity-based map shifts. By placing this data within Holistic Health Records, patients may easily convey difficult experiences, making them feel comfortable within new communities. Synthesising Holistic Health Records can also lead to a more robust collective experience than a standalone memory, creating new dynamic methods of communication. This data can also be transferrable, leading to new interactions with other people and a collective memory bank within communities.
Regenerative Local Health Futures Exhibition
In this project, we explored and designed speculative future worlds and experiences of regenerative local communities and systems leading towards equitable health in ten years.
Design, unlike art, is traditionally assumed to serve a practical purpose; our purpose for this project was to get people thinking about possible uses and unintended consequences of emerging technologies in real-world contexts. We urge you to challenge your perception and assumptions on technologically-driven regenerative realities. Would you be happy living in this world? What proactive measures would you take to facilitate/ prevent this future?
