art
Micah Alex
I am a Designer, Researcher, and Artist exploring community, technology, archives, and alternative digital infrastructures.
researcher
artist
designer
khattamicah- a play on ‘khatta-meetha’ (sour-sweet) and Micah (meekah).
Recent
Threads
Speculation & Futures
Imagining alternatives through fiction, games, and critical practice- who gets to design the future, and from where?
5 piecesArchives & Memory
Who holds memory, how should archives work, and what does annotation enable? From institutional platforms to community …
7 piecesSituated Practice
Research rooted in specific places and accountable to the people it concerns- from Bidar and Wayanad to rural Bihar and …
8 piecesCommunity Infrastructure
From mesh networks in rural Karnataka to community audio archives- building technology that communities own and …
9 piecesTeaching & Making Together
Workshops, studios, and experiments in collaborative learning- what does it mean to teach design as a situated, …
9 piecesWriting
How to do counter-UI/UX design
Interfaces help manipulate your sense of reality. As a designer/developer who is part of the plural "user" being …
How to simply set up IIIF images for your small archive
A practical guide to setting up IIIF image hosting for small archives using self-hostable tools, making collections …
essay
Technofutures from Bidar
This piece is a group reflection of a project run in Bidar, India, to set up a community mesh network facilitated by …
essay
The Case for a Webinar Pi
Advocacy for developing Webinar Pi, a platform built on Raspberry Pi technology to foster digital literacy and …
Establishing a community network
A speculative framework for imagining a long-term sustainable community-owned wifi mesh network, mapping the roles of …
How I use speculative design
An overview of how I use speculative design methods to question dominant systems and envision alternative futures, …
UI/UX Design
project
Website Development - IIHS
Developed a WordPress web experience for the Tamil Nadu Government Sustainable Habitats program, incorporating …
Papad - Community Audio Knowledge Archives
Papad is a tool for community-based practitioners to store and access oral knowledge bases, deployed over decentralised …
The Lived Experience Project
Explore the journey of creating a robust knowledge infrastructure to enhance the livelihoods of persons with …
Pune Covid Relief
A rapid-response website and app built during the Covid-19 crisis to aggregate and disseminate essential resources- …
Milli - Connect and Annotate your Archives
Milli was an open-source platform designed to make archives more democratic in the described and annotated ways. The …
Carpooling Unalone - Karwaan
A classroom project investigating carpooling culture in India through user research, leading to the design of Karwaan- a …
Research
Maps of Hyderabad Cinema History
This was a project to create print-ready maps of the cinema halls that existed in Hyderabad from 1936 to 2018.
resource
South Asian Digital History
A curated collection of web content exploring the history of the digital in South Asia and the digitization of South …
Speculative Storytelling in Wayanad
The output of a 5-week course in Wayanad, Kerala, in the aftermath of the 2018 floods. We designed a speculative …
talk
Milli Platform at International Archives Week
Presented the designs for the Milli platform at International Archives Week, demonstrating its capabilities for …
talk
Alternatives and Demands in Network Ruins
Participated in a panel talk discussing Servelots/Janastu's experiments with Community Networks, focusing on innovative …
resource
Wikipedia Editathon - Dalit History Month
Contributed a total of 24.5K words across 27 edited articles, including the creation of 2 new articles. Added 167 …
Pedagogy
Portfolio - Workshops, Classes, Panels and Publications
A portfolio of workshops, classes, panels, and publications that I have organized, spoken at, and written for.
Seeing, Being, Doing: design
I co-taught a four-month course on responding as a creative practitioner to places where humans and non-humans gather, …
project
Kishori Film Festival
Designed and facilitated 8-week long media-literacy classes for 11th grade young women from rural UP. Utilized …
Art
art
Poems
A small collection of poems and reflections
Art that I make
A collection of posters, paintings, and visual work created across different projects and personal explorations.
Feeling through the Cities - Koramangala
A poetic reflection on the hidden rhythms and overlooked details of daily life in Koramangala, Bangalore.
art
Glitch Art
A collection of glitch art pieces exploring digital aesthetics and visual protest through pixel manipulation and data …
art
Graphics work
A collection of posters, logos, explainers, and graphics created for various projects and organizations.