Ranjit Makkuni, President of the Sacred World Foundation, our ICHIM Closing Plenary speaker this year, has been receiving a great deal of attention lately. He:

• was featured in an extensive interview with Mark Vanderbeeken at the Torino 2008 World Design Capital site http://www.torinoworlddesigncapital.it/portale/en/content.php?sezioneID=47

• received a feature in Business week in February http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070226_426602.h... and

• won recognition from ID Magazine last year http://sacredworld.com/asp/Interactive%20Media%20Design%20.htm

Ranjit, who last enthralled ICHIM audiences in his closing plenary talk at L’Ecole du Louvre in 2003 http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim_03.html is a rare person in the world of technology (not the least for being also a professional sitar player). He deeply appreciates the culturally specific sources of meaning-making and the role of symbol, self and the spiritual in communications and, what’s more, he actually reflects that in his technological solutions In 2003 his ground-breaking work on culturally sensitive interfaces as represented in the Crossing project energized ICHIM attendees. These days, with the opening of the revolutionary Eternal Gandhi Museum, the work continues and deepens.

I’m looking forward to seeing Ranjit again later this month and to wrestling with him, and other ICHIM attendees, about how best to harness technologies for rich cultural transmission and cross cultural communication, the challenges we’ve been confronting at ICHIM conferences for nearly two decades.