Carolina Short

Designer, educator, and researcher / PhD candidate in Media and Creative Technologies, University of Waikato

I work at the intersection of design research, education, and professional practice – exploring design as a cultural, social, and technological system. I co-founded Bigital in 1996, a web design studio that has delivered over 100 projects across South America, Europe, and Oceania, and I have maintained that connection between practice and academia ever since.

My research translates complex ideas into visual, interactive, and narrative forms, with applications in public communication, cultural heritage, and decision-making. I am currently completing a PhD investigating urban typography as a lens for cultural memory and place identity. I have also published three open-source typefaces through Google Fonts – collectively used on tens of thousands of websites worldwide.

I design typefaces and publish them through Google Fonts. Mansalva (2019), an informal handwritten typeface, has received over six million requests and is used on more than 40,000 websites worldwide. Mynerve (2023), a handwriting typeface supporting 219 languages, receives 1.45 million weekly requests and was recently featured in the trailer for Anchor Me, a documentary on New Zealand musician Don McGlashan. Asimovian (2025), an experimental display typeface inspired by science fiction and speculative design, draws on geometric letterforms that blend Art Deco and futuristic aesthetics.

I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate design programmes at the University of Waikato, where my work has been recognised with a University Teaching Excellence Award and a Divisional Teaching Excellence Award.

• Transdisciplinary Design
• Typography & Cultural Memory
• Type Design
• Interaction & Communication Design
• Practice-led Research
• Urban Heritage
• Design Education

Dr Tomás García Ferrari

Designer, educator, and researcher at the intersection of design, technology, and society

For three decades my work has sat at the intersection of design, technology, and critical thinking – treating making and thinking as a single integrated practice. I co-founded Bigital in 1996, and since then I have been examining how design mediates the relationship between people and emerging technologies: from the conditions that enabled mass participation on the early web, through cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, to the AI-mediated environments we navigate today.

My current work develops the Homo Arbiter framework, which names the designer’s emerging role as critical evaluator and arbiter in AI-mediated systems.

At the University of Waikato, I served for thirteen years as teacher, researcher, and academic leader. As Head of Design, I authored the CUAP application that transitioned the Bachelor of Computer Graphic Design into the Bachelor of Design – opening the programme to interdisciplinary partnership with Media and Creative Technologies, Computer Science, and later Engineering through a new Industrial Design major. I also authored the programme submission for the Bachelor of Design in Interface Design at NZUWI, Waikato’s joint institute with Hangzhou City University in China, and led that programme from 2016 to 2021.

• Design & Technology
• AI-mediated Systems
• Internet of Things
• Interaction Design
• Design Education
• Design Theory