About Us
Lagori Collective is an experimental research and design studio from South Asia, based in India. We work to expand conditions under which multiple futures remain possible. We partner with businesses, mission-driven organisations, cultural institutions and philanthropic foundations on research, strategic foresight, systems strategy, and cultural programming. The work is grounded in local knowledge, cultural practices, and lived experience, while engaging broader global questions.
Our practice begins with grounded, participatory research to understand how change is lived and negotiated in everyday life. This includes people, culture, ecology, and technology in transition. We work in the field, building a rooted understanding of how these shifts are experienced, adapted to, and reshaped in context.
Alongside this, we initiate our own research and experimental projects through our South Asian Futures Lab, allowing us to test ideas in context, develop methods, and bring sharper, more grounded approaches into client work. At times, this work feeds directly into ongoing collaborations; at others, it takes the form of speculative artefacts, future scenarios, and immersive formats that explore emerging questions and possibilities.
Our work is shaped through an ongoing network of collaborators across South Asia, built through long-term research, partnerships, and shared projects. We work with multidisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and community partners who bring deep, situated knowledge of the contexts we engage with, allowing us to remain embedded in place while working across regions.
Lagori’s community space in Bengaluru also operates as an Index Node, part of a global network of non-extractive third spaces.
Futures thinking and strategic foresight are central to how we work. Recognising that many futures are possible, we create the conditions to imagine, shape, and rehearse preferred, grounded futures through strategy and real-world exploration. This work builds imagination infrastructure, where different ways of living, working, and organising can be imagined, explored, and taken forward in practice.
We don’t separate research, foresight, and practice. Each informs and reshapes the others.
Through conversations, workshops, exhibitions, and other collaborative formats, the space brings together practitioners across disciplines. The space is an ongoing experiment in how practice and collaboration can be organised outside conventional institutional formats.
We work through an evolving network of practitioners across South Asia and beyond.
Our work often brings together researchers, designers, writers, artists, developers, game designers and others who are working closely with specific contexts. We collaborate on a project basis, depending on the nature of the work and the questions it holds.
If you’re interested in working with us, whether through research, writing, facilitation, or other forms of practice, please fill the form and tell us more about you. We review this on an ongoing basis and reach out when there is alignment.
Lagori’s Practitioner Network
Our Team
Alifiya Mutaher
Alifiya Mutaher is a design researcher and cultural practitioner working on how collective practice is built and sustained. Her work is shaped through long-term engagements across South Asia and South-East Asia, working closely with communities, organisations, and interdisciplinary teams.
Her approach is grounded in participatory research and collaborative design, shaping processes that are attentive to care, accountability, and continuity. She designs programmes, spaces, and engagements that hold people in relation over time, with a focus on how work is carried, shared, and sustained beyond moments of intervention.
Dhaval Kothari
Dhaval Kothari is a design researcher and foresight practitioner working on how systems are imagined and reshaped over time. His work draws from engagements across a range of institutional and community contexts, spanning Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
His practice is grounded in field-based research and participatory inquiry, working closely with communities and institutions to understand how people live through transitions. Working through a South Asian futures lens, he develops inquiries and frameworks that engage with the cultural, economic, and institutional conditions shaping long-term change.
Reema Deshpande
Reema Deshpande is a design researcher and visual practitioner working on how narratives are shaped, shared, and held in public. Her work draws from engagements across climate, public health, and digital inclusion, using visual and participatory methods to surface lived experience across Asia and East Africa.
Her practice focuses on translating complex realities into visual and narrative forms that remain open, reflective, and publicly legible. She works across storytelling, artefact-making, and public engagement to create space for multiple voices and interpretations to coexist.