Saurav Vaishnav
info
Saurav is a play and learning experience designer with five years of cross-sector work spanning education, freshwater conservation, and public health.
His professional history sits at the intersection of design and social impact. At Ooloi Labs, he designed digital learning experiences for mission driven organisations including a choice-based narrative game to teach career decision making and a WhatsApp-based tool to teach computational thinking to high school students. At Memesys Culture Labs, he served as Design Producer and Art Director for Macaraccoon, a strategy board game, where he led production, art direction, and a Kickstarter campaign that raised USD 79K against a USD 25K goal.
He is also a founding member of Young Designers India, a global community of 16,000+ Indian designers.
Residency Practice
In 2024, Saurav undertook a 12-day, 150+ km nomadic walk along a desert river in India as part of the Moving Upstream Luni Fellowship (offered by Veditum India Foundation and School of Public Policy at IIT Delhi with support from Out of Eden Walk and A4 store).
One of the most dystopian sights during the walk was of water tankers scurrying in and out of villages. Villages on the bank of a river, dependent on water tankers for survival.
The Luni river is not disappearing in one catastrophic moment, but slowly: through falling water tables, sand extraction, chemical pollution, and the quiet reordering of livelihoods that depend on it.
Saurav is working on Luni (working title) – a systems-based tabletop game for adults that invites players into the lived realities of ecological decline. The game translates embodied fieldwork into a playable experience of uncertainty, trade-offs, and consequences.
This project directly advances QLO’s mission to prototype the future of learning through making. It’ll allow me to test my hypothesis that play is the future of adult learning. The project will also foster community dialogue, through playtesting and process-oriented engagement like storytelling from the walk and group reflection on the themes the game is trying to tackle.
He anticipates a threefold impact: for his practice, it helps position play as a serious tool for learning and sensemaking. For the broader community of educators, ecologists and community facilitators the game will become an artefact which enables meaningful dialogue around ecological decline. For QLO and its network, the project seeds a conversation and proof of concept for the future of play based adult learning.
