Design Connections 10x10 will return this year on Tuesday 19 September, showcasing a selection of the best emerging design talent in the UK. We caught up with speaker Pali Palavathanan from TEMPLO to find out more about her practice. 

Hi Pali, tell us about your practice. . .

TEMPLO is a branding and digital agency based in Shoreditch. We specialise in #CreativityForChange working in many sectors including cultural, education and NGOs. Our clients include Kingston University, Somerset House, Amnesty International, the United Nations, London School of Economics.

We also spend studio time creating self-initiated projects to highlight issues we are passionate about. The aim of our work is to have real-world impact.

What are you working on at the moment?

We are about to launch a national campaign for Plymouth College of Art inspired by the school’s philosophy about creativity being a continuum. This will come to life on billboards, digital platforms and in an interactive VR experience.

We're also working with Old Spitalfields Market during the London Design Festival, taking stalls headed for scrap and transforming them into makeshift emergency homeless shelters in London.

What impact do you hope to see through your work? 

#CreativityForChange is at the heart of everything we do so a lot of our work focuses on championing education, highlighting injustice and corruption, celebrating cultural diversity and raising awareness of climate change. As communicators and activists, it is our duty to use our skills to influence, inform and ultimately make an impact.

Tell us about something you’ve worked on that’s made you feel proud.

Our #StopTorture campaign which we co-created with some of the world leading human rights lawyers, journalists, investigators helped highlight the ongoing sexual violence in Sri Lanka by the government-led military. In order to connect a relatively unknown issue to the rest of the world, we created a trilingual branding system that connected the two main languages in Sri Lanka, Sinhala and Tamil, with English.

The project was endorsed by Desmond Tutu, Cara Delevigne, Bianca Jagger and M.I.A and has helped swing countries’ votes at The United Nations for an independent war crimes investigation.

To hear more about Pali's work, join us at 7pm on the 19 September on Facebook as we livestream the whole of Design Connections 10x10 from Second Home.