WSA Where Are They Now? – Three-Time WSA Winner Babak Fakhamzadeh Shares His Journey

WSA Alumni - Where are they now?

I’m in the interesting position of having been a WSA winner three times, representing three countries on three continents. The first time was back in, what feels like, prehistoric times, that is to say, 2012, when Dérive app, a mobile app that helps to get you lost, was one of the winners in the Tourism & Culture category, representing Uganda.

Dérive app is still going strong, is used daily by scores of new users from around the world, and is continuously deployed as a tool in education and for research.

The 2012 WSA Congress took place in Abu Dhabi, and traveling there allowed us to, for the first time, host a Dérive app workshop, here in collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi branch of New York University.

Dérive app workshops have since been hosted on most continents, and are now compressed, from the original two days (who has time for that now?), to a minimum of a few hours, with the most recent one taking place in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in late 2025.

Solutions in the Tourism & Culture category, or the Culture & Heritage category as it has been changed into, often include projects that are financially more precarious, as there tends to be less money to go around in culture & heritage, and, often, solid business models are difficult to define, and even more difficult to scale up.

It has been no different for Dérive app.

However, our win in 2012, combined with the app’s foundation in anti-capitalist theory going back to the 1960s, meant that we found ourselves on a trajectory that has generated a continuous interest and use.

Then, as a software developer who started experimenting with code back in even more ancient ZX Spectrum days, I value efficiency over bloat, once an essential necessity. And this has meant that, even with today’s fairly heavy use of our platform, the cost of running Dérive app has been very low, allowing us to keep growing, without running a continuous financial loss.

These are turbulent times. Not only is the ‘leader of the free world’ trying to destroy our world, AI is upending how we perceive digital change makers, and how we use the tools that allow for engendering change.

In one way, this will mean that the creation of digital tools, for whatever purpose, is democratised. On the other, there’s also a risk of solutions ending up in strict silos, changing the world for some, completely unknown to others. This, whether in Brazil, where I’m based now, or anywhere else in the world.

That said, perhaps the biggest strength of Dérive app is how to emphasise the relationship between the individual and the built environment, explicitly not relying on third-party services, or on a mediated experience. A democratisation of access to technology can also facilitate exactly that personalisation and individualisation.

Interestingly, or perhaps naturally, this approach to deploying technology, to serve the people, is also exactly what I see as the strength of WSA and its activities, and what drew me to the greater ecosystem from the very beginning. So I’m very happy that, over a decade ago, we got our start exactly with the WSA.

Let’s hope that leader of free world doesn’t spoil it for every single one of us.

Babak Fakhamzadeh