Changing Gears

Design is inherently a future-oriented practice. But how can we envision desirable futures on a troubled planet? Does society have a "crisis of imagination"? And if so, can designers help us both speculate about practices of tomorrow, and inspire us to take action? Climate Futures Now! brings together projects from the 4TU community, via the Design United Expo and an afternoon Dialogues session at DDW23. 

Promises of AI and Opportunities for Design.

Last year in this space, Nolen Gertz wrote,

Computers are ubiquitous, surrounding and infiltrating almost every aspect of our daily lives. Everything from our coffee makers to our smartphones operates on code. Yet our interactions with machines and programs remain to the largest extents bound to pre-defined routines or interfaces.

Our material world is in a state of flux. As we all are aware by now, the global overconsumption of natural resources can’t continue. The ecological problems caused by material production, use, and disposal need to be solved urgently.

Making materials and textiles in the postdigital era involves a synthesis of multiple, multi-species skills and mediums. The agency of fibre, substance, algorithm, and AI work in a joint endeavour with human and non-human participants in contexts of the future everyday. An everyday that is changed by these evolving practices. How we live and make tomorrow is already being constituted by how we are living and making today. 

The last years has seen a great surge of more-than-human (MTH) research and design. The field has explored ways of understanding, investigating, and imagining the world anew by going beyond human perception and cognition. Building on a strong theoretical ground of post-humanism, these pioneering works paved the way for studying why there is a need and what it means to have a MTH approach in design. Now it is time to connect these theories to MTH practice and develop our designerly ways of framing the scope and “doing” MTH design.   

Mathias Funk, Sara Colombo (TUE), Philip van Allen (TUD) and Cristina Zaga (UT)

Sara Colombo and Mathias Funk - Eindhoven University of Technology

Marie-Louise Stisen Kjerstein Sørensen, Bjarke Vognstrup Fog, Line Have Musaeus and Marianne Graves Petersen

Ambra Trotto (RISE) and Caroline Hummels (TUE)

Annemiek van Boeien - Delft University of Technology

Robert Collins - Umeå University

Elisa Giaccardi - Delft University of Technology

Nolen Gertz - University of Twente

Dan Lockton - Eindhoven University of Technology

Ron Wakkary - Eindhoven University of Technology

Dieuwertje de Wagenaar (WUR) & Milene Gonçalves (TUD)

Remco de Kluizenaar - Wageningen University & Research

Heather Wiltse - Umeå Institute of Design (Umeå University)

Himanshu Verma - Delft University of Technology

Bahar Barati - Eindhoven University of Technology

Jelle van Dijk - University of Twente

Geke Ludden - University of Twente

Jeroen van Erp - Delft University of Technology

Paul Hekkert - Delft University of Technology

Roy Bendor - Delft University of Technology

Miguel Bruns - Eindhoven University of Technology

Elvin Karana - Delft University of Technology

Bregje van Eekelen - Delft University of Technology

Mathias Funk - Eindhoven University of Technology

Stephan Wensveen - Eindhoven University of Technology

Jacky Bourgois - Delft University of Technology