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Event Details
Speakers: Grace Turtle (Sandberg Instituut), Christian Petersen (Norwich University of the Arts), and shobhan s (Purdue University & slowstudio)
Welcome to the first edition of Designing Sustainable Worlds, a new hybrid seminar series from the Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich University of the Arts in which we bring together interesting people and projects exploring what it means to ‘design’ ‘sustainable’ ‘worlds’—recognising that each of those terms is very much open to debate.
For our first edition, we’re joined by three educators who are also researchers, working at the forefront of novel approaches to engaging with futures in education. Futures have become an increasingly popular topic in creative education, with many new programmes and projects, often rooted in design schools, aiming to bring a degree of ‘futures literacy’ (as UNESCO defines it) to wider groups of students. But there are different models, taking alternative approaches to speculation and exploration, and our three speakers exemplify exciting work at this forefront, which we hope will be of interest to the design, futures, sustainability/transitions, and creative education community, students, educators, and researchers more widely.
All welcome online: please register (choose "Please select this ticket type if you are a member of the Norwich alumni community or an industry partner"): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/designing-sustainable-worlds-tickets-1794840108079
Our speakers
Grace Turtle (they/them) is a Colombian-Australian AI researcher, designer, and educator with 15+ years’ experience in strategic design and foresight. They are the Co-Head of Monstrous Futurities at the Sandberg Instituut, PhD Fellow at TU Delft, and a member of the futures design collective, Becoming. Previously, they led Design Research & Insight at Deloitte Digital (AU–NL). Their work has been featured internationally, including TEDx Sydney.
What happens when "we" try to “fix” the future before it arrives? This talk moves between queering AI, monstrous imaginaries, and embodied practices—inviting a futurity that embraces uncertainty, mutability and relationality as generative forces for transforming the worlds we inhabit.
Christian Petersen (he/him) is a graphic novelist and design researcher who uses teaching collaborations to reframe futures narrative using critical design methods, and climate critical storytelling.
In the seminar he will discuss Drawing Futures (2021-22) and Illustrating Futures (2023-24); live projects delivered in partnership between the BA illustration course (Norwich), and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS). Here students worked with future studies methods, such as back-casting and scenario planning in developing their projects, thereby exploring parallels between future studies methods and speculative- visual narrative- and world-building practices that are fundamental to the illustration discipline.
shobhan s (he/him) makes near-future prototypes and information experiences. He trained at the Royal College of Art; has worked with design, software, electronics, art, and more since 2011; currently teaches at Purdue University; sometimes makes playful work through slowstudio; and has a website, here: setwrite.in.
In his talk, shobhan will describe two courses where students designed near-future objects and invented rituals through frugal but affective prototypes. He will also discuss how designers need to demonstrate near-futures for the world they'd like to live in, and how they should consider 'emotions' to be their working material instead of focusing on designing artefacts.
The format is short talks, followed by a discussion moderated by Dan Lockton, Institute for Sustainable Worlds. Sign up to our newsletter to hear about future events.
