Rewilding Our Imagination
This talk by Anab Jain is part of the Design Interrupted talk series organized by the Department of Design, Aalto University
In her talk, Anab will give a glimpse of the approach and guiding principles behind Superflux's critical, speculative, and experiential design practice.
About the talk:
Rewilding Our Imagination
Standing before the prayer wheels at a cliffside monastery in Bhutan, Anab was struck by the way they embodied what she calls a ‘spiritual infrastructure’: the meshwork of relationships binding people, landscape, and more-than-human worlds. It brought her back to her childhood in India, where she grew up with the inherited knowledge that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers were more than just bodies of water: they represented life and spirit.
It was along the rural edges of Ahmedabad that she first cultivated this sense of our ecological interdependence, before breakneck development began to erode people’s connections to the natural world. Now, dividing her time between London and Vienna, she finds herself grappling with a global permacrisis that demands we radically reimagine these severed bonds. By integrating modern innovation with ancestral wisdom and expanding our perception of time and interdependence, she argues that we can design systems that foster deep, reciprocal connections with our ecology.
In her talk, Anab will give a glimpse of the approach and guiding principles behind Superflux’s critical and experiential design practice. Drawing from her roles as both a practitioner and educator at Design Investigations, she will reflect on how speculative futures have the potential to catalyse meaningful change. 'Rewilding Our Imagination' will explore our shared responsibility as designers to instill hope and agency amidst entangled humanitarian, ecological and technological crises.
Agenda:
- 17:00 Welcome words
- 17:10 Talk by Anab Jain
- 18:00 Panel discussion
- 18:50 Closing words
- 19:00 Event ends
Panelists:
- Namkyu Chun, University Lecturer in Design Communication
- Andrea Botero, Associate Professor in New Frontiers of Design
- Emilija Veselova, Postdoctoral Researcher in Multispecies Design
About the speaker:
Anab Jain
A designer, filmmaker, futurist, and educator, Anab Jain grew up in Ahmedabad, India, within the entangled postcolonial landscapes of a fast-growing nation. Moving to London, she gained her Masters at the Royal College of Art and went on to work on machine intelligence at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.
In 2009, Anab, with Jon Ardern, co-founded Superflux, a design studio foregrounding practices of critical foresight, speculative design, and experiential futures. Working for a diverse set of clients and commissioners, Superflux imagines and builds future worlds we can experience in the present moment. Projects such as Mitigation of Shock, a home thriving in a climate-altered world, and Refuge for Resurgence, a multispecies banquet celebrating planetary coexistence, reflect the studio's commitment to exploring more-than-human narratives.
Recently, Anab and Jon were awarded Royal Designers for Industry in speculative design, the UK's highest accolade for design, and in 2021, Superflux received the Design Studio of the Year Award. Clients and commissioners include Google AI, DeepMind, Omidyar Foundation, the Cabinet Office, IKEA, UNDP and the European Space Agency. Superflux's work has been exhibited at leading institutions, including MoMA New York, V&A London, Tate Modern, Museum of the Future Dubai, and the Venice Biennale. A sought-after speaker, Anab has delivered keynotes at venues including TED, Skoll World Forum, MoMA's Design Summit, and the House of Lords. As Professor of Design Investigations at the dieAngewandte, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Anab mentors students to embrace radical inquiry, equipping them with the tools to navigate and address the challenges of a complex, interconnected world. She has been recognized for her contributions to the field with an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London.
You can follow her work at @anabjain and @superfluxstudio.
Host:
Dr. Julia Lohmann
Julia Lohmann is a Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design. She investigates and critiques the ethical and material value systems underpinning our relationship with flora and fauna. Julia's research interests include critical practice and transition-design, bio materials, collaborative making, museums and residencies, embodied cognition and practice as research. As designer in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, she established the Department of Seaweed, an interdisciplinary community of practice exploring the marine plant's potential as a design material. She holds a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art, London.
About the talk series:
Design Interrupted Conversations for a 21st Century World
www.aalto.fi/en/design-interrupted
Today, the study and practice of design are in great flux. We are amidst the biggest socio-economic transformation since the 1750s, experiencing the fifth Industrial Revolution. There is a growing pressure to transition economies driven by extractive, wasteful and polluting logics towards systems designed to fit the planetary limits. Such transformation requires the design of new types of products and services, as well as new systems and approaches to large-scale changes.
At the same time, design as a practice area is also changing. It is shifting away from a more rigidly defined practice of professionally trained designers creating graphics, objects and spaces towards a practice that is loosely defined, fuzzy and seemingly omnipresent. Many have been calling for democratizing design and recognizing the efforts of non-professional designers. Design thinking, methods and practices have entered many contexts, including governance, jurisprudence, sciences and activism. The design community has been grappling with the ever-expanding definitions of what design is and who a designer is.
This talk series invites design professionals, students, academics and anyone interested in these challenges to a series of conversations. Each event features a scene-setting lecture by a leading practitioner and thinker followed by open discussion. Three themes give focus to the series: digital, societal and material transformations. What is design’s role in these transformations? How do we generate new know-how to support the needed transitions, and what examples already exist that we can learn from? What stands in the way of progress towards equitable, diverse, and sustainable lives, and what is the role of design in removing such blockages? What are design and designers in this new context?
Department of Design at Aalto University invites you to join our conversations to explore what design is, can and should be in the 21st Century.