Design Futures
About
Tutors: Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa + Oron Catts
The capacity to imagine the future is crucial to any society; it is not about looking forward, but understanding ourselves and our place in history. The events in the last year have dramatically shown us how volatile our present is — an increasingly unstable world makes the ability to imagine the future even more relevant. In Design Futures (DF) we imagine, build, critique and deliver possible futures. We deconstruct the past and break down the present to build worlds, objects and creatures waiting to come into existence. Design Futures encourages wild speculation alongside rigorous research and embraces wonder and terror.
In 2020/2021 Design Futures explores the notion of the post-human to imagine the future from a non-human perspective and challenge what it means to be human. Underpinning our work this year is the desire to debate and reimagine the role of design in the face of pressing issues — we work towards a brief of Designing for the Unsettling, an exploration of the way design can respond and address conditions of transition, instability, opportunity and precarity.
Some of the themes student’s are exploring this year include: the value of a single breath, the olive harvest, prosthetics and transhumanism, AI management, the future of food, non nuclear families, identity and what it means to be human.
Special thanks to: Gian Luca Amadei, Lou-Atessa Marcellin, Jane Withers, Sitraka Rakotoniaina, Clara Gaggero, Chris Lefteri, John Nussey, Susanna Garcia, Borja Alexandre, Khashayar Naimanan, Adrian Westaway and Robert Jack