Babitha George
Knowledge Translation and Meaning Making: Learning with Marginalised Communities
November 7, 2024
Babitha George is a director at Quicksand, where she has been developing design methods for research with vulnerable communities in India, focusing on participation and co-design. She is also a co-founder of UnBox Cultural Futures, a platform that brings together efforts around social change, art and culture, thoughtful design, and open research. Additionally, Babitha serves on the Advisory Board of the Victor Papanek Foundation and is a member of the Mozilla Foundation's inaugural cohort of ‘Network50’ for her outstanding work in Internet health.
Shilpa Das
Thursday, 3 October 2024
From Barriers to Bridges: Navigating the Spectrum of Disability, Inclusive Innovation and Accessibility
Shilpa Das is Chair, Education, and leads Interdisciplinary Design Studies across the three campuses of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. She brings three decades of experience across education, publishing, and the voluntary sectors. An Editorial Board member of The Design Journal, she has also served as Founding Editor of The Trellis and D/signed. Her work includes editing and authoring notable books like 50 Years of the National Institute of Design: 1961-2011, Narrative Universes of Disability, and Indian Crafts in a Globalizing World. She has been a visiting faculty member at various prestigious institutions worldwide and has received research grants from organizations such as The Wenner-Gren Foundation and the British Council. Her teaching spans Comparative Aesthetics, Narrative Traditions, History of Design, and Disability Studies. She contributes to several advisory boards and has numerous publications to her name, focusing on disability, design, public health, translation studies, and cultural studies.
Fernando García-Dory / INLAND
10 October 2024
Composing Knowledges for Revived Land
Fernando García-Dory`s work engages the relationship between culture and nature, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural to desires and expectations in relation to identity, crisis, utopia, and social change. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages drawing to collaborative agroecological projects and actions. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology and is preparing his PhD in Art and Agroecology.
Zhe Sun & Sophia Guggenberger
6. June 2024
Regenerative Design: From the Coral Reef to the Tooth Brush
Zhe Sun and Sophia Guggenberger were both research assistants at the Institute of Design Research Vienna.
Zhe Sun is a multidisciplinary design researcher and currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tongji University and a visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research topic is about defining an alternative framework for design collaboration within the context of ecological crisis.
Sophia Guggenberger has an educational background in design from the London College of Fashion and the University of the Arts Berlin. As an independent designer, she is researching production as a tool for transformation. Her work focuses on sustainability and the development of multi-perspective solutions for the conception and manufacturing of products with a holistic approach to social, technical, and material aspects.
Website
Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava
2. May 2024
The Natural City - Urban design in practice
Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava are co-founders of urbz, a collective specialized in participatory urban planning and design based in Mumbai, Bogota, Paris and Geneva. They have presented their work in the form of op-eds. academic essays, exhibitions, films and lectures at forums ranging from MoMA (New York) to the M+ Museum (Hongkong), in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Hindu, publications such as the Oxford University Press and Strelka, and at universities that include ETH Zurich, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Tokyo, School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Matias has studied Economics and Political science at the London School of Economics, Urban Planning at Columbia University and Information Systems at the University of Tokyo. Rahul has studied social anthropology at JNU, New Delhi and Cambridge University, UK. They were awarded a special Indo-Swiss Friendship Ambassador distinction in 2017.
Cameron Tonkinwise
7. March 2024
Design means Transitioning Human-Thing Relations
Professor Cameron Tonkinwise teaches Service Design and researches Sustainable Design at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). His expertise has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and UTS. Cameron has been a leading voice in the emerging practice of Transition Design, enabling human-scale designers to facilitate systems-level change toward more equitably sustainable societies. His collection of essays on the philosophy of design, How Designing Happens, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
İdil Gaziulusoy
1. February 2024
Towards a transformational agenda in sustainable design
İdil Gaziulusoy is Professor of Sustainable Design in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University. She is a sustainability scientist and a design researcher, developing a teaching and research portfolio on design-led innovations for sustainability transitions. In the times remaining from opening up the minds of students to plant seeds of change and chasing exciting new knowledge through research, she provides strategic consultancy to organisations and cities on proactively taking part and innovating in the current context of large, systemic changes for sustainability.
Konstantin Leonenko
7. December 2023
Making sense through making things
Konstantin Leonenko has travelled the world studying engineering and algorithmic music. He builds spaces for learning, discovery and co-creation starting from 2012, when he set up the first FabLab in Ukraine. Much of his work in Ukraine has been lost to the violent military aggression of Ukraine’s northern neighbor. Despite that he continues working at the intersection of cultures, geographies, communities, and disciplines trying to make sense of the world in the state of perpetually escalating crisis.
Website
Annalinda de Rosa
2. November 2023
Agency in rural contexts: how to carefully design systemic transitions? A design for social innovation and place-centred approach
Annalinda de Rosa is a Researcher and Lecturer in Design at the Polimi DESIS Lab (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability), Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests mainly concern the relationship between spatial and service design, with specific focus on design-driven models for the incubation of innovative practices and strategies for the cultural and creative sectors for improving social cohesion through participatory design approaches in urban and rural areas.
5 October 2023
Ludwig Weh - “Environmental Futures— towards critical-transformative perspectives”
Ludwig Weh is a research fellow in the “Futures and Innovation Unit“ at the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW. He has been focusing on aspects of praxis relevance, participation and democratization of research processes, on transformative research and education as well as on science ethics and knowledge discourse at science-society interfaces.
Rooted in his thesis on ‘Future scenarios as tools of participatory science communication’ in sustainability research, Ludwig has developed epistemic and methodical premises for investigating environmental futures and human-nature relationships from a strongly interdisciplinary perspective.
1 June 2023
Peter Spillmann - Cohabitation: A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Animals and Humans in Urban Space
Peter Spillmann (1961) is an artist, curator and lecturer who lives and works in Berlin. At the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, he teaches and researches in the Master of Arts in Fine Arts. As co-founder of self-organised platforms such as Labor k3000 or CPKC Center for Post-Colonial Knowledge and Culture, he develops projects and exhibitions in interdisciplinary contexts, such as the exhibition and event project Cohabitation - A Manifesto for Animal and Human Solidarity in Urban Space in collaboration with ARCHplus from 2020-2022.
4 May 2023
Lynn Harles - Between extinct species and speculative artifacts: How science communication and public engagement on socio-ecological issues can benefit from design research
Lynn Harles is a design researcher at the
Museum für Naturkunde - Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science in Berlin and a PhD candidate at Bauhaus-University Weimar. In her work, she examines the potential of critical and participatory design approaches for Science Communication and Public Engagement on complex social-ecological challenges in natural sciences.
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Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science
6 April 2023
Shashank Mehta – Sustainability: Context and Design
Shashank Mehta is a principal faculty in Industrial Design at the National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad. Shashank has extensively worked in the area of technology and Design fusion, sustainability and indigenous innovations. He has authored various articles and research papers and has widely lectured on these subjects. His recent publication Design at the Doorstep: Design Approaches for MSMEs brings to the fore the typical characteristics and concerns of the Indian MSMEs and scope for design intervention in this crucial sector of the economy.
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2 March 2023
Serkan Bayraktaroğlu - The nature of innovation in craft-design collaborations aiming to foster sustainable development in rural areas: The edge effects.
Serkan Bayraktaroğlu is an assistant professor for Industrial Design at Istanbul University and worked as lecturer and assistant professor at Kadir Has University. In 2015, he earned his Ph.D. in Industrial Design from Istanbul Technical University on the topic of Investigating Design for Social Innovation through Business Models in Rural India: A Model Proposal for Developing Countries and completed the Industrial Design and Manufacturing Master’s Programme at TU Dortmund and Twente University. Serkan teaches Design for Social Innovation and conducts research in design for repair, circular design, and design for social innovation.
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2 February 2023
John Thackara – Designing for Shared Aliveness
John Thackara - author, curator, and professor - is developing the “agenda of designing for life”. He curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years in Amsterdam and India. He was commissioner of the UK social innovation biennial Dott 07, and the French Design biennial City Eco LabA. In 2019, he curated the Urban-Rural Expo in Shanghai. John is a Visiting Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and Politecnico di Milano, and Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art. He was a 2022 Design for Planet Fellow at the British Design Council. His last book How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today was recently translated into Chinese.
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1 December 2022
Rebecca Reubens – To Craft, by Design, for Sustainability: Paradigms between the Global North and South.
Rebecca Reubens is a sustainability design consultant with expertise in design for and with craft and aligning sustainable products with the creative economy. She is a visiting faculty member at the National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad and did her Ph.D. on the intersection between craft, design, and sustainability at Delft University. With her company Rhizome and as an ambassador for the World Bamboo Organization, she is committed to fostering sustainable design. Rebecca is the author of the books Holistic Sustainability Through Craft-Design Collaboration (Routledge, 2019) and Bamboo: From Green Design to Sustainable Design (Promilla & Co, 2012).
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1 November 2022
Daniela Marzavan – Why Are You Designers Still Asleep? Don’t You Know the Global Sustainable Development Goals are Explicitly Asking for Your Action?
Daniela Marzavan runs a Berlin-based internationally acting innovation agency. Her team helps foster creativity and innovation for German and international public sector institutions and infuses Design Thinking as a management practice with corporate clients. She teaches, researches, and operates within the disciplines of Design Thinking, innovation management and organizational change. She works interculturally and across sectors, building her own approaches and processes.
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