This talk will address the potential for the imaginary as a design tool for social change. Designer and researcher Gillian Russell will introduce her recent work which explores the role of contemporary design practice in future imagining, future literacy and future ethics. Working at the intersection of design, anthropological futures, and narrative environments, her work uses a combination of speculative intervention and value-sensitive design to engage publics to question the authority of a specific reality in order to foreground its assumptions and ideologies – raising awareness that if reality is made, then it can be unmade and made anew.
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Gillian Russell is a Vancouver-based designer, curator and researcher whose work centres on the interplay between design and its critical contexts. She is a lecturer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the co-founder of the ‘Defamiliarization Lab’ – a transdisciplinary platform for developing methodologies and tools to re-imagine design’s role in sensing the world anew.
This workshop is part of the Speculative Interventions workshops series.