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Designing Transformation
13 June 2024, 9:00 am–10:15 am
Join UCL IIPP for this IIPP Forum 2024's plenary sessions, taking place on Thursday 13 June at 09:00 - 10:15 BST.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL IIPP
Location
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Wellcome Collection183 Euston RoadLondonNW1 2BEUnited Kingdom
IIPP 2024 Forum
As part of the IIPP Forum 2024, UCL IIPP is hosting five plenary sessions. These sessions are an opportunity to rethink existing policy systems and explore what transformative ‘market shaping’ policy approaches look like in practice.
About the talk
The turn of the century saw design move from the engine room of industry, and core aspects of public service delivery, into the forefront of industrial transformation, ultimately helping drive the success of the tech sector. Over the last decade, its practices and culture have moved into government transformation, helping refine public services. Yet as our shared challenges multiply, diversify and intensify, design must move upstream. Design’s true value is not in simply refining existing services, but in fundamentally reimagining systems. It can reveal and challenge assumptions, nimbly reframe questions, make tangible possible futures, and devise alternative infrastructures of everyday life. Design’s potential for integrative, participative and systemic approaches, capable of shaping both our environments and the dark matter of policy, regulation and governance that produce them, allows it to meaningful address climate and biodiversity crises, as well as its tangles of linked challenges: social justice, public health, demographic change, and new waves of radical technologies. Yet design remains far from the ‘top table’ when it comes to devising and delivering ‘just, green transitions’. Few governments have design at the core of their cultures of decision-making. Policy labs can end up sidelining design rather than truly integrating it.
This session discussed why this might be–but also to hear how to unlock the potential of design for systemic transformation, as our array of leading design practitioners demonstrate and critically debate its potential for tackling the climate emergency.
Meet the panel
Our expert panel included Rowan Conway, Deputy Director at The Just Transition Finance Lab based at The Grantham Research Institute On Climate Change and the Environment and IIPP Visiting Professor of Strategic Design, Dan Hill, Director of Melbourne School of Design and IIPP Visiting Professor of Practice, Julie Hjort, Director of Sustainable and Circular transition at the Danish Design Center and Anab Jain, Co-Founder and Director of Superflux, to find out more about how best to apply design and engagement strategies across different contexts both in theory and in practice.
Key information
- When: Thursday 13 June at 09:00 - 10:15 BST.
- Where: Henry Wellcome Auditorium at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE
About the Speakers
Dan Hill
Visiting Professor of Practice at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Anab Jain
Co-Founder and Director of Superflux
Anab grew up in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India within the entangled postcolonial landscapes of a fast-growing nation. After studying filmmaking at the National Institute of Design she moved to London to gain 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, research and futures practice. Superflux work with businesses, cultural institutions, academic partners and government bodies to adapt and innovate through periods of uncertainty and change, and build more just futures. In our 15th year, Superflux has received theDesign Studio of the Year Award in recognition of our “contribution to the fields of speculative and futures design with a committed social mission.”
Anab is a globally recognised thought leader renowned for her pioneering work on design-led foresight, emerging technologies, more-than human and ecological thinking. She has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts, London, with the citation “A philosopher for our age, her concepts of ‘design for the new normal’ and ‘more-than-human centered design’ are expanding the public’s imagination, and making possible futures tangible.”
Over the years, Anab has is responsible for presenting key ideas to the world, such as Design for the New Normal (2012), More-than-Human-Centred Design (2018) and Ancillary Design (2022)
In 2022, Anab was awarded the prestigious ‘Royal Designers for Industry’ (RDI) Award, by UK’s Royal Society of Arts, in speculative design. The title ‘Royal Designer for Industry’ (RDI) is the highest accolade for designers in the UK. Only 200 designers, who have achieved “sustained design excellence, work of aesthetic value and significant benefit to society” can hold the title.
Anab is also the recipient of the Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, as well as awards from Apple and the UK Government’s Innovation Department. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, V&A Museum, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China, Vitra Design Museum, and Tate Modern.
Anab has delivered talks and keynotes at several conferences including TED, Skoll World Forum, Human Rights Watch, MIT Media Lab, NEXT, LIFT, Global Design Forum, and FuturEverything. Recent talks include Why We Need to Imagine Different Futures, More Than-Human Centered Design, Design for the New Normal, Valley of the Meatpuppets and How Will We Live.
In addition, Anab serves as Professor of Design Investigations at the dieAngewandte, University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2016. Her hope is to instil a culture of radical enquiry in her students, so they can become active designers-translators-catalysts for a complex and uncertain world.
More about Anab JainRowan Conway
Policy Fellow and Visiting Professor of Strategic Design, leading the Transformation by Design module of the MPA in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Prior to joining UCL, Rowan was Director of Innovation at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) where she set up the RSA Lab, an experimental space using design methods to explore, prototype and test research insights and policy ideas with government agencies, NGOs, academic partners, NHS Trusts, businesses and social enterprises. She designed and led a range of action research programmes on the future of work, deliberative democracy, tech and society, circular economy and systems innovation. Prior to that she has 15 years’ experience leading a wide range of design and engagement processes, notably the as part of the Design Team for London 2012 Olympic Park. Alongside this, she holds an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath and is a PhD Candidate at IIPP.
Julie Hjort
Director of Sustainable and Circular transition at Danish Design Centre
