…what began as a Speculative Spatial Design (SSD) pedagogy honed by Gem Barton over 18 years of innovative teaching has grown into a digital platform for the speculative community.

the story of Experimental Realism

Advocacy for imagining inclusive futures is demonstrated by the alignment with the UNESCO principles and SDGs (4,5,11,16) through the conception and leadership of ‘Experimental Realism’ community and research platform - a network of thousands of global readers, partnerships, activists, educators, and students.

‘Experimental Realism’ was founded in 2020 as a consolidation of research specialisms (#spatialdesign, #designfiction, #designfutures, #queertheory) converging with pedagogic expertise in curriculum (re)design - the same year that UNESCO named ‘futures literacy’ one of four key competencies for the 21st century. ‘Experimental Realism’ supports UNESCO vision for ‘futures literacy’, it was founded to build community, encourage open discourse, and facilitate the transition from education into practice. It exists in the world in 3 ways;

1) an Online ProjectStore, a global collection of speculative design projects created by students from universities around the world,

2) as ExRe mentoring programme, a free 6-month global mentoring programme with a speculative design practitioner, running for 3 years, facilitating 70+ mentoring relationships (outputs range from collaborations on research papers, creation of open source resources, PhD applications, to business plans).

3) as a book. The success of the pedagogical model, and my subsequent achievements, and its contextual framing and articulation of other academic endeavours led to the commissioning of the book ‘Experimental Realism: (design) fictions and futures’ with RIBA Publishing.”

Hear the story of how Experimental Realism began [toggle to 8:18] as told by Gem on this episode of ‘From Later’ Podcast.

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Gem is an author and senior academic specialising in the interrelations between human behaviour, speculation, and spatial design.

Currently teaching at the Royal College of Art, she was awarded a coveted National Teaching Fellowship in 2019, is Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, and founding chair of QuEAN - Queer Educators in Architecture Network.

Gem’s work in the future(s) space comes to life through her advisory, research, teaching and leadership of superFUTURES at the RCA, her directorship of the Experimental Realism platform and consultation services offered through her Office for Speculative Spatial Design (O-SSD).