#ExRe2022
…is 6 month student/graduate mentoring programme with a speculative design / futures practitioner: designed to build community, encourage open discourse and facilitate the transition from education into practice.
MEET THE MENTORS:
Introducing @decoydhruv of @a4_achaar a returning mentor for #ExRe2022. “I am a professor of design and co founder of A4.Achaar, a collective that forays into discursive design methods and futures thinking through participatory social research, and have been associated with design since 2010 when I started my graduate studies in crafts, culture and design. As a teacher, I've been engaged in design learning spaces, in scopes of teaching and coordination. As a Mentor I hope to come across Individuals and/or practices that are pursuing to make sense of our collective future in some manner. My work in speculative design has been artistic in parts of its expression, possibly because of the agencies involved in sponsorship, curation etc. so possibly I would prefer to be matched with people who are similarly aligned. I can help in activities/discussions involving participatory research, tool building etc. More than that, I’ll be happy to share the curation of practices, tools, methods that I've come across and/or built over the past few years.”
Introducing Fred Wordie a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Fred Wordie is a Berlin based critical designer who’s work explores how we engage with technology and each other. “The kind of speculative design I love and would try to foster with a mentee, is the kind that deals with the mundane, that primary critiques the present, aims to challenge existing power, meets people where they are and is as critical as it is playful. In this pursuit, I believe I would be well placed to help a mentee take research and insights, and turn them into artefacts that are understandable, provocative and full of character.”
Introducing Jocelyn Ibarra of @thetimetravelagency as a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. “I believe knowledge transfer serves my community and the generation after me, and it helps me understand how I can get better at making space for those entering our profession. We will offer our speculative design method as it will exist in its toolkit and futures design form as well as an experience in finding their own speculative design researcher method. Our mentee will have absolute freedom to explore How they would like to explore the spaces or themes we propose, based in their skillset (both in what they're experts and novices at).” @thetimetravelagency is a speculative design research studio in the Nordics and online. We create products, experimental methods, and participatory experiences that prepare people to reach the future in order to imagine it differently.
Introducing @living_midnight returning mentors for #ExRe2022. LMNO is a collision of wisdom produced through the bodies of three shapeshifters on the earthly realm who manifest as Ankita Trivedi, Ishita Jain and Thomas Mical. Ankita Trivedi is a futurist and design academic with an expertise in speculative narrative environments. Ishita Jain is an artist-scholar and architectural historian working on affective learning environments and mytho-poetic theatre. Thomas Mical is a process philosopher working on transdisciplinary design research for re-enchanting landscapes. :We traverse across academia and industry to craft our narrative projects. Through this journey, parts of hidden worlds are revealed, and other obvious worlds often are taken for granted. For early career professionals and researchers this often means forms of disenchantment and disillusionment. Over the last year, we have been actively crafting practices of hope, care and re-enchantment through narrative world-building as part of our professional and academic practices. It is this ethos of transformation and churning that we want to share with any of the incoming mentees, over and above any inputs with regards to the toolkits and ethics of speculative world-building.”
Introducing Mansi Parikh @FutureTenseInc as a returning mentor for #ExRe2022. “My speculative design and foresight practice is centred around using cultural understanding and insights to build strategy. I also focus a lot of my energy on experimentation to find new ways of using foresight, research and design in more culturally forward ways.” @futuretenseinc works to bring Speculative design into Foresight work and also using it to question current narratives. Sharing provocations through the zine ‘Variations on Tomorrow’ which is also a platform for collaborating on speculative design work & showcasing different perspectives on futures.
Introducing Phil Balagtas of @futures_design returning mentor for #ExRe2022. Phil is a design leader based in San Francisco, CA and has been a practicing designer for over 20 years. He has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He most recently served as an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Company working across industries to transform and enhance their digital businesses and strategies. He is also the president and founder of the Design Futures Initiative which organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and the PRIMER conference in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events and workshops bring together designers and futurists from all over the world to teach and share strategies for designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies. “As a mentor I can provide guidance on how to use the methodologies in different contexts, how to apply it to your personal and professional practice, provide guidance and feedback on portfolios and career advice. I can also provide end-to-end guidance on specific projects. My focus is on how to make futures work across sectors, make it practical and actionable and not just a thought exercise.”
Introducing Santini Basra of @studioandthen - brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Santini spends most of his time running Andthen, a team of designers that do research — mostly about what the future could or should look like. Here, he works with organisations in the early stages of creating new things (from new products to new jobs). He also sometimes teaches at the Glasgow School of Art and hosts the Speculative Futures Glasgow meetup. Our practice is heavily informed by approaches from speculative design, design futures and futures thinking — we use these to help clients in high-impact phases of the innovation process, such as strategy development, project definition and organisational planning. While these approaches often are most visible in academic or cultural circles, we strive to use them in highly applied ways, as a way to help organisations better interrogate what they want from the future.
mentors for #ExRe2022. Sharp & Sour is a multidisciplinary design studio focused on the futures of food. “We think one of the coolest parts of being a mentor is the possibility to interchange our knowledge and ideas with someone else. Debating and having deep conversations is one of the things that as a studio has given us with most of our ideas for self-innaiciated projects. And we really hope that this type of dynamic can benefit someone else too.”
Introducing @virajvjoshi as a returning mentor for #ExRe2022. Viraj is a designer, technologist, and futurist, who produces design outputs and fiction with great affinity towards our technological futures. His work explores physical-digital interactions, speculative design and futures, and emerging technology, and has received several international accolades, including an exhibition at the Science Museum, London; and another with the United Nations DPPA. He works at Fjord, London after spending time at Fjord, Stockholm. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art for Speculative and Interaction Design. He has graduated from Royal College of Art (MA), and Imperial College, London (MSc) in 2018.
Introducing @molend a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Ania Molenda is an independent Rotterdam-based researcher, curator, and writer. She is a co-founder and director of research and publishing platform Amateur Cities. In her work, Ania focuses on the socio-cultural dimension of spatial practices. She is interested in developing new forms of debate that bring different disciplines together. She has been involved in various publishing experiments and continues to develop her own. Since 2017, she has been involved in research on technical and cultural aspects of dealing with complex digital archives. Before starting an independent career, Ania worked as a researcher and design teacher at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture (The Why Factory) as well as an architect at MVRDV, Powerhouse Company, and SVESMI. In 2019 she was a finalist of the Geert Bekaert Award for architectural criticism and in 2018 a co-recipient of the Dutch Design Award in Design Research for Amateur Cities and New Generations. “My background is in architecture and urbanism and my first years of practice focused on speculative design within the spatial context. Between 2009-2013 I was engaged in speculative design research, co-creating the design studios, and teaching MA program at the TU Delft (The Why Factory). At the beginning of 2013, I started my own practice that drifted away from speculative design and focused on architectural criticism, publishing, and curatorship. I co-founded a research and publishing platform Amateur Cities, which in turn became a vehicle to experiment with the relationship between research, debate forming, language (see for example urgentcity.eu), and experimental publishing (Making Public, Feminist Finance Zine, currently Going Hybrid and Beyond the Essay).”
Introducing @garciaclarice a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Clarice Garcia has a background in design and trend forecasting. As a professional trend forecaster she worked for different industry sectors, such as fashion, design, food and beverage, education. She is a doctoral researcher at RMIT University passionate about how fashion as culture might be transformed by speculative design towards more sustainable futures. “I've been working as a trend forecaster and cultural researcher since 2014 for different industry sectors, such as fashion, entertainment, design, food and beverage, education, and automobile. I freelance for important trend forecasting companies around the globe, such as The Future Laboratory, Kantar, Box 1824, Ipsos, Questto Nó Manyone, among others. I collaborated to projects for clients such as Google, Unilever, Nestlé, Ford, Havainas and Melissa. I'm also a Phd candidate in the school of Fashion & Textiles at RMIT University , where I'm investigating the intersections between design practices and futures studies to facilitate futures thinking in transitional times and to unfold more sustainable futures. In doing that, I'm articulating fashion, speculative design, material culture and participation in a project-based research.”
Introducing @dominikaswierad of @stillnotquite a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Dominika is a London based critical designer with experience in designing for services, public sector and place-based strategies. She's a co-founder of Still Not Quite, a critical research studio engaging with communities to work on visions for participatory futures. In her practice she's interested in exploring in the impact of possible on the present, and using speculations to aid resilience and make marginalised voices heard. “I would like to work with a mentee who's interested in creating narratives and artefacts to contribute to a public debate, and meaningfully engage with communities. I'm interesting in taking the speculative design out of the academic context and bringing it into participatory futures practices, and to aid advocacy of the marginalised voices and topics. I offer transparency, support and insight into any of my own areas of practice, but also flexibility to adapt these approaches into whatever project or goal the mentee would like to work towards.”
Introducing Ollie Cotsaftis of @biodesign_bureau a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Dr Olivier Cotsaftis is a post-disciplinary designer navigating the spaces between presents, futures, fictions, and realities. At RMIT University School of Design, his research addresses climate resilience and social innovation in more-than-human and circular heterotopias. He has a keen interest in next-gen biopolymers and their application in biophilic architecture and urban design to create regenerative and equitable cities. Before joining RMIT, Ollie spent 10 years in industry, working with start-ups, non-for-profits, governments, and blue-chip companies. He was a design lead at Fjord Design and Innovation, the founder and creative director of future ensemble studio, and the co-founder of Melbourne Speculative Futures—the Melbourne Chapter of The Design Futures Initiative. “As I mentor I hope to strengthening ties with the wider community and pay forward the knowledge I have accumulated over the years.”
Introducing @radha_mistry a returning mentor for #ExRe2022. Radha has a background in architecture, narrative environments, and strategic foresight — and loves teaching, writing, speaking, and learning about any and all bits related. Radha currently leads the foresight practice at Autodesk, teaches as part-time faculty on the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at The New School (Parsons), and spends most of my time exploring the impact of emerging technologies and how they’ll change the way we design and make things in the future. Her work’s purpose is to collaboratively build more equitable and inclusive futures — to make space for communities who might not yet see themselves in our future visions. “I came into the Futures/Foresight space with some amazing and incredibly generous mentors. However none of them looked like me or had to operate in the world as I have. I'm seeing this shift slowly now, and that's been wonderful. But I know we've got a long way ahead of us, and I'd like to be able to support someone through this journey who perhaps also hasn't seen many versions of themselves in the Futures space. I hope to have an arrangement where I can create a safe space for my mentee to grow into their own practice and even challenge some of my own assertions. I'm happy to share and advise on foresight/speculative design tools and methods, developing a personal practice, navigating corporate or boutique environments, making space for yourself in environments where you don't often see many "yous", building a critical perspective on the field, etc.”
Introducing Theo Ploeg of @hyperspace_st a returning mentor for #ExRe2022. Theo is a design sociologist and speculative accelerationist. Co-lead of Speculative Futures Amsterdam. Using speculative design to explore the accelerating world and to tackle macro challenges. Interested in the effect of telling positive stories about the future and alternative realities by embracing the emancipating aspects of new technologies. “I’d like to share my knowledge and practices. With Studio Hyperspace and Speculative Futures, I did a range of different projects with speculative design as a core attitude. Also, I have experience in setting up strategies for new companies and integrating speculative design in businesses. Arrangements focus on the specific needs and wants of both mentee and me. Mentee can also, if possible, participate in activities that we organize in Amsterdam or Heerlen.”
Introducing Akash Das @thewanderingforest of MeWeStudioX as a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. Akash is a NIFT, Delhi Fashion & Apparel Design alum with a decade of multidisciplinary experience in lifestyle design, speculative & futures research, strategy development and visual communications with education at crux. He specializes in foresight-led processes in cross-connecting socio-cultural macrotrends to potential innovations, in order to generate industrially viable and beyond-human-centred holistic designs. Akash leads MeWeStudioX, a newly-formed think tank and strategic design consultancy studio aimed at providing holistic and glocal solutions and is a faculty & course lead for Speculative & Futures Lab at ISDI, Mumbai - in collaboration with Parsons School of Design, New York. “I hope to share my ability and enthusiasm to scale large swathes of seeming tundra-lands of data and events, to find patterns that leaden to the hidden treasures of insights - the kinds that can inspire action and shed light on supposed impossibilities in such clarity, that future proofing begins instantly."
Introducing James Estrada of @dreaming.collective a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. James Estrada is an innovation director at The Sound, a consumer exploration and product innovation agency. He is also the founder of Dreaming Collective, an art and research studio dedicated to the development of alternative modes of design thinking in the pursuit of liberatory imagination. His methods rely on conversation and intimacy with strangers, family members, and other artists through interviews, micro-commissions, and collaborative social programming. He also maintains an art and painting practice which invites viewers to consider how sacred objects, dreams, migration, and technology affect our sense of place and feelings of belonging. “Collaboration with young curious professionals and researchers who are testing new methods and discovering new questions and modes of inquiry is key to my own practice. As a mentor, I hope to advise multidisciplinary practitioners who do not fit squarely into a field, who are from underrepresented backgrounds or who do not traditionally have access to mentorship. As a Latinx 1st generation American, my transnational and bilingual point of view are key lenses through which I view the world. I’m indebted to past mentors who saw those things in me and helped my cultivate and hone them.”
Introducing Pranshu Kumar Chaudhary of @createitwitty a brand new mentor for #ExRe2022. “I am a creative technologist and a playful futurist. As a designer and researcher, my interest lies in the areas of technology and creative, non-intrusive applications, focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society. Actively involved in combining physical computing tools with storytelling methods. I have 5 years of experience working in the field with speculative design practice and interactive installations. Having worked with researchers, startups, museums, corporates, theatre, residencies and also personal passion projects, I now have a better understanding of how to balance technology, fiction, realism, and use that to identify our interests and map them to build a world. I can offer mentees ways to map their interests and build a world that is believable. With my experience of rapid prototyping, I can help them ideate ways to quickly prototype their concepts. But technology and humans coexist in a cultural landscape, and often our social and cultural practices of today shape the interaction and vision of technology of tomorrow, so this mapping of socio-political situations is also what I will focus on.”