Future Makers at Cumulus-conference Bangalore

From 20-23 November 2017 our Future Makers colleagues Jeroen van den Eijnde and Daniëlle Bruggeman attended the Cumulus-conference in Bangalore.
The theme of the conference was ‘Letters to the Future’, here Jeroen and Daniëlle presented their paper ‘Imagining the Future through Speculative Design: Towards a New Paradigm where Art meets Science’.

Abstract

Research through creative design practices leads to new insights and thought-provoking questions regarding urgent societal challenges. In the letters we write to each other we will personally reflect on speculative design in combination with science to dream of the possibilities for the future. We will do so by analysing the work of a selection of Dutch designers, artists and speculative researchers, such as Arne Hendriks and Koen van Mensvoort. For example, the provocative future scenario ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ by Arne Hendriks focuses on the implications of downsizing the human species to better fit the earth, and thus addresses the continuous obsession with ‘growth’ in our culture and society. This exemplifies where artistic research, speculative design and science meet in order to imagine radical future scenarios to help create a more responsible and ethical engagement with the earth and its abundant resources. We propose to understand this ethical engagement from a post-phenomenological perspective (Verbeek 2000), and thus in terms of sustainable relations between human beings and the material objects that surround our bodies and living spaces and mediate our human experience. We envision a new paradigm where art meets science in order to imagine the future through speculative design.