Symposium: Tomorrow Today: Design, Fiction and Social Responsibility

How do we design the future? Fiction has long played a key role in the creation and envisaging of better (and worse) worlds in design. Today, this socially-driven impulse to shape a better tomorrow through design narratives is only growing amidst pressing concerns over what the future holds.

In this symposium we will bring together designers, critics, academics and other voices to explore how designers have created narratives of futures, be they intended or impossible, desirable or not. Whether through the creation of imagined spaces, subjects or temporalities, creating tomorrow today raises questions about design, fiction and social responsibility.  

This half-day symposium is organised by Cat Rossi, Senior Lecturer in Design History and Portia Ungley, Lecturer in Visual Culture at Kingston University, London.  

Programme:

11:00 – 11:15 Cat Rossi and Portia Ungley
What is Tomorrow Today?

11 :15 – 12:00 Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design
Keynote

12.00 – 13.15 Panel 1: Public Engagement and Design Futures

Chair – Dr Paul Micklethwaite, Senior Research Fellow, The Design School, Kingston University

Jocelyn Bailey, consultant at BOP consulting and PhD candidate, University of Brighton
Whose Utopia? Governing a Pluralist society

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, designer, artist and writer, PhD candidate, RCA
The Dream of Better: Design to Understand Better

Onkar Kular, designer, RCA tutor and 2014 Stanley Picker Fellow Design
Platform 13: An overview of a socially engaged teaching practice

13:15 – 14:00 Lunch (not provided)

14.00 – 15.45 Panel 2: Between Fact and Fiction

Chair – Dr Chris Horrocks, Associate Professor, School of Art & Design History, Kingston University

Jerszy Seymour, artist, designer, director and co-founder of the Dirty Art Department, Amsterdam 
Belly of the Beast

Dr Betti Marenko, design theorist, Contextual Studies Programme Leader, CSM
Which Design Fiction for the Post-Anthropocene?

Paul Graham Raven, science fiction writer, critic, and PhD candidate in infrastructure futures and theory
The Rhetorics of Futurity: Utopias, Prototypes, and Reading Protocols

Liam Young, urbanist, designer and futurist
City Everywhere

15:45 – 16:00 Closing Remarks