| Workshop | 14:15-16:15 | Room 1 |
Coastal communities all over the world are entering a new era of disaster and vulnerability. At the same time we can look to their deep history of adaptability and resourcefulness in the midst of continual environmental and social changes.
We’ll spend our time together using futuring methods and rapid speculative prototyping to imagine resilient futures for coastal communities. In this short workshop, participants will explore different future scenarios and engage in rapid conceptual prototyping to create artefacts, systems, and rituals that we might find there. We aim to create entry points to new dialogues and suspend disbelief about change. By hosting this workshop at ThingsCon we hope to connect with a more-than-human perspective around technologies and IoT and to explore different possible futures so that we might start creating the futures we want, today.
Hosts
Gemma is an interdisciplinary researcher and strategist specialising in ethnography, semiotics, and futuring. Gemma is also co-founder and tutor at School of Critical Design. She is fascinated by the relationships we have with our bodies, habitats, and communities, and how these endure and evolve over time. She has spent her career working with brands and organisations on strategies for design, innovation, place-making and community research. Highlights have included decoding the cultural surroundings of Waterloo Station for the Place Bureau, mapping out the changing nature of messaging behaviours and platforms for Meta and working with a community climate partnership to understand how elders in their coastal community view the climate crisis. She holds a masters in Culture and Creative Industries from King’s College London.
Vitor Freire is a Brazilian creative director, strategist, and educator at co-founder of Imagination of Things, a creative studio blending design, play, and emerging technologies to craft meaningful stories. He has collaborated in places like VICE/Virtue, CP+B, 72andSunny, worked with clients like AB Inbev, Henkel, Crocs, IKEA, the EU Commission, and the architect Ole Scheeren, and has led learning experiences in places like TU Delft, Hyper Island, Willem de Koningen Academy, and Universiteit Utrecht. His passion for playful urban imagination was seen in projects in cities like São Paulo, New York, Lisbon, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Athens, and Marseille.He holds a masters in Creative Technology at New York University (ITP, Tisch School of Arts)