Insights · December 23rd, 2022
Laura Forlano – Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is also Director of the Critical Futures Lab – presents her keynote ‘Crip Futurity, Cyborg Disability and Designing the World Otherwise’ at Anticipation 2022.
We are constantly told that there is a crisis of the imagination, that we need solutions to problems, that critique is not enough. Yet, alternative ideas about the future are all around us – in art, in activism, in everyday life. In this presentation I will ask the question: how might the world be different if we understood both ourselves and our technologies to be disabled?
Forlano draws on her own experience as a Disabled Cyborg, documented through a decade of autoethnographic observation about Type 1 diabetes, my “smart” insulin pump and sensor system, she discusses what it means to live with automation through themes of agency, labor and failure. Through examples from disability activism, art and design. She illustrates the ways in which disabled people might participate more actively in framing and shaping alternative possible futures for living well with each other and with machines. These art and design examples challenge dominant sociotechnical imaginaries around AI, data and machines thereby asking how the world might be otherwise.
About Laura Forlano
Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist and design researcher. In 2018-2019, she is Visiting Research Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Her research is focused on the aesthetics and politics of socio-technical systems and infrastructures at the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices and the future of cities; specifically, she writes about emergent forms of work, organizing and urbanism.
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Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 300 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments. He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 200+ billion dollar investment funds.
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