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The World Around & Future Observatory present In Focus: Research

The 2024 symposium at the Design Museum will be dedicated to the radical power of research for envisioning new approaches to design.

The speakers of the day reflect the urgent need to champion truly new ideas and thinking to address the world’s profound environmental and social challenges. Join us on Saturday 16 March to explore the inspiring and visionary landscape of cutting-edge research-driven cultural practitioners who see research as activism, as architecture and as an artistic practice.

Tickets include access to the forum 3pm-6pm and a drinks reception 6:00pm-7:30pm.

Speakers

Adrian Lahoud, Royal College of Art

Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher, and Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. Responding to a need for a planetary-scale response to the climate crisis, his project The Second Sea is an online platform that calculates the damages proportionately owed by the world’s nations to coastal cities at risk from rising sea levels.

Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture

Weizman is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the founding director of Forensic Architecture. Since 2010, Weizman has led the award-winning agency comprising architects, scientists, computer programmers, video editors, and lawyers to investigate human rights violations around the world. Weizman is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Feifei Zhou

Zhou is a Chinese-born artist and architect, whose work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialized built environment. With Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger and Alder Keleman Saxena, she co-edited Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, an online interactive platform for scientific research into, and research dissemination about, feral species and feral dynamics in the Anthropocene.

Henk Ovink, Global Commission on the Economics of Water

Ovink is the Executive Director for the Global Commission on the Economics of Water and Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. Ovink served as the first ever global water ambassador for over 8 years, appointed in 2015 by the Cabinet of the Netherlands as Special Envoy for International Water Affairs. He is the author of the book “Too Big, Rebuild by Design: A Transformative Approach to Climate Change.”

Indy Johar, Dark Matter Labs

Johar is an architect and the co-founder of Dark Matter Labs—a field laboratory focused on building the institutional infrastructures for radical civic societies, cities, regions and towns. Dark Matter analyzes the shifts required in the underlying ‘dark matter’—monetary, economic, governance, regulatory and policy systems—to manifest transformations in our food, housing, land, material and nature systems towards a future of mutual thriving.

Julia King, LSE Cities

King is an architect, teacher and urban researcher. Her design-led research at the London School of Economics studies the urbanizing world and its impact on marginalized communities. From analyzing the impacts of mass-migration on UK high streets to co-designing sanitation systems for urban settlements in New Delhi, King’s research aims to understand cultural and institutional relationships in areas of dense development, to collaboratively design and build site-specific interventions.

Natsai Chieza, Faber Futures

Chieza is a designer and the founder of Faber Futures: a multi-disciplinary practice advocating the use of advanced biological technologies in response to urgent global challenges. Learning from non-human life forms, Chieza’s work ranges from experimenting with bacterial dyes to reduce water waste in textile production, to structuring and envisioning policies towards sustainable, resilient bio-economies driven by technology.

Sammy Baloji

Baloji is an artist whose work explores the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was born and raised in the contested and mineral-rich Katanga province of the DRC, and his photography, film and sculpture forms an ongoing research project into the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the region, as well as a questioning of the impact of Belgian colonization.

Tickets include access to the forum 3pm-6pm and a drinks reception 6:00pm-7:30pm.

*Please note that this benefit only applies to the cardholding Member’s ticket and not those of additional guests.

Tickets are non-refundable and non-exchangeable. Visit our terms & conditions page for further information.

This event is a collaboration between The World Around and Future Observatory, the venue partner is the Design Museum and the event is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Fondation Cartier.