ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Sandra Kemp combines Senior Research roles at the V&A and Imperial College London. As
an academic and curator, she has previously worked at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow, the Royal
College of Art, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington DC. Her exhibition, Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation, funded by the Wellcome
Trust at the London Science Museum, explored the long intellectual union of science, art, design and
technology in the analysis of the face as a 3D bar-code of identity.
Sandra’s current research in the Department of Materials at Imperial College involves cross-disciplinary
investigation of futures thinking and visualisation, in partnership with science-based industries,
government agencies, and the creative and cultural industries. In particular, she focuses on how expertise in
predicting and shaping the future is mobilised and materialised; how fundamental notions of agency and
risk create a platform for debate about ethical issues; and how we might engage wider publics in debates
and policies concerning the future. This research builds on collaborative industry-related research and
public engagement in areas including design, material science and computer science, developed as part of
her Royal College of Art role as Research Director from 2000-2008.
ABSTRACT
How are futures known and told? Who is an expert in the future? Who decides which futures are viable?
The future poses special problems of representation, as all forms of futurity depend on complex processes of
envisioning and embodiment. Technological and economic innovation is usually foregrounded in studies of
the future. But art and design have always played key roles in the circulation of ideas about the future, and
in the dialectic between the future as radical alternative and as an object of science and governance.
Cultural values, beliefs and legacies, and the historical work that informs them, are as essential as science
and economics for anticipatory practices: our relationship with past, present and future is dynamic and
contextual.
This presentation will explore the role of design in both shaping and making the future in the following
three areas:
- Histories of design that have anticipated future directions
- Experimental design, using new materials and technologies and how the future may be changed by
human intervention in a rapidly changing universe - Speculative design, including devices, tools and methods for future visualisation and prediction
I will argue that cross-disciplinary forms of investigation are increasingly crucial for futures’ analysis, and
will investigate some of the methods – narrative, visual, or material – through which futures are made and
managed, including some ways in which design informs futures conceptualisation in STEM disciplines.
What drives the creation and translation of technological innovation remains as much of a key question
today as to the early industrial innovators.