Global Futures Symposium in Rome, Italy - MAXXI Museum
Paula Gaetano Adi, a noted artist and an associate professor at RISD played a video of her robot, a ball made of electronics and mud, in action. I was confused. What’s the purpose?
I registered for the Global Futures Symposium weeks before I left for Rome. The event was a culmination of the work from the Global Futures Labs conducted in various design institutions in different parts of the world. The resulting work, envisioning culturally relevant futures, was displayed in the exhibition Souvenirs from the Futures.
Besides the mud ball robots, there were other ideas presented - reusing the gas emitted by bovine creatures (basically, bovine farts), that toed the line of impossibility. But isn’t anything possible these days? While Tegan Bristow, an interactive media artist from South Africa, spoke against globalization if Africa wanted a better future, Saeid Aliari, Industrial designer from Iran thought globalization is the best way to realize a better future.
The biggest take away for me, as a practicing designer, was from the talk given by Stephanie Tharp and Bruce Tharp. They are trying to standardize the language of design, from what I understood, and ran through a list of terms and definitions that can be used to better communicate design work to others (not just non-designers).
As one of the audience members, while asking Paula Gaetano Adi a question, spouted something along the lines of “You just created a ball”, I wondered how many others in the audience felt that way. I later spoke to Praveen Nahar, senior faculty at the National Institute of Design, who referred to the work presented as speculative design. It definitely made better sense.