SOAH Research Presents: Environment with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Joanna Boehnert

Speakers
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Joanna Boehnert

Moderator
Sarah Teasley

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Better Nature

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist working across disciplines and media to explore the human values that shape design, science, technology and nature. Through installations, fictions, writing and curatorial projects, Daisy examines why we make things, what those things are, and their relationship with us and the world.

Daisy has spent over ten years researching synthetic biology and the design of living matter, pushing the boundaries of design and science with scientists, engineers, artists, designers, historians, social scientists, and museums around the world. Daisy is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice at the RCA, interrogating how powerful dreams of 'better' futures shape the things that get designed (supervised by Professors Sarah Teasley and Anthony Dunne). Daisy received the World Technology Award for design in 2011, and the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction described as 'romantic, dangerous and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world'. Daisy exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, and her work is in museum and private collections. Talks include TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba and the New Yorker Tech Fest. Post-PhD, Daisy is back to practice with a residency at Somerset House Studios, London, developing new projects including wilding the planet Mars, and resurrecting the smell of flowers made extinct by humans, in search of the sublime. 

Joanna Boehnert – Ecocene Design Economies: Three Ecologies of Systems Transitions

Dr Joanna Boehnert @ecocene is interested in the visual communication of complex problems and the politics of ecological transitions. She is the founder of EcoLabs and a lecturer at Loughborough University. Her book Design/ Ecology/ Politics: Towards the Ecocene was published by Bloomsbury Academic in February 2018.

Dr Sarah Teasley – Moderator

Dr Sarah Teasley is Head of Programme (RCA) for the V&A/RCA Programme in History of Design and Reader in Design History and Theory. She is a social historian who works at the interface of history and design research.

Her research takes an artefact-led approach to the social history of modern and contemporary Japan, with particular focus on design, manufacturing and  communities. She is particularly interested how different social groups interact at times of historical change, and how these values and behaviours, alongside material and environmental factors, influence mid- and long-term trajectories. 

This event has been organised by the School of Arts & Humanities. For more information please contact Anne Duffau.