Keynote speakers

 

Guy Julier

Guy Julier is a renowned writer and academic who is widely credited with establishing Design Culture Studies as a formal field of research and study. With over 30 years of professional experience, his work examines the relationship between design, global economics and social change. He has authored several foundational texts, including The Culture of Design (2014) and Economies of Design (2017), and has held honorary professorships at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Southern Denmark. He has been  Professor of Design Leadership at Aalto University, Finland since 2018.

Throughout his career, Julier has held significant institutional leadership positions, notably serving as the Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum / University of Brighton. During his time at the V&A, he contributed to its development of new curatorial approaches and directed the museum’s Design Culture Salon. Previously, while at Leeds Metropolitan University, he founded DesignLeeds, a multidisciplinary unit focused on social design, and co-directed LeedsLoveItShareIt, an initiative dedicated to innovating approaches to urban regeneration and social change.

Beyond academia, Julier is a key figure in design activism and public policy, collaborating with the think-tank Policy Connect in a UK parliamentary enquiry into design for public services. He has a deep connection to the international design community, evidenced by his role as a jury member for the Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño and his coordination of major international conferences in cities like Barcelona.

 

Laura Forlano

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. She has used participatory workshops, collaborative games, exhibitions, speculative videos, prototypes and performances to imagine alternative futures for living with data and computation. She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, MIT Press 2024) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011).

Prior to her current position, she was Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2019-2020, Forlano was Institute of Advanced Study Fellow (IAS) at Durham University (UK), working on a project called “Material Imagination”. In 2018-2019, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Digital Life Institute at Cornell Tech and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.