Writer, social scientist and design researcher Laura Forlano
Writer, social scientist and design researcher Laura Forlano is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Her recent talk at the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator traces emergent discussions around post-humanism from across a range of disciplines and perspectives, and considers examples from emerging design practices that emphasize the interrelations between human and nonhuman actors.
As part of our weekly Pizza, Beer and Ethics discussion with the TEK-TILES 2018 Project team, Laura recently presented critiques of post-humanism to consider how emergent design perspectives might better support values such as equality and justice for humans and non-humans that have been traditionally ignored in design processes.
Since at least the mid-1980s, design has been dominated by a human-centered and user-centered paradigm. Currently, the implications of technological and environmental transformations are challenging designers to focus on complex socio-technical systems.
Here’s what Laura had to say about it.
