When we take in the number and magnitude of threats to the survival of humans as well as countless other species, the future looks grim. As we view the array of disruptions and disasters coming at us in the rush of climate change, we are apt to lose ourselves in resignation and grief. How can we find anything positive to guide us? How might we invoke technology and agency in ways that promote healing of the earth and of ourselves? In this time of daunting challenges, what does successful transformation look like? And how can designers be part of such transformations?
Brenda often reminds design students that “We can’t design from despair.” A corollary is: “hope is an active verb.” In the developments and inventions examined in this talk, we will see how hope is an essential ingredient. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be a success. When design ideas don’t work as we’d imagined, we reflect on our “interesting failures” and learn. And then we move on.
How does the planet feed 8 billion people in the face of the pollution and habitat destruction caused by industrial farming of plants and animals? How might we reframe “conservation” as restoration? How might we attenuate plastic pollution and keep fast fashion out of landfills? How can we address the drivers of deforestation? How might we design and engineer methods for slowing glacial melt and atmospheric heating? There are innovative and promising answers to those questions bubbling up in the minds of designers, scientists, engineers, and transdisciplinary teams all over the world. Brenda’s keynote will review some of those efforts, identify what they have in common, and explore how we might employ those commonalities as heuristics for designing positive interactions with the Earth.
Brenda Laurel
Principal at Neogaian Interactive
United States
Brenda Laurel is an independent scholar whose interests include interaction design, XR, theater, media theory, and Gaian systems. She has worked in interactive media since 1976, in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research at Atari Research, Interval Research, and Sun Labs as a Distinguished Engineer. In 1988, she co-founded the Game Developers Conference. At the Banff Centre for the Arts, she co-designed and produced the ground-breaking VR piece, Placeholder. She led a research team on gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996) and co-founded Purple Moon, an interactive media company for girls, in 1996. She designed and chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design (2001-2006) and the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts (2006-2012), both emphasizing design research and transmedia methods and skills. Furthermore, she also taught in the Games and New Media program at the University of California at Santa Cruz (2012-2015).
In 2015, she received the Trailblazer Award from Indiecade. She was awarded the Nextant Prize from the Virtual World Society in 2016 and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Videogame Alliance in 2018. In 2022, she was inducted into the inaugural class of the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy. She has served on the boards of IxDA, StoryCenter, the Virtual World Society, and the Communication Research Institute (Australia). She earned an MFA in Theatre and a Ph.D. in Drama Theory and Criticism at The Ohio State University. Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, (1991, Second Edition 2014).
True to her generation, Brenda is a hard-core fan of both the Grateful Dead and Star Trek. She is an avid snorkeler, abalone diver, and amateur underwater photographer, but since she has moved from northern California to the high desert in Santa Fe, New Mexico, US, she now photographs chollas, petroglyphs, and clouds.