Future Series: Cities

Will technology take over our intimate lives or is a human-centred mutiny necessary? For the second event, V&A Future Series: Cities we are joined by Simone Ferracina , whose architectural practice is on the knife-edge of the discipline exploring the city as a metabolic organism; Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, the world’s premiere expert in the Internet-Of-Things exploring the future of the connected city; and Indy Johar, the serial ‘co-’entrepreneur unleashing the power of the many to re-imagine our cities and advocate for a boring revolution.

Chairing the panel:
Priya Khanchandani
Priya Khanchandani is Editor of ICON. She has published dozens of articles for publications ranging from Disegno to Bloomsbury’s Encyclopaedia of Design and spoken at numerous festivals, conferences and on BBC Radio 4. She holds an MA in the History of Design with Distinction from the Royal College of Art and previously worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum and as Head of Arts Programmes for India at the British Council.

Speakers:
Simone Ferracina
Simone Ferracina’s experimental architectural practice is at the knife-edges of the discipline. Simone leads the design of Living Architecture, an EU-funded project that operates at the intersection of architecture, building construction, bio-energy and synthetic biology. He is the Director of Œ Case Files, a book series that seeks to redraw the disciplinary map of architecture and design, with particular interests in hertzian space, cyborgian extensions, wet/living technologies, material computation, augmented reality, design fiction, prototyping, queer and monstrous ecologies and post-natural futurism. His most recent writing includes contributions to “Liquid Life: On Non linear Materiality," co-authored with Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes, and Architecture Design Theory (Ardeth). At the V&A Future Series, he’ll transport us to the ecologically entangled organism that is the metabolic future city. He’ll guide us through his alternative ethos and design methodologies that precipitate a healthier and kinder built environment for humans and nonhumans alike.
organseverywhere.com
@oeverywhere

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is who people go to, to understand the possibilities of a connected culture. She is joining the dots between every thing in your world whether it’s through the Good Night Lamp, that connects families living apart, digital story tags on your jeans revealing the craft behind your clothing or building interactive installations for National Geographic. A global leader in Internet of Things (IoT), in 2016 global trend intelligence firm Postscapes, voted her the number one IoT Influencer in the world. She was the first to distribute the Arduino platform in the UK, runs the second largest IoT Meetup on the planet and is director of designswarm , a strategic consultancy. For the V&A Future Series, Alexandra will be exploring the future of the connected city beyond the novelties of talking street furniture.
designswarm.com
@iotwatch

Indy Johar
Indy Johar envisions a society with conditions for radical hope built in – a bold new system with inherent audacity. He’s a four-time RIBA award winner and serial entrepreneur with an emphasis on the “co-” prefixing his many roles. He dives deep into the detail and jumps up over the blue sky, where he thinks broad and wild with fresh insights on the mechanics of the world - little wonder why he was appointed by the Mayor of London to help set out a 25 year vision for the city. He believes democracy is not about ‘the vote’, but the democratic power to create our cities. Can we radically rethink the way our institutions and infrastructures are organised enough to fundamentally recreate them from the inside out? For the V&A Future Series, Indy will be exploring how we unleash the many to create, re-imagine and remake our cities and why innovation needs a boring revolution.
medium.com/indy_johar
@ indy_johar

About the curators, Propela
Propela is the world’s leading agency for the creatives that are crafting your future. At Propela, we only represent mavericks working on the bleeding edge of the arts, design, science and technology. From Body Architects and Food Artists to Cultural Hackers and Fashion Futurists, all our Speakers are true thought leaders and provocative visionaries with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Propela is where industry go for far-future thinking.
Propela.co.uk
@Propela_