Who Gets to Future?
Daniela Rosner

This third day of the conference gathers a path-breaking group of artists, scholars and activists whose words and work conjure new forms of imaginative critique through storytelling. By broadening the contours of a fabulatory practice in everyday life, they elevate our understandings of the unknown in ways that upend conventional modes of recognition and possibility around future making. Rather than position the past as a stable precursor to the present, or view the future as a progressive march to the finish, the speakers in this session materialize stories to challenge teleologies of innovation, reworking who and what are made to matter. Across lectures, screenings and performances they weave feminist speculation into critical rereadings, drawing out what Sareeta Amrute (borrowing from Kathleen Stewart) calls a techno-affect of attunement, those ways of connecting that curtail relations of domination. In enlivening expanded genres of world building, this session helps us learn to notice and future otherwise.

Participants: Shaowen Bardzell, Sarah Sharma, Åsa Ståhl / Kristina Lindström, Priscilla Telmon / Vincent Moon

Daniela Rosner is Assistant Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the social, political and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. She has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Adobe and Nokia Research, and as an exhibit designer at several museums including the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Rosner’s work has been supported by multiple awards from the United States National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. She is the author of several articles on craft and technoculture such as ‘Legacies of craft and the centrality of failure in a mother-operated hackerspace’, Journal of New Media & Society (2016) and ‘Binding and Aging’, Journal of Material Culture (2012). Her book Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (2018) investigates new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility. Rosner serves on the editorial board of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice and as the editor of the ‘Design as Inquiry’ forum for ACM Interactions magazine. Along with Beth Kolko, Rosner co-directs HCDE’s Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT Lab).