ANAB JAIN

As a designer I’ve found really interesting the discussion about the role of designers in creating a vision of the future. Yesterday Patrick Gyger affirmed that we don’t have anymore a vision of the future, because we think we are living it. Indeed it is difficult to imagine the future, to predict it.

Matt Webb highlights how designers play an important role in reflecting and experimenting around the evolution of a product, of a service, of a system. But what are the tools in hand of designers to do that? Anab Jain invites us to play with tomorrow creating speculative scenarios of possible near future. The visionary “Metromatics 21th century” scenario of Frank Beau or the “Carnivore domestic entertainment robots” shown by James Auger are examples of this kind of practice.
To imagine the future we also need to know what didn’t work in the past. Nicolas Nova suggests a design strategy based on failure. We need to spot and document failures in order to not repeat them one more time. Some designers look at the prototype as a tool of conception, that leads to a more empirical design method based errors observation and progressive adjustments. Fabio Sergio believes that technology can actually be a material to sketch with. In this context the present becomes a sort of beta-version of the future we want to live in. In the picture above you can see an early prototype of a project where I tried to use a real plant as a computer input device.

So, let’s start to sketch our idea and let it grow. What we need is just a mixture of rationality and passion, of pragmatism and fantasy.

Originally from India, Anab Jain is a London-based interaction designer with skills and experience in technology foresight, service design, people-centred research and filmmaking. Her work is about people and everyday life today by informed visions and design, but also about how to best design for an uncertain future in a complex world. Until recently she was design lead on a project at Microsoft Research Cambridge, which attempted to rethink notions of machine intelligence by developing product and service scenarios around biotechnology and RFID. Currently she works as a service and interaction designer at Nokia Design in London, while developing her emerging design practice ‘Superflux’. Her work has received international awards including the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, Design for our Future Selves Award and Award of Excellence, ICSID and DuPont Inc and has been shown at Mattel Toys, Apple and Intel headquarters.

She looks at LIFT as a convergence of ideas and interesting people. It is a platform for conversations and debates, a space for sharing and reflecting on our own current practices and where they intersect with other disciplines. She says “Within the context of the larger world ‘economic and environmental’ crisis that we find ourselves in, the theme of this year’s LIFT is very timely. I am hoping that it becomes a platform for not only discussing ideas around alternative, sustainable ways of building our futures, but also an opportunity to find collaborators and initiate projects that could influence collective change.”

Find out more about Anab Jain at http://www.anab.in/