About

Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF) investigates the role and purpose of design in the twenty-first century – understood as an ecology of knowing, imagining and making that is deeply involved in the complex worlding dynamics shaping contemporary reality. 
The version of design that emerged in the early twentieth century continues to play a dominant role in shaping the model upon which the (global Western) world is founded. While the potential of design as a worlding dynamic is clear, it is less evident how its objectives, metrics and methodologies have contributed to the construction of a world that is increasingly showing signs of failure and collapse. The once dominant world model reveals itself as fragile, broken and highly unsustainable, adding to the sense that its future continuation is uncertain. This raises fundamental questions about this particular world model, how we represent and render it, how we adapt to or challenge it, and, importantly, how we may dare and care to imagine and speculate – through novel design methods – other possible, plausible, potential, and preferred worlds that are seated in difference. To this end SUrF aims to develop, test and share a host of new design methods and pedagogical tools that may help us foster the conditions needed to achieve key reforms and meaningful, fundamental changes that are necessary to align design with some of the demands and challenges of the twenty-first century.
In short, based on speculative design approaches in situated urban settings, SUrF focuses on the development of new design methodologies and epistemologies that may guide us towards mitigating existing environmental devastation as well as building other worlds. These will exist as five pilot packages that encompass all the educational materials required to replicate each course in other academic, civic and corporate contexts.

SUrF will be conducted in 3 key phases:

Phase 1 (September 2023 – June 2024): Develop and test five pilot projects (one per institution) with students (various project durations and levels of students).

Phase 2 (September 2024 – June 2025): Exchange the pilot project with another institution for further testing and iteration (experimenting with durations and levels of students).

Phase 3 (September 2025 – August 2026): Package the final version of the pilot as a sharable brief and disseminate for use at other institutions.

SUrF is an educational project funded by ERASMUS+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth and sport, with the aim of strengthening design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience while developing new methods in the field of design. This three-year project (1 September 2023 – August 2026) brings together leading European academic/research institutions from design practice, education and research. The consortium is led by the ENSCI les Ateliers (France), and consists of Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering  (Spain), The University of Split  (Croatia) and the Estonian Association of Architects (Estonia).

• Estonian Association of Architects (EAA)

The Estonian Association of Architects (EAA) was established on 8 October 1921 . The EAA is the representative organisation for the architectural profession in Estonia. It organises architects, landscape architects and architecture researchers and today consists of more than 400 members, and plays an active role in forming the direction and quality of the built environment in Estonia. The EAA has actively participated in drawing up legislative documents; in 2002, the official architecture policy of Estonia was developed upon the initiative of the EAA. In 2004 the EAA was granted the status of member in the Architects’ Council of Europe. The EAA and the Estonian Academy of Arts have established the Estonian Centre of Architecture, the commercial branch of the EAA.

Researcher profiles

Jüri Soolep
The Estonian Association of Architects, Tallinn, Estonia

Dr. Jüri Soolep graduated as an architect at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn (1986); his PhD is from the University of Portsmouth (2001). He served as professor and dean at the EAA (2001–2011), has lectured at the universities of Tartu, Oulu, Porto, Cork, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Halle and Tokyo, was professor at the  NC State European Center in Prague (2016 - 2018)  and guest-professor in Umeå School of Architecture, Sweden (2011 - 2016). He was the rector of the Nordic Baltic Academy. Currently he is the research and development advisor for the Estonian Association of Architects. He has been a member of steering boards for Strong Research Environments ResArc and Making within Swedish Research Council grant Since 2001 Soolep has been partner and lead architect in the architectural studio AB Medium; most of his designs are built in Pärnu and Tallinn. His most recent book is Architecture, Imagospheric Horizon and Digital Universe (Tallinn, Archimedium 2018). His current field of research includes studies in the representational systems of architectural phenomena, innovation and composition in the digital age.
https://soolep.ee

• Elisava, Barcelona

Researcher profiles

Roger Paez
ELISAVA 
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Roger Paez qualified as an architect at ETSAB, Barcelona, in 1998; completed the MS AAD at Columbia University, New York; and was granted a PhD by UPC, Barcelona, in 2015. He gained professional experience in the studios of Alison and Peter Smithson and Enric Miralles. He is the founder of AiB architects, and full-time professor and researcher at Elisava, where he serves as Design for City Making Research Lab leader and MEATS director; he is also an architectural design professor at ETSALS and guest professor at universities worldwide. He regularly publishes peer-reviewed articles and books, notably Operative Mapping: Maps as Design Tools (2019) and Plug-ins: Design for City Making in Barcelona (2022), and participates in research projects, both as leader and as partner. He works at the intersection of design, architecture and the city, focusing on temporality, experimentation and social impact. ORCID: 0000-0001-9038-552X.

Manuela Valtchanova
ELISAVA
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Manuela Valtchanova  is an architect (TUM, Munich/ UACEG, Sofia, 2015) with a PhD from the University of Barcelona, Department of History and Theory of Art, granted in 2022-. She is a researcher at Elisava Research (Design for City Making) and associate professor at the undergraduate degree in Design and Innovation and the Master of Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces (MEATS), Elisava. Since 2012 she has collaborated in several architectural offices with a special focus on heterogeneous architecture formats, ranging over exhibition spaces and interventions in public space. Her work area is built on the critical transaction between politics, space and intersubjectivity and in her PhD investigation she explores the idea of Architecture of Action or the socio-spatial practices of critical intervention in the hypermodern city.  She is currently developing research projects that deal with ephemeral architecture, operative mapping and social cohesion. She has been visiting professor and guest lecturer at universities worldwide and has published both specialised articles and book chapters, mainly addressing expanded design strategies based on transformative urbanism, collaborative spaces and temporary interventions in public space. 

www.manuelavaltchanova.com Orcid: 0000-0001-7168-7645

• Centre de Recherche en Design (CRD), ENS/ENSCI

The Centre de Recherche en Design (CRD) is a laboratory co-founded by the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle (ENSCI-Les Ateliers), a school exclusively dedicated to industrial creation and design, and the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS), a multidisciplinary Grande École (university) with an international and multidisciplinary outlook.
The lab focuses on practice-based research, emphasising designing for transitions. This includes: 1) developing methods to understand what we need to transition from, including attitudes towards resources, socio-technical systems and economic models; 2) the development of imaginaries that describe what to transition to – depictions of preferable futures that address contemporary problematic practices; and 3) how to make the transition – situated, real-life projects with citizens, policy-makers, scientists and other related actors who develop new design methods, tools and interactions. The CRD also exploits its position at the core of the ENS trans-disciplinary network to share knowledge, develop collaborations and forge new forms of practice.

Researcher profiles

James Auger
ENS/ENSCI, Paris, France

James Auger is director of the design department at ENS Paris-Saclay and co-director of CRD. His work explores ways in which practice-based design research can lead to more considered and democratic technological futures.
After graduating from Design Products (MA) at the Royal College of Art in London, James moved to Dublin to conduct research at Media Lab Europe (MLE) exploring the theme of human communication as mediated by technology. He worked in Tokyo as a guest designer at the Issey Miyake Design Studio developing new concepts for mobile telephones. Between 2005 and 2015 James was part of the critically acclaimed Design Interactions department at the RCA, teaching on the MA programme and continuing his development of critical and speculative approaches to design and technology, completing his PhD on the subject in 2012. After the RCA James formed the Reconstrained Design Group at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) in Portugal, exploring the potential of the island as an experimental living laboratory through a combination of fictional, factual and functional multi-scale energy-related proposals and projects. This work was awarded the Cultural Innovation International Prize by the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) in 2017.
James is a partner in the speculative design practice Auger-Loizeau, a collaboration founded in 2000. Their projects have been published and exhibited internationally, including 21_21, Tokyo; The Science Museum, London; The National Museum of China, Beijing; Ars Electronica, Linz and MoMA, New York, where their work is in the permanent collection.

Armand Behar
ENS/ENSCI, Paris, France

Since the 2000s, Armand Behar has devoted himself to the creation of a single, evolving work:  Histoire d’une représentation, which has been exhibited in art centres, galleries and biennials. In parallel to his creative work and research work focused on the question of creative writing, Armand co-founded art3000-le Cube in 2001, where he created a research workshop dedicated to creation and new technologies. In 2012, he opened phenOrama, a research and experimentation platform in art and contemporary industry at ENSCI-Les Ateliers. In 2016, he created a series of encounters Écritures de creation-Pratiques de recherche[2] with the architect and researcher Antonella Tufano. In 2017 he developed a research programme on ethno-fiction with the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative. He is currently co-director of the CRD

Émile de Visscher
ENS/ENSCI, Paris, France

Emile De Visscher is junior professor and holds the chair Design for Ecological Transitions at ENS. As a practice-based design researcher, his work explores alternative production technologies and materials in response to the ecological crisis. 
Emile initially trained as a mechanical engineer, and pursued his studies in the double Masters programme Innovation Design Engineering between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. He then conducted a PhD in the “Sciences, Arts, Création, Recherche” doctoral program (SACRe) led by Université PSL, hosted at EnsAD, which he defended in 2018. Right after,  he joined the Humboldt University in Berlin, as a research associate (post-doc) in the Research Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity”, where he stayed for 4 years, ending up as group leader of the “Material Form Function” research foci. In 2023, he was awarded a CPJ at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay. His research led him to develop several new technologies, like Polyfloss, an innovative plastic recycling machine, or Petrification, a new ceramic craft out of cellulose. He presented his projects in more than 50 international exhibitions and obtained several awards. In parallel, Emile regularly publishes articles on the emergence of alternative manufacturing processes and their technical, political, social, economical and philosophical impacts.

Lorène Picard
ENS/ENSCI, Paris, France

Lorène Picard is a graphic designer, educator and researcher, specialised in digital culture. She works on the relationship between critical art, design and digital technologies through an enlarged vision of graphic design, at the frontiers of computing and digital arts. After three years in applied arts (La Martinière, Lyon / École Estienne, Paris), she studied graphic design at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Grenoble-Valence before joining the Design and Research postgraduate programme at ESADSE Saint-Étienne in 2015. She worked for the editorial committee of the design research journal Azimuts. She is currently completing a PhD – Web et transparence. Conscience critique en art et design (1995-2019) — in Industrial Arts (CNU 18) at Unité de recherche ECLLA, Université Jean Monnet, and Random(Lab) (defending November, 2024). She teaches on the master of design research (writing and documentary research) at ENS (since 2020) and supervises student practice-based research according to contemporary issues (aesthetical, technical, social, communication and ecological). She is also responsible for the co-coordination of the programme. Lorène has been a member of the CRD since 2021.
http://lorene-picard.com/

• AE+T, TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture

The research of TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment covers the full spectrum of design, engineering, planning and management of the built environment. Its research portfolio comprises the research that is conducted by four departments: architecture,  architectural engineering and technology (AE+T),  management in the built environment (MBE), and urbanism. The faculty’s research focuses specifically on improving the design and performance of buildings, districts, cities and regions in order to better meet the requirements and expectations of their users and communities. From this perspective, much of its research can be understood as applied science, appealing to the curiosity and needs of other researchers, practitioners and the broader public alike. The research is a blend of humanities, social and engineering sciences. The humanities are strongest represented in the architecture department, social sciences in the MBE and urbanism departments, while the engineering sciences find their strongest representation in AE+T. 

Researcher profiles

Heidi Sohn
TU Delft, Netherlands

Heidi Sohn is associate professor of architecture theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft. She is academic coordinator and head of the Architecture Philosophy and Theory group in the Theories, Territories & Transitions section of the Architecture Department. She received her doctoral degree in architecture theory in 2006 from TU Delft. She has been visiting professor of architecture theory in Anhalt, Dessau and Umeå School of Architecture. She is a member of the scientific board of the City and Philosophy international research network. 
Her areas of interest oscillate between concepts of ‘process’, the ‘monstrous’, ‘heterotopia’ and ‘difference’. Her work addresses environmental questions, critical and intensive cartographies, worlding dynamics, and the shifting theoretical landscapes since the postmodern turn, including different modes of expressions of culture, materiality, spatiality and temporality. She is interested in understanding the expressions of political and libidinal economic forces on (in)habitation patterns, including housing, as well as their impact on bordering processes and movement-induced ontologies. Her current research work explores narrative, fabulation and environmental storytelling as tools in the construction of onto-epistemologies of posthuman, inhuman and more than human agencies and their worlding dynamics within timespace continuums.

​​Stavros Kousoulas
TU Delft, Netherlands

Stavros Kousoulas is assistant professor of architecture philosophy and theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at TU Delft and received his PhD cum laude from IUAV Venice. He is executive editor of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint and the book series Ecologies of Architecture. He is the author of Architectural Technicities (2022) and has co-edited the volumes Architectures of Life and Death (2021), Design Commons (2022), The Space of Technicity (2024) and Noetics Without a Mind (2024).
His research develops a non-reductionist account of architectural practices and discourses. Versed in the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer as well as the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology, he wishes to propose a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment. Central to this effort is a genuinely transdisciplinary approach as well as a prioritisation of the (pedagogical) value of problematising.

Andrej Radman
TU Delft, Netherlands

Andrej Radman is assistant professor of architecture philosophy and theory, and coordinator of the Ecologies of Architecture research group at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft.. He is a member of the National Committee on Deleuze and Guattari Scholarship, a founding editor of the TU Delft OPEN Publishing Ecologies of Architecture Book Series, and the executive editor of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint (2011–2024). Radman is a co-editor of Critical and Clinical Cartographies (2017), Architectures of Life and Death (2021), The Space of Technicity (2024), and Noetics Without a Mind (forthcoming). He is the author of Gibsonism (2012) and Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (2021). He is also a licensed architect with a portfolio of built and competition-winning projects. Radman received the Croatian Association of Architects’ annual award for housing architecture in Croatia in 2002. In 2023, he was honoured with the Mark Cousins Theory Award presented by DigitalFUTURES. This award recognises leading theorists in the field of architecture and design who have demonstrated forward-thinking perspectives in the field.Over the past two decades Radman’s research has focused on the nexus between architecture and radical empiricism as a means of tapping into the relations of exteriority, or the design-of-world, in favour of an affirmative constructivist (meso)politics of matter.

• Arts Academy, University of Split

The Arts Academy at the University of Split was established in 1997 and consists of three departments: Fine Arts, Music Arts, and Theatrical Arts. Department of Visual Communications Design has almost 20 years of experience in critical and speculative design education, introducing and promoting novel methods and approaches, and is considered a leader in the region. The focus of applied speculative practice is on the implications of important global topics in local contexts, such as how recent and emerging technological, economic, social, political and environmental changes impact the context of Mediterranean South-Eastern Europe. The department participated in the realisation of the European project Urban IxD: Designing Human Interactions in the Networked City (2013–2014). A part of the project, the international exhibition City, Data, Future: Interactions in Hybrid Urban Space, is now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Members of the department realised the exhibition Speculative: Post Design Practice or New Utopia? and the corresponding publication at the Milan Triennale (2016). For the University of Split, the department led the international Erasmus+ project SpeculativeEdu, the first European project that dealt with education in the field of speculative design and related practices, and resulted in the book Beyond Speculative Design: Past, Present, Future (2021). Department members participated in the discursive programme of Croatian representation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which resulted in the book Designing in Coexistence: Reflections on Systemic Change (2023).
https://ww.umas.unist.hr/en/
http://interakcije.net/en/

Researcher profiles

Ivica Mitrović
Arts Academy at the University of Split, Croatia

Dr Ivica Mitrović is the associate professor at the Department of Visual Communications Design at the Arts Academy (University of Split). Since 2001 the focus of his critical and speculative design practice has been on the implications of important global topics in the local context, such as how recent and emerging technological, economic, social, political and environmental changes impact the Adriatic region. His work has been exhibited internationally (at the Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, BIO Ljubljana, Vienna Biennale, and Media Architecture Biennale, among others). He has been invited as a lecturer, workshop leader and visiting professor to many international institutions (KTH Stockholm, Chalmers University, Umeå Institute of Design, Milan Polytechnic), festivals and conferences (BIO Ljubljana, Primer Conference, DIS Conference).

Oleg Šuran
Arts Academy at the University of Split, Croatia

Oleg Šuran is the assistant professor at the Department of Visual Communications Design at the Arts Academy (University of Split), teaching visual communications, interaction design and speculative design. He holds a BA in visual communications and an MA in new media design. Together with Andi Pekica and Oleg Morović, he runs Fazan, Polet, nakonjusmo.net portal, and the FazanFonts type foundry. He runs workshops in the fields of communication, interaction and speculative design. He has participated in multiple group and solo shows both in Croatia and abroad. He is involved in the informal educational platform Interakcije at the Arts Academy in Split, which deals with new design practices (from interaction design to critical and speculative design).

Dora Vanette

Arts Academy at the University of Split, Croatia

Dora Vanette is a design historian and theorist. After receiving MA degrees in Design Studies, Art History, and English, she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Southern California (USC).

Her research focuses on the visual and material culture of childhood and old age. Her current book project examines the rerouting of eldercare from family towards architecture, design, and technology. In particular, it investigates how care manifested materially in nursing homes and retirement communities of 1950s and 1960s United States.

Her teaching is grounded in the pedagogy of care, which she approaches as both an ethic and a practice. In her research, she is committed to using material culture to center underrepresented narratives, spotlight the lived experience of marginalized groups, and widen the scope and type of methodologies available to design historians. This approach moves beyond traditional focus areas to attend to not only creation and innovation but maintenance and repair; servant—and not only served—spaces, and art and design outside hegemonic spaces and systems.

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