Visions of the urban future proliferate across planning documents, architectural competitions, policy frameworks, and marketing brochures: vertical gardens climbing high-rises for climate and energy management, autonomous mobility, waterfront promenades animated by cosmopolitan leisure. These images promise sustainability and connectivity, yet remain curiously placeless, detached from the messy realities of local conditions and material constraints. Emerging from global circuits of capital and design, they project a universal aesthetic of progress in which the future appears inevitable, simply awaiting construction.

Today, few terms are more central to policy, planning, or economics than the term “resilience.” From urban planning to twining the earth systems, we have come to understand systems as constantly in a state of crisis that needs perpetual management. This article traces the rise of resilience as a dominant epistemology and practice in environmental management, logistics, demography, and energy. I will argue that resilience has become the dominant discourse by which time and uncertainty are currently being managed in the wake of post-World War II decolonization, generating new techniques such as digital twinning and GenAI.

This year's symposium of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) took place on June 13, 2024, at the Technical University Dresden. The event titled "Planetary Experiments: Environments by Design", brought together leading scholars at the intersection of design and the humanities to explore fundamental questions about shaping our planetary future and highlighted the urgent need to understand design as a critical practice in the context of global environmental change.

Planetary Urbanisms is the second of three installments of the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures, which showcases seven works by creative practitioners from around the world commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project; these practitioners critically examine how design, architecture, and technology are imbricated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities but also present tools with which to imagine and build more equitable, democratic, and sustainable worlds.

The COST-action DATAMIG (Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control), Working Group 1 “Inventory”, is hosting a 2-day hybrid open workshop on the topic of epistemology in the critical study of technology and migration regimes. We invite short contributions from interested participants in response to the outlined themes of the workshop. In order to apply, please submit a 300 word reflection on how your research and thinking speaks to feminist and decolonial epistemologies in the study of technology and migration regimes.

We arguably live in a new age of planetary design. From the training of large language models on billions of users to the rise of synthetic biology and bio-materials, life is becoming a medium for experimenting with technology at every scale. Orit Halpern will trace four loci to track the emergence of this new ethos of generativity: 1) transforming practices , 2) new forms of computational territory (the zone and the spaceship), 3) emerging forms of rationality and perception and 4) new ideas of materiality and economy that transform separations between organic and inorganic at multiple scales.

Over the past four decades, the idea that both digital machines and human agents are networked intelligences and parts of self-organizing systems has not only shaped financial markets, but has also been incorporated into economic thinking and artificial intelligence. This has led to what Halpern calls the ‘financialization of cognition’, an economy of attention that reconfigures human agency and decision-making based on a model of contemporary finance and the digital economy.

This collected volume explores a novel approach to the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, proposing that instead of merely writing about AI, scholars should think with AI. Rather than treating AI as an external subject of study, the essays explore how concepts from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science can provide ways to rethink core humanistic questions of meaning, representation, and culture. Critical AI Studies typically focuses on AI’s societal implications—its role in surveillance, exclusion, and global capitalism.

Arguably, infrastructural study calls attention to the geological and material underpinnings of contemporary digital systems, thus offering opportunities to interrogate the histories of race, capital, and colonialism that inhere within contemporary media. However, infrastructural discourses can also support broader techno-deterministic and technocratic discourses of engineering, foreclosing alternative imaginaries about the constitution of agency, politics, and life.

This commentary situates the idea of ‘counter-practice’ within a history of art and documentary cinema to ask what it means to witness in an age of big data and ubiquitous sensing? And how might art practices and data studies inform each other? To do so, this essay focuses on the work of Harun Farocki and the concept of the operational image to question whether politics can be separated from aesthetics and to re-introduce problems of human subjectivity and history into the discourse of subversion and praxeology.

The German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF), in collaboration with the Chair of Digital Cultures TU Dresden, invites participants to critically engage with the theme Planetary Experiments: Environments by Design. This conference explores the diverse perspectives and practices of design research and theory in addressing the far-reaching ecological, social, and technological challenges of our time. Planetary Experiments seeks to map the complexities of planetary-scale design interventions and interrogate the ethical, social, and ecological stakes of reimagining the planet as a site of experimentation and design.

Curated by team members Eylül İşcen Özgün and Nadia Christidi and featuring a global group of speculative designers, artists, and academics re-imagining the future of the planet under catastrophic conditions. Part of the Against Catastrophe Project directed by Orit Halpern and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Sinergia Grant, Governing through Design.

Article appears in anthology "What could possibly go wrong? Impact and Consequences of Design" and offers a close reading of Horst Rittel’s and Melvin Webber’s often cited, yet rarely challenged or historically situated publication on wicked problems «Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,» published in 1973. Invested in a denaturalization of design fixes as a predominant design response to crisis it contemplated the (unintended) consequences of adopting wickedness as a design paradigm.

This research studio invites participants to explore the haunting legacy of abandoned mines and extractive landscapes in the regions of Ore Mountains and Lusatia, questioning how these sites can inform our understanding of resource-driven histories and speculative futures. We will delve into the concept of “ghost mines”—both as literal sites of abandonment and metaphorical markers of environmental trauma and contested futures.

In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround Edited by Joshua Neves and Marc Sternberg Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround. Driving every experience of convenience is the precarious work, proprietary algorithms, or predatory schemes that subtend it.

The conference Planetary Design – Reclaiming Futures took place this year in Berlin, in late October, bringing together critical voices and debate on the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. This audio series gathers these provocative polemics and presentations for posterity, allowing for deep dives and due reflection.

Why is human movement increasingly conceived of as a logistical problem? Global forms of human movement have been occurring for centuries, but popular discourse and policies often construct contemporary human movement as exceptional: an unprecedented global problem that requires new techniques of management and logistics. Scholarship situates logistics as a site that articulates social relations of power and differentiates human worth. In this paper, we ask how human movement becomes transformed into a logistical matter in the first place.

There is a long history of psychology linked to economics. What is economics? It is the study of how people make decisions about resources or about money. Hayek was very interested in many sciences, particularly the new ones that emerged after World War II about systems, communication and information. He was very interested in models of decision making. His whole neoliberal economic theory is based on what he calls the limits of knowledge, the fact that human beings do not have complete information about our world, that we make imperfect and often bad irrational decisions.

The current state of the planet, marked by climate change and biodiversity loss, presents one of humanity’s most urgent challenges, further exacerbated by a projected population increase to nearly 10 billion by 2050. Scientific and technological advancements are vital for monitoring and mitigating these issues, offering solutions for humanity to coexist with a changing planet in a sustainable way.

As health systems increasingly adopt digital solutions, such as remote monitoring and telemedicine, the use of health apps is becoming increasingly widespread. Meanwhile, data protection regulations and digital transformation initiatives are making the individual responsible for protecting their health data.

KEYNOTE: Orit Halpern at Reconfigurations of Educational (In)Equality in a Digital World September 26, 2024 Buenos Aires