UN-Predicting the future

Round table hosted by the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University (Australia)

Wednesday 18th March 2020, 6pm to 9pm

The Commons, Melbourne, Australia

Just like in every futuristic movie ever made, engineers wonder how to decide who a self driving car might kill in an accident, robots are automating our industries, we are experiencing the climate crisis first hand and there is a potential global health crisis looming. As policy makers, industries and governments scramble to solve these real-world problems from the top down, we want to challenge the very mechanisms used for predicting the future.

This panel of academic futures thinkers will hold a conversation focussed on disrupting predictable contemporary thinking in the policy, government and industry and innovation sectors for a future that is more ethical, equitable and inclusive.

Speakers

• Professor Sarah Pink - Director of Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University will chair the panel, and reflect on her futures anthropology research into self-driving cars, future intelligent mobilities, and energy futures.
• Professor Noortje Marres - Director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, (Warwick University). Noortje is a digital sociologist, and will speak about the tests and experiments that engineers use today to create the future: living labs, online personality tests, and smart traffic systems do not just predict what is to come, but change the present, and this makes it more urgent to figure out how art, design and social research can make possible different kinds of experiments with the future.
• Dr Nerea Calvillo - Associate Professor ,Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, (Warwick University). An architect by training, Nerea will present In the Air, a visualization project currently on display in the Royal Academy (London), which makes visible the microscopic agents of Madrid´s air. This and other projects by Nerea create embodied, material, and affective ways of sensing our environmental futures.
• Professor Juan F Salazar - Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Juan will speak about creative practices, poetics of tomorrowing and speculative approaches to futuring Antarctica and Outer Space. 

Discussants

• Dr Debora Lanzeni - Research Fellow, Emerging Technologies Research Lab
• Dr Karen Waltorp - Assistant Professor, Aarhus University

For more details : https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/un-predicting-the-future-round-table-discussion-book-launch-tickets-96057076301