Anab Jain: Rewilding the Imagination
Anab Jain invites us to face the many overlapping challenges of our time - from climate change to economic justice.She asks: how can we build the spiritual strength we need to face the challenges of the present moment? As Co-founder and Director of Superflux, Anab’s work bridges design, film, and futures thinking to catalyse meaningful action for the planet and its future custodians.
Anab reflects on two recent projects - Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, a meditation on more-than-human consciousness, and Trespass, a call to rewild both land and body. She explores natural environments that people consider sacred, how to be defiantly hopeful in challenging times, and ways to resist a sense of apathy that can make us feel numb. This talk is about how our imaginations can be a kind of infrastructure that helps us to shape livable and interconnected futures.
Bio:
Anab is a designer, futurist, filmmaker and educator. As Co-founder and Director of Superflux, she catalyses our Studio’s mission to leave a meaningful legacy for our planet and its future custodians.
Anab grew up in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India within the entangled postcolonial landscapes of a fast-growing nation. After studying filmmaking at the National Institute of Design she moved to London to gain her Masters at the Royal College of Art, and went on to work on machine intelligence at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.
In 2009, Anab, with Jon Ardern, co-founded Superflux, a design, research and futures practice. Superflux work with businesses, cultural institutions, academic partners and government bodies to adapt and innovate through periods of uncertainty and change, and build more just futures. In our 15th year, Superflux has received the Design Studio of the Year Award in recognition of our “contribution to the fields of speculative and futures design with a committed social mission.”
Anab is a globally recognised thought leader renowned for her pioneering work on design-led foresight, emerging technologies, more-than human and ecological thinking. She has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts, London, with the citation “A philosopher for our age, her concepts of ‘design for the new normal’ and ‘more-than-human centered design’ are expanding the public’s imagination, and making possible futures tangible.”
Over the years, Anab has is responsible for presenting key ideas to the world, such as Design for the New Normal (2012), More-than-Human-Centred Design (2018) and Ancillary Design (2022)