Guest Lecture by Danille Wilde

Wearing technology in troubled times

In her award-winning first novel, Memory of Water, Finnish author, Emmi Itäranta (2014) describes a time beyond ‘The Twilight century’ (the 21st Century) when humankind’s wasteful, indifferent attitudes to its own, and other, species and the planet, resulted in climate changes from which there is no return. The icecaps have melted, the planet has warmed, and most of the landlocked freshwater has gone. Much of the land is given over to huge landfall containing the unrecycleable wastes of this century and the one before - plastics, electronics, consumer junk, which there is no longer the power to use. Sadly, Itäranta’s fiction is already a little too real. 
Wearable technologies bring together textiles – the fourth most polluting industry on the planet; and electronics – an industry that comes with unacceptable sociological and ecological costs. Yet clothing fulfils important functions, and technologies make so many things possible. Not least they can help us to imagine new ways of approaching the everyday realities of living within the unfolding ecological crisis, and the accompanying political and social unrest.
Design is a world-shaping activity. How, in these troubled times, can designers envision wearable technologies that are enriching and transformative: that fruitfully entangle humans with the myriad living and non-living beings that make up our worlds? Without such devastating costs?
In this presentation, Wilde will discuss how some designers are approaching this “almost unimaginably difficult to imagine task,” highlighting approaches to wearable technologies that bring together textile crafts and emerging science to try to find new ways forward. 
__
Danielle Wilde is a research associate professor of Embodied Design at The University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, focused on Embodied Design, Wearable Futures and Design Ecologies. She concurrently holds positions as: adjunct professor of practice-based, creative research at RMIT University, Melbourne, in the School of Fashion and Textiles; associate research fellow at Waag Society for Art, Science and Technology, Amsterdam, where she is investigating material and biological entanglements across scales of experience and concern; and is a regular guest lecturer at Design School Kolding, introducing undergraduate and Masters students to disruptive ideation strategies, embodied futuring, critical and speculative design, and designing with biology. Wilde holds an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and a practice-based PhD from Monash University (Art, Design and Architecture) and CSIRO: Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Materials Science and Engineering). She publishes and exhibits widely and has received numerous awards for her work over the years, including the University Medal for her PhD, which investigated the impact of decision making throughout the design and development of wearable technologies on a poetics of experience. For more information see: www.daniellewilde.com