Superflux

It's very nearly the end of the year, and I want to take a moment not only to reflect on my favorite highlights from Superflux, but to express immense gratitude to all we've partnered & collaborated with. ⚡️A Just World on a Safe Planet: For the Earth Commission and Global Commons Alliance,  we created a tripartite digital artwork on planetary justice for The Lancet. Thanks to the lead scientists + Maya Rebermark Lisa Jacobson & Zoe Tcholak-Antitch for this landmark paper on climate justice. ⚡️A World Without Landfill: One of my favorite projects—a generative, systemic speculative design inquiry for a globally impactful business. While confidential, I hope this work inspires critical reflection and actionable strategies. ⚡️Summit of the Future 2024: With United Nations Foundation Earth4All, See Through Stories & Cream Projects we presented a VR experience imagining New York City in 2075—a plea urging leaders to turn abstract promises into tangible actions today. ⚡️The Intersection, on Tour! Our film 'The Intersection' gained unexpected attention this *year of AI*, reflecting a global desire for alternative tech futures. Grateful to @MMCA_Korea, Bunduskunsthalle, Beta Festival Dublin, and the @Grassimuseum Leipzig amongst others. ⚡️Circularity by Design: Thrilled with our fully circular and modular exhibition design for the Ingka Group at the New York Climate Week 2024. Huge thanks to Ludvig Liljekvist, Lusyanna Vuorenniemi Pelaez and Action Speaks teams showcasing bold systemic action. ⚡️Ecological Intelligence: What else could intelligence be? Where do our stories fit in the grand tapestry of ecological intelligence? Our 'Ecological Intelligence Agency' was presented at HEK Haus der Elektronischen Künste & Transnatural Festival; more coming soon! ⚡️Rewilding Our Imagination: At The Conference in Malmö, my keynote explored connections between Bhutan, England, and India, drawing on ancestral wisdom, ecological imagination, and creative practices. Big thanks to Media Evolution, hildreth england & Martin Thörnkvist. ⚡️On Slow Revolutions & Equity in Imagination: A year of expansive conversations on themes close to my heart, thanks @The RSA (The royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce) Andy Haldane, Radha Mistry Deem Journal, Chris Duffy, #SciFoo, TED Conferences. ⚡️Futures of Advanced AI: With Tech & Society (Google) and Google DeepMind, we spent 5 months exploring responsible AI through futures research, worldbuilding, and speculative design. Grateful to Mira Lane, Dorothy Chou, Marco Zamarato, Alice Moloney, Natalie Breitkopf + all who contributed—more soon. Biggest thanks to our incredible colleagues at Superflux; Ed Lewis Matthew Edgson Isabelle Bucklow Camille Dunlop Carmen Pop-Tiron Léa Gimpel-Lichtarz Andy Thornton Julia Merican, Mon Cano, Stefan Schoenauer, also Rachel Foley, Sarah Brin, @gahlicheva_gehlen and ofcourse Jon Ardern! Grateful for this year and holding onto hope for more peace, care, and compassion in 2025.

As 2024 draws to a close, we’re foraging for the right note to end things on. What feels like an apt response to yet another tumultuous year? What are the lessons we’ve learned, and how can we begin to act on them? What’s the friction that sparks cultural imagination, invention, and innovation? These are some of the provocations in our latest newsletter on the power of critical sensemaking in shaping our collective future(s) 📝 "Critical sensemaking isn’t about having all the answers, but about asking better questions. It’s about developing the mental agility to connect dots that aren’t obviously related. It’s about sitting with uncertainty and allowing it to reveal new pathways forward. It’s a cartography of the future, a way of mapping what we don’t entirely know and can’t always prepare for." Read our full newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/ecYSrCuA

Superflux presents The Ecological Intelligence Agency (EIA), a project that combines artificial intelligence with nature data to rethink the future of our water management. Our freshwater systems are under threat from climate change and pollution, endangering the quality and sustainability of these vital resources.   Based on research into England’s River Roding, the EIA has developed three future scenarios that address critical scenarios of pollution, sewage problems and flood risk. This project challenges us to explore how AI can help improve the ecological health of our rivers.   The EIA represents a new way of thinking, not only accepting the most popular data, but also recognizing diverse ecosystems and non-human factors. This allows for a deeper connection and understanding of the challenges. A sustainable and holistic approach to freshwater management is created—one that allows for an ecological future where our rivers come back to life. Superflux is part of the Invisible Matters exhibition which opens Fri. 20 Dec. at 17h. #freshwatermanagement #climatechange #waterpollution #ecologicalintelligence #Superflux #RivierdeRoding #AIbynature #restorationindustryl #futurescenario # #NatuurEnTechnologie #Transnatural

“We want to build spaces that are immersive and exploratory, that really enable us to think about the future from the future.” - Anab Jain RDI & Jon Ardern We're thrilled to be featured in the latest issue of Grafikmagazin. Issue 06.24 is centred around speculative design, and the question of how design approaches can help to visualise futures and develop innovative ideas that will help us to better decide how to act now ✨ In these pages, Anab Jain RDI and Jon Ardern answered some questions posed by Susanne Schaller about the prerequisites for translating future uncertainty into present day choices, their ethnographic research, and upcoming projects. You can read their full interview—written by Julia Merican and translated by Susanne Schaller—in the latest issue: https://lnkd.in/eyhPvm8J Thank you Christine Moosmann and the Grafikmagazin team for this lovely feature, and for these stunning photographs of the new issue!

It's been a busy summer in the studio, but we finally have a newsletter update! Our latest newsletter is a recap of everything we’ve been up to over the last few months—the fully circular exhibition we worked on for Ingka Group and IKEA's Action Speaks showcase at #NewYorkClimateWeek, the VR experience we designed in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, Earth4All and See Through Stories as part of the #UNSummitOfTheFuture, the digital triptych we created for the Earth Commission and Global Commons Alliance to accompany their paper on #AJustWorldOnASafePlanet in The Lancet, and our travelling projects, 'the Intersection' and the Ecological Intelligence Agency at the HEK - Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Bundeskunsthalle, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Beta Festival and GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts. We also share news about Anab Jain RDI's recent talks at The Conference in Malmö and Digital Science's #SciFooCamp in Cambridge on weaving a spiritual infrastructure and rewilding our ecological and technological imaginations, and introduce our newest team members, Mon Cano, Stefan Schönauer and Julia Merican 👋 If you haven’t already, subscribe for more seasonal updates, tidbits for thought, and exciting things that catch our attention: https://lnkd.in/ep8vphcc 📮 Special thanks to all the people we've worked with who have made this work possible: Ludvig Liljekvist, Lusyanna Vuorenniemi Pelaez, Sarah Jane King, Jesper Brodin, Jonathan Clay, Optimist Gaffney, Liane Aviram, Ana Taboada, Francesca Whitlock, Léna Belly-Le Guilloux, Lisa Jacobson, Maya Rebermark, Zoe Tcholak-Antitch, and of course, our Superflux team and our collaborators Sarah Brin, Camille Dunlop, Galicheva-Gahlen and Cream Projects ✨

In preparation for Climate Week NYC, we partnered with the Superflux team to bring our vision to life. It was amazing to see our digital platform come to life through this collaboration—a true testament to what working together can achieve. Thank you Anab Jain RDI, Jon Ardern and team. 💚 Together, we create impact. At Ingka, 'Tillsammans' (Swedish for together) is more than just a value – it's a way of driving real change. Collaborations like this align with our mission at Action Speaks. By joining the Action Speaks community, you can be part of a movement dedicated to empowering voices and actions for a better world. Whether big or small, every initiative counts. Let's unite our strengths and make a difference. Submit your initiatives at https://lnkd.in/deQiiFNT #Tillsammans #ActionSpeaks #Sustainability #JoinTheMovement

In 'Future Feelings' a podcast by Deem Journal, Anab Jain RDI spoke with Radha Mistry about our work and practice at Superflux. Their conversation also explored the humility that the practice of 'futuring' requires, and what it means to be a 'futurist' today. Thanks for sharing Speculative Futures Milan 🌟

🌍 Our digital triptych, created for the Earth Commission and Global Commons Alliance groundbreaking new report "A Just World on a Safe Planet" in the The Lancet Group Planetary Health Journal, tells the story of planetary justice. The study identifies critical thresholds for climate, biodiversity, and freshwater, showing that exceeding these limits endangers both human wellbeing and planetary stability. We highly recommend digging into the report and how to use it to inform decision-making.

It’s Time. We’re standing on the cusp of a critical moment in climate history, and business is not at all as usual. The theme for this year’s #ClimateWeekNYC, “It’s Time”, was a rallying call to propel the energy transition into the mainstream—through governmental initiatives, business transformations, community developments, and individual shifts in behaviour. 🌍🌏🌎 For the largest annual climate event of its kind, we were commissioned by Ingka Group and IKEA to design an exhibition showcasing a selection of pioneering climate action projects from businesses, organisations, and communities around the world. We were delighted to launch this latest work in collaboration with Ingka, IKEA, and their partners and members Project Drawdown, World Economic Forum, SSAB, Allbirds, Minesto, Houdini Sportswear and so many more. This installation acted as a rallying call, showcasing a selection of transformative and regenerative climate action projects. Built as a fully circular, modular and adaptive framework, our design for this exhibition reflected the intent of Action Speaks to catalyse real change through collective climate action. It offered multiple points of entry, inviting business leaders, NGOs, and the public to weave their own route around the Action Speaks showcase at the The Nest Climate Campus —a spatial reminder that there is no single way to begin navigating the climate crisis. By stepping through this threshold, this exhibition considered how we might embark upon collaborative wayfinding in uncertain times. 💥⚡🌱 As Ingka group’s CEO Jesper Brodin said when #ActionSpeaks was launched earlier this year: ‘It’s good business to be a good business.’ While many organisations are transfiguring their energy models and reimagining their consumption patterns, #ItsTime to turn these goals into realities, and transform words into action. Find our more about this project: https://lnkd.in/emFRseyF With many thanks to Ludvig Liljekvist Lusyanna Vuorenniemi Pelaez and the entire Action Speaks team ✨ A big shout-out to our Superflux crew Jon Ardern Ed Lewis Matthew Edgson Anab Jain RDI Sarah Brin Mon Cano Galicheva-Gahlen and extended team 💫

"For us, speculation is a space of possibility, and the power of speculative design is that it creates these open spaces: taking that speculation and giving it form and bringing it into the now, allowing for a visceral, full-bodied engagement. It opens up new ways of thinking about the future and the possibilities we might engage with in a robust, intuitive manner." An expansive interview with Jon Ardern and Anab Jain RDI on how we practice speculative design and experiential futures for nomad__magazine. https://lnkd.in/erxvS_kq