BRIDGETTE ENGELER (AUS)
SENIOR LECTURER, SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY
Bridgette is a pracademic working across design, strategic foresight and culture. With 20 years' experience in brand, design and innovation strategy, Bridgette's work focuses on the potential of design and futures to tackle challenges intersecting people, community and systems.
Her career began at one of Australia's best-known design firms, and she has since been involved with creating brands you may use every day. Bridgette holds a BA and MA from Monash and a Masters degree in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne. She is part of the team at Swinburne’s Living Lab that’s been working on VR and AR wearables for people with early-onset dementia and is a leading researcher with Project Geldom, a research initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop the next generation condom.
Bridgette is keen to see design shape preferred futures, not just the ‘business as usual’ stuff we’re told to expect. More importantly, she’s interested in how our individual agency will help us get to better tomorrow. Through collaborations with all types and sizes of organisation, her work spans strategic and speculative design, experiential and critical futures, and design for transition.
TALK: 'DEFAMILIARISING CERTAINTY: AKA DESIGNING FOR SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T EXIST' (2019)
Design and designers are practical agents of imagination, creating the sensory blueprints for the objects and experiences of tomorrow – and the more design is used to innovate and solve problems, the more it can influence conversations and decisions that shape our collective futures. But we must acknowledge design as complicit in contributing to (over-)consumption and material culture, and that addressing our current state of an overpopulated planet in crisis requires all of us to collaborate, across generations, ideologies and borders. So what if design stopped trying to ‘pin down’ the future– especially in material culture – and instead focused on designing for something that doesn’t yet exist?
MASTERCLASS: 'FUTURES THINKING: HOW TO APPLY STRATEGIC FORESIGHT IN YOUR ORGANISATION' (2019)
This Masterclass is a two-day immersive program introducing you to the thinking and practice of Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight – including tools, theories, mindsets, and (of course) lots of speculation. You’ll learn how to use Futures Thinking and some strategic foresight tools in your everyday work, and identify ways to anticipate change in your projects, organisation, and industry.
