EN/ Frani O’Toole (b. Chicago) works in communications for an architecture and urban planning firm building social infrastructure near the US-Mexico border. Frani studied Art History and English at Yale University before moving to Ireland on a Fulbright fellowship for her Master’s in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Now in-between writing and architecture, she’s working to see the built environment be defined more by universal design.  About the lecture “There is nothing wrong with making things people want. It’s just that too little attention is being paid to the things people…

EN/ Suhair Khan Head of Strategic Projects Google Based in London, Suhair works on Strategy development at Google. She is also the founder of the Open/Ended Design platform. Over the last decade at Google she has led innovative projects merging technology, culture and design. She has been involved in the development of Google’s self-driving car (now known as Waymo), a new sustainability platform for the global fashion industry, and launched numerous successful global projects with artists and cultural institutions at Google Arts & Culture. Her work has spanned Asia, the U.S., Europe and Africa, and she has been based out…

EN/ Alison Brooks B.E.S. B.Arch RIBA FRSA RDI  Alison Brooks is one of the UK’s most inventive and internationally acclaimed architects. Born and educated in Canada, she moved to London in 1988. She is the only UK architect to have received all three of the profession’s most prestigious architectural awards: the RIBA Stirling Prize, the Manser Medal and the Stephen Lawrence Prize.  Alison Brooks’ architectural approach springs from invested research so that her design solutions emerge as both unique and relevant to the constituencies they serve. This is beautifully exemplified by her recently completed Cohen Quadrangle at Exeter College, Oxford. The…

EN/ Sumayya Vally (b. 1990, South Africa) carries obsession for Johannesburg and her work around narrative, identity and memory in the city have admitted her into a host of conceptual and investigatory projects. Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and territory. Her praxis draws on Johannesburg as grounds for speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Sumayya was recently named to the…

EN/ Asif Khan is a research and development led architecture studio who design buildings, landscapes, exhibitions and installations, among other things. Khan’s practice explores how material and social innovations can fundamentally alter the way people experience and shape their environment, realised through rigorously detailed and delivered outputs. His studio is based in East London, formed in 2007. Khan is currently working on the new Museum of London at West Smithfield, Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture in Almaty and the Dubai Expo 2020 public realm. Recently he designed the award winning UK Pavilion at Astana Expo 2017 and the Hyundai Pavilion…

EN/ An artist and transmedia filmmaker of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn’s works redistribute power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Codesigned with immigrants and working families, Jahn’s key projects include Bibliobandido (a story-eating bandit), Video Slink Uganda (experimental films slipped or “slinked” into bootleg cinemas), and CareForce, a project that amplifies the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce, caregivers, through two mobile studios (NannyVan, CareForce One), an app for domestic workers named by CNN as “one of 5 apps to change the world,” and a PBS/ITVS film series. Jahn’s works have been presented at Obama’s…