Gemma Jones
A researcher and strategist specialising in semiotics, cultural insight and futures methods.
Gem is the Director of Insight at Protein Agency where she works with established and start-up organisations to understand early adopter communities and emergent culture. She guest teaches undergrads and post grads from diverse design disciplines in critical research and futuring methods. Gem’s a co-founder of the School of Critical Design, a forum for exploring and teaching experimental methods for design and business to address critical social and environmental issues.
Malex Salamanques
A British – Venezuelan designer & researcher centering her practice at the intersection of semiotics & cultural insight, design and speculative futures.
Malex has been over 20 years practicing and teaching design, and over a decade working in commercial semiotics. She has pioneered Design Semiotics frameworks and methodologies specifically to help brands internationally and across a wide range of categories to optimise communications.
She is part time Director at Space Doctors, an international cultural & creative consultancy specialised in Semiotics alongside running her own studio, Mundano, where she helps disruptive Latam business and start-ups to conceptualise and develop meaningful brands and services that are changing the landscape in their categories.
She is a fellow of the School of Critical Design and she has special interest in understanding how Critical and Speculative Design Practices can help to imagine alternative visions & narratives of futures for Latin America.
Workshop: Re-Semiotizing Futures: Introducing Speculative Design as a Tool for Semioticians
In this mini workshop session, we will introduce some core principles of speculative and critical design and highlight where semiotics offers a powerful contribution to the field.
Key takeaways for participants will be:
- New ways to expand how semiotics defines and explores ‘the future’. Exploring what’s next for trajectories/ RDE models in order to engage with chaotic and inconvenient futures.
- The value critical and speculative design prototyping can bring for the research and insight process through developing and engaging with fictional artefacts of the future.
- Understanding how we can re-semiotize these emerging disciplines so that futures prototypes are humanized and culturally specific and sustaining.