As the high-tech breakthroughs and entertainment emanating from Silicon Valley and Hollywood cross increasingly more international borders, so does a prevailingly western vision of progress – of how globalization will reshape our shared world. “We discount the fact that there are other visions of the future that come from different cultures,” notes Associate Professor of Industrial Design Paolo Cardini. In recognition of this, the Italian designer is spearheading a RISD-supported project called the Global Futures Lab, a series of international workshops aimed at articulating alternative versions of what’s to come – both utopian and dystopian – and that reflect local realities of non-western communities.
As the second recipient of RISD’s Global Faculty Fellowship (GFF), Cardini has already led workshops at the Art University of Isfahan in Iran and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, with others forthcoming at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru in Lima and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. In these four-day workshops the designer works with local students in developing “souvenirs from the futures” – artifacts inspired by student-written speculative fiction and then fabricated in cooperation with local artisans. Cardini plays the role of catalyst: he introduces a structure that allows participants to generate ideas and then encourages their realization in the form of tangible objects informed by students’ own cultural conditions and traditions.
“Projects like Paolo’s are taking RISD to places in the world where we have not typically worked in a sustained way,” says RISD Global Director Gwen Farrelly, who works with Academic Affairs to co-sponsor the GFF. Last year, as the program’s inaugural fellow, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies Avishek Ganguly conducted research into translation in global contexts and next year, as RISD’s 2017/18 fellow, Assistant Professor of Architecture Emanuel Admassu will launch a project titled Where is Africa? that engages architects, designers and artists across that continent in a series of dialogues.