Manuela Celi
Manuela Celi, an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano’s Design Department, specializes in Metadesign and design processes and has focused extensively on Design Futures and Anticipation for the past 15 years. She serves on the Design PhD Board and is the Rectors’ delegate for talent development at the ASP School. Her research explores various forms of design knowledge, metacognitive skills, and advanced design processes. Employing a transdisciplinary approach, she investigates the intersection of design with humanities and social sciences, emphasizing intermediate design products with significant cultural content such as trends and scenarios. Recently she was Polimi’s principal investigator for the FUEL4Design E+ project. She integrates research with education through publications in academic journals like Futures and The Design Journal, fostering innovation and experimentation among students and in applied research.
Vlad Glaveanu is Full Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University, Ireland, and Professor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen, Noway. He has published extensively on topics related to creativity, imagination, collective futures, wonder, collaboration, culture, and human possibility. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network, editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, and founder and editor of Possibility Studies and Society, a Sage journal. His recent books include “The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory” (Oxford University Press), “Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience” (Bloomsbury), and the novel “The Wish Thief” (Possibility Press).
Betti Marenko
Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist and educator working across process philosophies, design theories and the critique of planetary technicities. Her current research focuses on uncertainty, unknowing and nonknowledge as generative spaces of resistance; speculative-pragmatic design for the prototyping of the present; transversal methodologies and post-qualitative inquiry. Her forthcoming book is The Power of Maybes. Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures (2024). She co-edited Deleuze and Design (2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life. Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies (2021). She is the founder and director of the Hybrid Futures Lab, a research initiative for world-building interventions. She is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she also runs the Contextual Studies programme for the BA (Hons.) Product and Industrial Design, and is WRH Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Mshai Mwangola
Oraturist/Performance Scholar, Dr Mshai Mwangola, uses Story and the lens of culture in her work as an academic, artist and activist. Her intellectual work is characterised by her practice of performance for the purpose of research, teaching and advocacy. Mwangola serves as Chair of Uraia Trust, Vice President, the Transitional Council of the Society of International Development (SID); and Member, Executive Committee of the Council for the development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). A founding member of The Orature Collective and The Elephant inf, she also serves on the Advisory Board Literary Festival.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Roberto Poli (PhD Utrecht) is Professor of Philosophy of Science and the UNESCO Chair on Anticipatory Systems at the University of Trento (Italy). Roberto teaches Social Foresight and Epistemology of the Social Sciences; he directs the Master in Social Foresight, currently in its eleventh edition. Roberto is a fellow of the STIAS — Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He is the President of AFI-Association of Italian Futurists, and Skopìa, a company offering professional anticipation services. Roberto has published 7 volumes and more than 250 papers. He has edited the Handbook of Futures Studies (Elgar 2024) and is in the Stanford list of the most quoted scholars.
