Spaces of Speculation: Designing the Future

As technologies advance, our live, work and leisure patterns change and the need to protect the natural world becomes an imperative, imagining the design of the future becomes an obligation rather than an option. This lecture will present a series of possible future environments, examine how and why they will emerge and consider how these future spaces will both reflect and direct the behavior of end users in utopian and dystopian ways.

The speaker will be Dr. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA). She is Reader in Architectural Education at the Royal College of Art. Harriet is a qualified architect and coordinates the Post-Graduate Research programme in Architecture. Her teaching, research, and writing are largely focused upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition. Her 2016 publication, A Gendered Profession, asserts the need for widening participation as a means to ensure professions remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve. Dr. Harriss has won various awards for teaching excellence including a Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Higher Education Academy Internationalization Award, a Churchill Fellowship, and two Santander awards. Before joining the RCA, she led the MArchD in Architecture at Oxford Brookes as was appointed a Principal Lecturer of Student Experience. She was most awarded a Clore Fellowship (2016-17), elected to the European Association of Architectural Education (EAAE) Council in summer 2017, and in 2018, awarded a Principal Fellowship of the UK's Higher Education Academy. Harriet's consultancy roles include the UK Department for Education construction industry panel, international programme validations, and pedagogy design and development. From 2018-2020, Harriet will chair the RIBA's prestigious Dissertation Medal judging panel.