Danielle Wilde
Danielle is a professor of Design for Sustainability at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden, and Associate Professor, Sustainability Transitions, at SDU, Denmark, where she leads research into food system transformation, and coordinate local efforts on the H2020 FUSILLI project. Across both institutions, her research and teaching raise questions around the social, ecological and material sustainability of human action, and the roles that design might play therein. Danielle uses experimental methods to examine how embodied engagement with the materiality of the world can assist people in thinking in new ways; develop new possibilities for future action that can be implemented today; alternative responses to challenges we face, whether these are planetary in scale or concern the nature within us. She uses performative and probiotic methods, participatory and speculative research through design, to open up new ways of thinking, through moving, making and doing. She undertakes pedagogical research, to infrastructure new roles for design in the twenty-first century, including through biodesign and designing with living things. Her work challenges the role of designer as a maker of things: products, cultural artefacts or services, positing that it is, rather, to examine relationships and dependencies, and do as little as possible; leverage participatory and co-creative design methods to help people to infrastructure their own agency, understand what they need to regenerate the world around them, and take action so that humans and non-humans alike might flourish. Much of this work is focused on food and more-than-human health.