Future Library and Futures Literacy: Making Futures from Where We Are
22nd November 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM GMT
To mark the 10-year anniversary of Katie Paterson’s 100-year artwork, Future Library, we gather to discuss what it means to be “futures literate”. We explore relationships between place, knowledge, imagination and time in making meaning from and engaging with different futures.
Speaker Biographies
Katie Paterson (born 1981, Scotland) is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.
Richard Sandford is Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage, where his research explores the relationship between heritage and the future, drawing on notions of care, maintenance and repair to develop alternative orientations towards the future, and developing an account of the particular capacities of heritage practices to shape the future. Before joining UCL, Richard led horizon-scanning teams in the UK Civil Service, developing the capacity of strategy and policy groups across government to work with long-term change and uncertainty. His previous research in education futures addressed young peoples’ ideas of the future, futures literacy, and the place of new media technologies in learning.
Anne Beate Hovind is an urban developer who commissions and produces art in public spaces for more than 20 years. She holds several board positions and is senior lecturer II at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at OsloMet. Hovind has extensive management experience primarily in the private sector, but also in the public sector. She has held project management roles with responsibility for development work and change processes in large organizations, led innovation and development projects, and sat in the project management of land-based construction projects. In 2018, she received the Oslo Municipality’s Artist Award for her work with art in the city.
Anja Hendrikse Liu (she/they) is a 2024 graduate of Edinburgh Futures Institute’s MSc Narrative Futures: Art, Data, Society. They are a co-organizer of a group of students and recent graduates working on projects that bring together Edinburgh Futures Institute and Future Library — hopeful, collaborative, narrative-driven commitments to the future and to each other. As a speculative fiction writer, Anja also explores these infinite hopeful (not perfect) futures for AI, climate, and our collective experience as humans living in the world.
Jen Ross is Professor of Digital Culture and Education Futures at the University of Edinburgh. She researches and writes about speculative methods for researching education futures, exploring a variety of topics including museum engagement, AI in education, surveillance and trust, and online distance learning. She is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, and recently developed and launched the MSc in Education Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute.
