Professor, Design for Sustainablility
E-mail: danielle.wilde@umu.se
Website: www.daniellewilde.com
Background
I was born in Australia and have lived in France, Germany,
Denmark, the United States, the UK and Japan. I hold a PhD from
Monash University (Art, Design and Architecture), and the CSIRO
(Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation / Material Science and Engineering); and an MA
(Interaction Design), from the Royal College of Art, London. I do
not hold an undergraduate degree. I moved to Umeå in March 2022,
from Denmark, where I founded and ran the University of Southern
Denmark (SDU)'s BodyBio|Soft Lab, and recently opened FoodLab. I
came to academia late after a career in theatre and performance,
then research and speechwriting (for two Chief Scientists of
Australia and one Prime Minister). I have worked as a cook in New
York, a trapezist in Paris, and have ridden a BMW GS motorbike,
solo, around Australia.
In parallel to my professorship at Umeå, I maintain a partial
position in the department of Sociology, Environmental and Business
Economics at SDU in Esbjerg, where I coordinate local efforts on
the FUSILLI project (fusilli-project.eu / koldingfood2030.dk),
working closely with Kolding Municipality, and assisting twelve
participating cities across Europe to develop and implement Food
Living Lab roadmaps to transform their food systems to be more
sustainable. I sit on the Academic Council of the Estonian Academy
of Art, Tallin; am Associate Editor of She Ji: The Journal of
Design, Economics and Innovation; am on the international advisory
board of the Collaborative Future-Making research platform at Malmö
University, Sweden; and am a founding member of the Feeding Food
Futures research collective. I currently supervise PhDs at: SDU,
RMIT, KU Leuven, University of Salzburg, and Estonian Academy of
Art.
What
I do at UID
My research and teaching raise questions around the social,
ecological and material sustainability of human action, and the
role of design therein. I use 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. I use performative and probiotic
methods, participatory and speculative research through design, to
open up new ways of thinking, through moving, making and doing. I
undertake pedagogical research, to infrastructure new roles for
design in the twenty-first century, including through biodesign and
design with living things. At the same time, I challenge the role
of designer as a maker of things, products, cultural artefacts or
services, positing that the role of the designer is to examine
relationships and dependencies, and do as little as possible: to
leverage participatory and co-creative design methods to help
people to infrastructure their own agency-to understand what they
need to regenerate the world around them, sand take action o that
humans and non-humans alike might flourish. Much of my research,
teaching and methodological development is focused on food (from
multispecies perspectives).
Talk
to me about
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Food as a multispecies concern
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Societal change processes
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Participatory research through design
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Biodesign
