Maria Göransdotter (PhD) research and teaching sits in the intersections of design historical and practice-oriented design research, exploring how transitional design histories can work as prototypes for unpacking and reframing core concepts in contemporary and emerging design practices. Purposefully destabilizing and constructively complicating assumptions and values embedded in design methods and processes, transitional design histories are made from the outlook of practice, as formed in a nexus of situated individual and collective doing, knowing, making and thinking.
Li Jönsson (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden. She works at the intersection between design, STS /feminist techno-science and futures. She specializes in participatory and speculative engagements that explore ways of opening up for more-than-human practices and imaginaries through design.
Thomas Laurien (PhD) is an artist/designer/curator, educator and researcher based at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is also the chair of the advocacy group The Natureculture Association Shimmer and Entanglements, and co-founder of its initiatives, The Species Embassy Viskan-Borås and Oak Trees and Humans – Relation Shaping Nature Care. His research and artistic practice focus on issues of more-than-human representation, and multispecies justice/Rights of Nature. Laurien is an active member of The Confluence of European Water Bodies, and pays special attention to the well-being of Lake Vättern and the watershed Viskan, as well as the tree species Black Alder and Oak Tree.
Kristina Lindström (PhD) is a researcher and designer at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden, where she also serves as co-director of the Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures. She has a broad experience working with participatory, speculative, and inventive design approaches. Together with Åsa Ståhl, she co-initiated Un/Making Studio, which explores alternatives to progressivist imaginaries in design. Through projects such as Grief and Hope in Transitions, her work has engaged with the affective dimensions of transitioning toward post-carbon futures. In Design After Progress, she further develops this line of inquiry, with a particular focus on unlearning in and through design.
Coral Michelin (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University. With a background in environmental studies, her research, teaching and consultancy works focus on ecology, sustainability, regeneration, decolonial studies, and futures, and their relation to design theory and practice. She is a mentor at the What Design Can Do Accelerator Programme and a collaborator with Sur Global.io initiatives. She is also an ecology activist, feminist, and occasional poet.
Åsa Ståhl’s (PhD) design research and educational work combines participatory design, speculations, and feminist technoscience from the perspective of environmental posthumanism. For holistic transformative work she focuses on world-making and un/making through alternative ecological economies such as householding and community economies. Apart from “Design after Progress: Design Histories and Futures”, she also works on cultural entrepreneurship in an Earth Logic Design Agency, local governance in “Foresight through the Doughnut Model”, socio-ecologically just transition in “Holding Surplus House”, and care, repair and composting in the aftermath of previous design in the Un/Making Studio.