Paula Ehrlich and Dennis Liu at “The Power of Design: Designing Climate Futures” Forum

Paula J. Ehrlich, President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, and Dennis Liu, Vice President of Education of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, will speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Morningside Academy for Design annual Forum, The Power of Design, dedicated this year to “Designing Climate Futures.” This convening is an opportunity to discover design responses to the current climate and ecological crisis.

The Forum aims to show how how design addresses the climate emergency by helping to produce new ecological, spatial, and social conditions rather than mere technical fixes. The Forum brings together a group of designers who are proposing diverse and highly transformative approaches to the climate crisis, spanning from the local to the planetary scale, and offers a platform to know their work and learn, through workshops, with them.

Dennis Liu will be leading a Preserving workshop as part of a Designing Climate Futures session from 3:30–4:30 pm.

Paula J. Ehrlich will be speaking as part of the Forum from 5:00–6:45 pm.

The event will take place at the MIT Welcome Center and Innovation Headquarters, located at 292 Main Street Cambridge.

The Forum event will also be livestreamed for the larger MIT and global communities. The livestream can be accessed from the Morningside website design.mit.edu or from the livestream site (The Power of Design).

SPEAKERS
Alphabetically ordered

• Benjamin Bratton is the director of the Antykera Program at the Breakthrough Institute and former director of the Terra-Forming program at Strelka Institute. Bratton’s current work focuses on the potential of planetary computation to tackle planetary scale problems.

• Paula J. Ehrlich is the President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. She is the co-founder of the Half-Earth Project and has led the development of the Half-Earth Project Map.

• Ayr Muir is the founder of Clover Food Lab, a vegetarian restaurant chain that works with local providers to reduce the CO2 footprint of the food industry.

• Céline Semaan is a designer focusing on climate and environmental activism. She is the founder of Slow Factory and the Slow Factory Labs, two initiatives addressing climate justice and human rights through cultural change, science, and design.