Dr Betti MARENKO
Title
Reader
College
Central Saint Martins
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research

Biography
Dr. Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist, academic, educator and curator working across process philosophies, design studies and critical technologies to investigate the relationships between design, society and culture, and their role in shaping futures. Her transdisciplinary research across philosophy, design, and the critique of technology explores how future-facing speculative and pragmatic interventions can mobilize and amplify design practice.Her work features frequently in international conferences, collections and journals e.g. Design and Culture, Design Studies, and Digital Creativity. She is the co-editor of Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life. Intelligences. Agencies. Ecologies, with Marco Rozendaal (TU Delft) and Will Odom (SFU), a volume that offers a new research framework for interaction design (Bloomsbury 2021). She is also the co-editor of the volume Deleuze and Design (Deleuze Connections Series, Edinburgh University Press 2015, with Jamie Brassett), the first book to use Deleuze and Guattari to provide a new theoretical framework to address the theory and practice of design. She is Associate Editor of the journal Design and Culture.
As the Principal Investigator at UAL for the Erasmus+ project FUEL4Design [Future Education and Literacy for Designers] she develops curriculum innovation tools to think about futures and teach futures to the designers of tomorrow.
She is currently writing a monograph titled The Power of Maybes. Between Prediction and Potential in Algorithmic Culture, which investigates the new contingent logic of planetary computation and its impact on society, publics and subjectivities. It examines how algorithmic governmentality shapes modes of knowledge-production and modes of existence, and suggests ways of reclaiming, re-imagining and re-crafting human-machine ecologies through unpredictability, intuition, and minor practices.
She is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where she is also the Contextual Studies Leader for Product and Industrial Design since 2007. She is WRHI Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology where she leads research on transdisciplinarity and the articulation of hybrid methodologies that can furnish educators, learners, and practitioners with agile tools of exchange, discussion and debate across arts, design, science, technologies and the humanities.
Prior to this she held teaching posts at the University of Essex and the University of Urbino. Her earlier work focused on the practices and politics of body modification - specifically tattooing - analysed through the thought of Deleuze, Guattari and Spinoza, and she is the author of two seminal books (in Italian) on this subject: Ibridazioni. Corpi in Transito e Alchimie della Nuova Carne (Roma, Castelvecchi 1997), and Segni Indelebili, Materia e Desiderio del Corpo Tatuato (Milano, Feltrinelli 2002). Both are works of practical philosophy based on her extensive experience of, experimentation with, and reflection on permanent body marking.
Grants and awards
(Figures indicate amount awarded to UAL)
- Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, Erasmus+ Programme, Strategic Partnership in Higher Education institutions, €450.00, (2019-2022)
- Independent Social Research Foundation, The Hybrid Futures Lab: a transdisciplinary dialogue for critical technology literacy, £4,901.80, (2021-2021)
Research Outputs
Article
- Marenko B, Benqué D. Speculative Diagrams: Experiments in Mapping YouTube (2019)
- Marenko B, van Allen P. Animistic design: how to reimagine digital interaction between the human and the nonhuman (2016)
- Marenko B. When making becomes divination: Uncertainty and contingency in computational glitch-events (2015)
- Marenko B. Neo-Animism and Design. A New Paradigm in Object Theory. (2014)
- Marenko B. Body marking/mapping: embodied difference and strategies of deconstruction of identity. (2010)
- Marenko B. Is there life in bio-art? (2007)
- Marenko B. Museum Epidemiology (2003)
Book
- Marenko B. Contagious affectivity: the management of emotions in late capitalist design (2010)
- Marenko B. DIY Survival. There is No Subculture, Only Subversion. (2005)
- Marenko B. Segni Indelebili: Materia e Desiderio del Corpo Tatuato (2002)
- Marenko B. Ibridazioni: Corpi in Transito e Alchimie della Nuova Carne (1997)
Book Section
- Marenko B. Algorithm Magic: Simondon and Techno-animism (2019)
- Marenko B. FutureCrafting. A Speculative Method for an Imaginative AI (2018)
- Marenko B. Speculative Design. The body of the digital mind (2018)
- Marenko B. The un-designability of the virtual. Design from problem-solving to problem-finding. (2018)
- Marenko B. Filled with Wonder. The enchanting android from cams to algorithms (2017)
- Marenko B. Incertitude, contingence et intuition matérielle: un cadre de recherche pour un “design mineur” (2017)
- Marenko B, Brassett J. Introduction (2015)
- Marenko B. Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis and the Intelligence of the Technodigital Object. (2015)
- Marenko B. Now I can feel myself! (2010)
- Marenko B. Object-relics and their effects: for a neo-animist paradigm (2009)
- Marenko B. The Eyes are trapped: Dario Argento’s ‘The bird with the crystal plumage’. (2008)
Conference, Symposium or Workshop item
- Marenko B. The Power of Maybes. FutureCrafting, or how to divine futures by design (2018)
- Marenko B, Benqué D. Speculative diagrams: plotting to reclaim algorithmic prediction (2018)
- Marenko B. Thinking about Future technologies (2018)
- Marenko B. FutureCrafting: Speculation, Design and the Nonhuman, or how to live with digital uncertainty (2017)
- Marenko B. Digital Uncertainty, FutureCrafting and Animistic Fiction (2017)
- Marenko B. Which design fiction for the post-Anthropocene? (2015)
- Marenko B. The Nonhumanity of Planetary Computation: or how to live with Digital Uncertainty (2015)
- Marenko B. Digital materiality and the Intelligence of the Technodigital Object (2014)
- Marenko B. Digital Materiality (2014)
- Marenko B. Material morphogenesis. For an encounter between philosophy and design (2014)
- Marenko B. Deleuzian Design. The Adventure of Actualizing the Virtual by Capturing Material Stories from the Future. (2014)
- Marenko B. Digital materiality, morphogenesis, and the intelligence of the technodigital object (2014)
- Marenko B. Commodity encounters: late capitalist re-design of the consumer pathosphere (2011)
- Marenko B. Designing futures: a Deleuzian take on design as embodiment of virtuality (2011)
Teaching
Current research students
- Rebecca Breuer, Fashion beyond identity. The three ecologies of dress. (Lead supervisor)
- Guy Keulemans, Affect and the experimental design of domestic products. (Lead supervisor)
- Megan Rowden, The bond between maker, material and the audience; and the honour and conflicts of being a material led artist. (Lead supervisor)
- Megan Rowden, The bond between maker, material and the audience (Joint supervisor)
- Neslihan Tepehan, Asignifying traits in design. (Lead supervisor)
Subjects
3D design and product design