Advocacy for imagining inclusive futures is demonstrated by the alignment with the UNESCO principles and SDGs (4,5,11,16) through the conception and leadership of ‘Experimental Realism’ community and research platform - a network of thousands of global readers, partnerships, activists, educators, and students.

‘Experimental Realism’ was founded in 2020 as a consolidation of research specialisms (#spatialdesign, #designfiction, #designfutures, #queertheory) converging with pedagogic expertise in curriculum (re)design - the same year that UNESCO named ‘futures literacy’ one of four key competencies for the 21st century. ‘Experimental Realism’ supports UNESCO vision for ‘futures literacy’, it was founded to build community, encourage open discourse, and facilitate the transition from education into practice. It exists in the world in 3 ways;

1) an Online ProjectStore, a global collection of speculative design projects created by students from universities around the world,

2) as ExRe mentoring programme, a free 6-month global mentoring programme with a speculative design practitioner, running for 3 years, facilitating 70+ mentoring relationships (outputs range from collaborations on research papers, creation of open source resources, PhD applications, to business plans).

3) as a book. The success of the pedagogical model, and my subsequent achievements, and its contextual framing and articulation of other academic endeavours led to the commissioning of the book ‘Experimental Realism: (design) fictions and futures’ with RIBA Publishing.”