Contact


Carole Collet

Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures
Director Design & Living Systems Lab
Central Saint Martins , University of the Arts London
Granary Building, 1 Granary Square
London N1C 4AA
United Kingdom
c.collet@csm.arts.ac.uk

 

Bio:

Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures

Director Design & Living Systems Lab, Central Saint Martins UAL

 

Carole Collet has dedicated her career to developing a new vision for design, and pioneered the discipline of Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins fourteen years ago. She is now a full time Professor and her current research work is focused on biodesign, biofacturing and high-tech sustainability.

Collet operates within a long-term framework and her research targets the year 2050 and beyond. By anticipating future key socio-economic factors and technological timelines, she aims at impacting today’s design directions so as to enable a more resilient and sustainable future. Her design vision fosters an integration of the design process in scientific arenas so as to develop meaningful sustainable future products and services. Collet’s ambition is to elevate the status of design to become a powerful tool that contributes to developing innovative paths to achieve the ‘one planet lifestyle’.

Her recent curation of ‘Alive, New Design Frontierswww.thisisalive.com questions the emerging role of the designer when working with living materials and technologies such as synthetic biology and clearly establishes a new original framework for designing with the living. It is in this key area that her contribution to new knowledge is recognised at international level. One of Collet’s characteristics is that she straddles different research roles, from designer, to curator and educator.  This enables her to develop an informed critique of both the design outputs and the design contexts, from making knowledge to framing knowledge.

Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and she regularly contributes to conferences on the subject of textile futures, biodesign, biomimicry, synthetic biology, future manufacturing, sustainable design and climate change. Collet is a prolific design researcher and works at local, national and international levels.