‘DesignTO Talk: Net Positive’ contributes to DesignTO’s 15-year legacy of showcasing design’s capacity to drive positive change in Toronto and beyond. The half-day event brings together ten multidisciplinary experts to explore innovative responses to the climate crisis from a perspective of abundance. Speakers include Aaron Budd (SvN Architects + Planners), April Barrett, Deepikah RB, Fran Erazo (Culturans), Judith van den Boom (Central Saint Martins), Netami Stuart (Waterfront Toronto), and the Living Room Collective (Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui, Clayton Lee, Andrea Shin Ling), covering such topics as regenerative design, urban infrastructure, more than human kinships, carbon positive initiatives, and more.

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What is the trajectory of the climate crisis? If you envision our collective, planetary path, do you feel optimistic or distressed? In ‘Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety’ author Dr. Britt Wray notes the validity of feelings of pessimism about the climate crisis, and suggests these emotions can be productive, spurring action. Perhaps what these feelings tell us is that we’re on the wrong path: that “green” or “sustainable” approaches have not been enough to course correct and we need to forge a new path toward a healthy and thriving planet.

Design and its adjacent industries are integral to determining this new path. As is often cited, the building and construction sector creates approximately 40% of annual carbon dioxide emissions. However, Dr. Janis Birkeland notes, “If all old wasteful buildings were replaced by new green ones, the material flows used in doing so would destroy the planet.” It is urgent that we shift design goalposts from doing “less bad” to doing “more good.”

How do we design from an understanding of humans as a part of nature, and not apart from nature? How do we repair the damage done to ecosystems? How can we design whole living systems? In envisioning these design responses, how can we navigate the tensions between human needs, ecological restoration, and the structures of ownership and governance that shape our world?

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A certificate for 2 hours of OAA ConEd will be issued to registered attendees who request it upon registration and attend.

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‘DesignTO Talks: Net Positive’ is organized by DesignTO, and supported by the Government of Ontario and OCAD University, with media partner AZURE Magazine. Venue provided by the Ace Hotel Toronto.

DesignTO is a non-profit arts organization celebrating 15 years of designing a sustainable, just, and joyful future. From January 24-February 2, 2025, the DesignTO Festival features 100+ free events across Toronto, showcasing hundreds of artists and designers. Known as Canada’s largest annual design festival, DesignTO has welcomed over 1 million attendees, reached 2.6 billion people through media, supported 6,500+ creatives, and generated $120 million in tourism impact. “DesignTO isn’t just a festival; it’s an anti-loneliness machine,” co-founder Christina Zeidler remarked, underscoring the organization’s power to foster belonging and spark vital conversations about design’s role in shaping a better world.

Tickets

$40 + HST
DesignTO Members 10% off
DesignTO Premium & Company members 20% off

Speakers & Topics

Aaron Budd (SvN)
Details to come.

April Barrett

“Big data technologies like AI are obscured by a black box, inaccessible to users. Still, though we are not all the engineers of AI, we all feel its heat. This talk tells an optimistic story of how one community in Ireland has leveraged the waste heat of a data centre to secure its own material well-being, alongside a massive global corporation and against a backdrop of energy scarcity. As a design anthropologist, I will share my research journey from question, to field work, to outputs, outlining how I leveraged design research methods to make digital heat tangible to a wide audience, as well as to raise questions around its ownership.”

April Barrett is an Indian-Canadian design anthropologist from Toronto. She has a background as a community manager in the video game industry as well as a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from McGill University. She recently graduated from the Design for Change MA program at the University of Edinburgh with distinction and shortly after completed a research residency at the Design Museum in London, England. She developed expertise in data infrastructure through her MA thesis and residency, during which she looked at the socio-environmental politics of data centre expansion. April brings her ethnographic methods to the design and digital culture space, and has a particular interest in alternatives to Big Tech.

Fran Erazo (Culturans)

Could a city’s forgotten past inspire its net-positive future? This talk will present a radically different vision of today’s Mexico City through the lens of the Chinampas – a unique nature-based design system that once created a thriving human habitat on a lake, integrating food production, diverse life forms, and natural landscape.

This vision explores the last standing remnant of a lost green city as a source of new paths for urban living, together with a growing movement of protectors, regenerators, and diverse citizens, and guided by the idea of a “grassrootsphere” where design, knowledge, and community life merge. Project Chinampa is part of The Good Enough Transformation: a larger global initiative that weaves together cultural and natural landscapes of grassroots communities around the world, where humanity’s green future is now.

Fran Erazo is a co-founder of Culturans, a Mexico-City based NGO that uses creative industries to build sustainable cities on a human scale. With a background in art, architecture, philosophy, and urbanism, Fran has worked for over a decade as an active proponent of design as a tool for engaging citizens in the transformation of their communities, participating in and leading projects that bring together public, private, and civil society sectors to humanize cities and improve the quality of life for their inhabitants.

Fran has been featured in international festivals and forums in cities such as Montreal (INRS, SSHRC), Beijing (751 Design Festival “A Better City,” Beijing Design Week), Nairobi (“Harnessing the Power of Identity and the Arts for Social Transformation,” UNESCO), Copenhagen (“GLOBUS future scenarios,” Nordisk Kulturfond), and Cairo (World Urban Forum, ONU-Habitat).

Living Room Collective

Join the Living Room Collective for an inspiring panel discussion about some of their groundbreaking research representing Canada at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. This visionary team, blending biodesign, robotics, and computational design, is pioneering a shift from sustainable to restorative architecture. Discover how their innovative bioprinting technology, developed at ETH Zurich, integrates carbon-sequestering bacteria to create carbon-negative structures that actively remove atmospheric carbon. Explore the potential of buildings as ecological agents, challenging traditional architecture to regenerate the planet. Engage with critical questions on transforming design goals from “less bad” to “more good,” and envision a regenerative future.

The Living Room Collective is a group of architects, scientists, artists, and educators who work at the intersection of architecture, biology, and digital fabrication. The creative team is led by biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling, alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui, and Clayton Lee.

Andrea Shin Ling is an architect and biodesigner working at the intersection of design, digital fabrication, and biology. Her focus is on shifting from exploitative production systems to regenerative ones. She has been a creative resident at Ginkgo Bioworks, a researcher at MIT Media Lab, and is currently a doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich. Nicholas Hoban, a computational designer and fabricator, is Director of Applied Technologies at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty. He has contributed to the 2014 Canadian and 2016 Swiss pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Vincent Hui, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the intersections of architecture, fabrication, and digital tools. He works with organizations like the RAIC to mentor emerging designers. Clayton Lee, a curator and performance artist, is Artistic Director of the Fierce Festival in Birmingham and has presented work internationally. He was an artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023.

Judith van den Boom
Judith van den Boom’s methods of research and design are inspired by her approach as a practical idealist and a deep passion for working with ecosystems whilst forging connections between people, places, and disciplines—especially between ecology and design. Judith is course leader of MA Regenerative Design at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) contributing to a world in which designers practice collectively within communities, making positive ecological and social change, strengthening living systems and building relational ecologies.

Judith received her MA at the Royal College of Art and has since worked in design, research, and education. Through her PhD (MMU), she is developing regenerative frameworks and developing the guidelines for working with the “living” in living systems. Judith brings over 15 years of expertise and is an avid lecturer and consultant working with partners around the world. Currently, she is co-developing with Assoc. professor and restoration ecologist Dr. Barbara Smith the Ecosystem Alliance, a platform for place-based trans-disciplinary projects between ecologists and designers. She co-founded UFƟ Unidentified Facility to co-hosts drifts and investigate future design ecologies.

Netami Stuart (Waterfront Toronto)
Details to come.

Deepikah RB | Tentacular Spontaneity

Tentacular Spontaneity is my framework for reimagining making practices that go beyond “green” sustainability and center on Jugaad (hack). Grounded in speculative worlds and non-extractive making, my work embraces more than human kinships and resists resource-intensive approaches. Inspired by posthumanism and my lived experience in India, I create “material bridges” using algae, bioplastics, and found objects, envisioning a future where materials are nurtured, lived with, and not considered mere resources. This practice invites us to embrace slow, relational creation and to explore how joyful, cooperative human-nonhuman relationships can inspire resilient design. Let’s explore ways to create thriving systems for a vibrant future on our planet.

Deepikah RB is an Indian interdisciplinary artist based in T’karonto. She graduated from OCAD University with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art. She creates speculative installations about ecology, climate crisis, and perception in collaboration with materials like algae, plants, gelatine, and more than humans. Her thesis show, “a place to fall apart,” was exhibited at Ignite Gallery in April 2024. Deepikah was part of the Geary Art Crawl 2024 (Toronto) and has exhibited across Canada, India, and CDMX (Mexico City).