1. Speaking Practice at Google – Designing AI-powered service to help learners to practice English – 17.30 pm

Language Learning is a large global need. Although it seems a solved problem based on all the offers out there, learners all over the world don’t have the chance to practice speaking daily in a foreign language.
With Speaking Practice, we leverage AI to enable people to become more confident in speaking English at scale.
In this talk, Mauro Rego, Design Lead at Google A will walk through the process of designing and launching an experimental service that is used by millions daily.
Mauro Rego, design lead at Google AI, is a senior designer and enthusiast about education and visual communication. He has experience on designing end-to-end digital services, team management and organizing learning formats for communities. In addition to crafting, he has been teaching professionally at universities and companies.

2. Living – with Transformations –  19.00 pm

Societal transitions do not only entail coming up with new, alternative ways of being and living but also breaking down, phasing out and letting go of lots of our existing practices, structures, and cultures. This inevitably means that many things we have considered normal, socially accepted and desirable for a long time might not be in the future anymore. As sustainability transitions are often discussed on a collective, meso level, the intimately personal dimensions of change and how these breakdowns and phase-outs manifest themselves as “transitions in everyday lives” tend to be overlooked. This hides how we as human beings living and shaping these transitions (while we are also being shaped by them) feel about letting go of well-established practices, structures and cultures and how our emotions could help us in sense- and meaning-making of these changes. In this talk, we explore how we can actively create spaces to engage with letting go in sustainability transitions. We engage with the interconnectedness between having a systemic understanding of how a system needs to change and the consequences this has for our personal ways of being and living, addressing the tensions and chances of how the systems we built shape us and can also be shaped by us.

Kristina Bogner is an assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainabel Development at University Utrecht. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher enthusiastic about engaging in sustainability transitions. Her mission is to support transformative social innovation, peoples’ development, and impactful and responsible thinking and behavior. Her main research interests are sustainability transitions and transformations. She is currently focussing on questions around justice, emotions and transformative action, e.g. how we can engage with emotions in complex justice situations or how we can engage in transformative research and education. She is co-hosting the Special Interest Group on “Justice, Power and Transformative Action in Sustainability (JUPITA)“.

Femke Coops is an Industrial Design graduate from Eindhoven University of Technology and a Designer in Residence at the Design Impact Transition (DIT) Platform and the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) in Rotterdam. She believes that design plays a pivotal role in addressing the challenges of our time. As design problems have never been clearly defined or easily solved, she believes designers can thrive within these complex environments: “We can create design spaces which offer opportunities, rather than getting stuck in the system, because of our ability to combine analysis and creation into synthesis. Analysis helps us to grasp complex societal challenges, learning how they are positioned within the bigger system and understanding how they came to be. By creating, design can make visible what is not, showing possibilities and making them tangible.”

The talks will be onsite in Room 11 at KISD.