Laureate Professor Sarah Pink
Director, Emerging Technologies Research Lab & FUTURES Hub
Monash Art, Design and Architecture & Faculty of Information Technology
Anticipatory Infrastructures for Emerging Technology Futures
In what has been called a polycrisis world characterised by multiple climate, economic, geopolitical and technologically driven crises, we urgently need to infrastructure new ways of understanding, novel modes of foresight about and innovations in design research and practice.
I suggest that by redefining the fundamental concepts through which we understand our relations with emerging technologies, we might consequently re-think – or constitute new anticipatory infrastructures for imagining – our possible futures with emerging technologies. On the one hand this means pursuing anthropologically, the experiential question of what it feels like to live in possible futures, and on the other it invites new interdisciplinary design research and practice, towards inclusive, ethical futures.
I will use the concept of trust as an example – specifically because it has been engaged so much in studies of interaction and transactional relations – to explore how going beyond interactional and transactional concepts of trust could help us to reconceptualise our possible future lives with emerging technologies as part of trusted futures.
Sarah Pink (PhD, Phd hcx2, FASSA) is an award winning futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Sarah is currently Laureate Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University. Previously she was Distinguished Professor and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, and she holds Visiting Professorships at Halmstad University and University of West of England, and in 2026 is an International Visiting Professor at Stuttgart University.