(11 Mar) Designing for Resilience: Ethics, Sustainability and the Future of Human Centred Design

The world is going through a period of upheaval and facing many serious challenges, whether from climate change, war, or new diseases. Societies across the world are having to grapple with the difficulty of living in the face of such adversities. In this cross-disciplinary symposium, we raise the question of how design can contribute to fostering more resilient forms of life.

Rather than treating design as a tool for erasing difficulty, we will consider how it can cultivate the capacities, whether social, material, and imaginative, that enable communities to endure, adapt, and even flourish under pressure. This includes asking how design can scaffold mutual care, create infrastructures that absorb shocks, and open up new ways of organising collective life in uncertain times.

Speakers

Prof Stuart Walker

Stuart Walker is Professor of Design for Sustainability at Manchester School of Art (MMU) and Emeritus Professor at Lancaster and Calgary. His work is exhibited internationally, and he has authored many papers and books including Design for Resilience (2023) and Design Shift (2026).

Assoc Prof Lyle Fearnley

Lyle Fearnley is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Head in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at SUTD. Trained in science and medical anthropology, he earned a joint PhD from UC Berkeley and UCSF. His book Virulent Zones (Duke) won Honorable Mention for the 2021 Hsu Prize.

Asst Prof Cheng Nien Yuan

Cheng Nien Yuan is a Singaporean performance scholar an Assistant Professor at SUTD. Her work examines digital-age storytelling and performance-making, with current research on intercultural acting and rehearsal in Singapore. She has recently published The Storytelling State (Hawai’i, 2025).

Assoc Prof Timothy Matthew Collins

Timothy is an Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture at SUTD whose artistic research is at the intersection of Catholic theology, eucharistic eschatology, and visual collage with current investigations into architectural modeling using found objects.

Asst Prof Setsuko Yokoyama

Setsuko Yokoyama is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Her work on a literary history of speech-to-text technology reimagines the contemporary discourse on fairness in Speech AI.