Social Re-imagination

Social Re-imagination is a research group that engages with critical questions concerning the multifaceted dimensions that construct and shape social realities. It explores how design in artistic research can create new ways of reimagining what the social or societal could be.

blue and red galaxy artwork — Blue and red galaxy artwork Photo: Photo by Suzy Hazelwood. License: CC

Affiliation

About the research group

The group encompasses a diverse array of themes and methodologies pursued by individual members, spanning a wide spectrum of design fields, including visual communication, interaction design, object design, illustration, participatory design, graphic design and so forth.

As a research group, it is driven by a shared understanding of how design is embedded in the construction of societies and a commitment to critically responding to societal challenges. We explore issues including, but not limited to, politics, democracy, decolonization, identities, embodied experience, culture, health, economies, and globalization. Currently, the group's research topics are centered around democracy, surveillance capitalism, generative AI, health, speculative landscape/space, language, and identities.

Through each member’s research interests and design practice, the group operates as a diverse and organic vehicle for creating new experiential knowledge and expressions. It seeks to problematse and question the status quo of social realities while imagining alternatives.

Events

All events

Projects

Things That Might Not Be True (2018-2024) | Ingrid Rundeberg

The PhD project examined how visual communication design might help devise new methods and tools for the public to approach politics, and, by extension, expand the conversation about democracy on a personal as well as societal level. →

Critical Airspace (2021-) | Matthew Flintham

Critical Airspace explores creative and critical responses to controlled and restricted airspaces across the UK and the world. →

Interfacing Democratic Futures - GenAI, Design, Truth (2025-) | Albert Cheng-Syun Tang

The artisitc research project is to investigate the relationship between GenAI and democracy with a focus to visualise the relationship between AI-generated visual contents and its impact on people's perceptions of truth.

Border of Democracy - Human, interface, surveillance capitalism (2023-2025) | Albert Cheng-Syun Tang

The aristic research project aimed at visualising the politcis of surveillance capitalism enabled technologies such as AI and its impact on democracy. →

Among signs – propositions from a typographic practice (2023-) | Åse Huus

The artistic project examines the outer edges of language – where it dissolves and where it perhaps begins anew. It is a visual exploration of how meaning can be reconstructed, scaled and reassembled – into new forms and surfaces. →

Clinic of the Future: Designing Dialogues for Care (2024-) | Amy van den Hooven

The PhD project explores art and design inspired communication methods, with the goal of questioning, challenging, and re-imagining the way we practice care within medicine. →

The New Networks (2022-) | Marte Stadheim Teigen

The PhD project The New Networks explores our personal autonomy in relation to social media platforms. It asks what power, if any, do we have over the digital platforms we use on a daily basis? Have social media platforms become tools for disassociation rather than connection? These topics are explored by fostering moments of reflection through discursive and participatory design methods. →

The Face Between Us (2022-2025) | Thilde Louise Dalager

The PhD project examined abjection, the gaze, and the body at the border of the Self and the Other in Autorial Illustration. →

The Living Archive of Political Design (2025-) | Adam Flint Taylor

A research platform that collects and contextualizes images and objects at the intersection of political and design history.