06/October/2025
https://rsdsymposium.org/configuring-incompossible-futures/
Configuring Incompossible Futures
Cybernetics, Format: Keynotes & Talks, Framing Conversations, Keynotes & Talks, Pacific Edition, RSDX, Topic: Learning & Education, Topic: Methods & Methodology
Claudia Westermann, Chris Speed, Elisa Giaccardi, and Mike Phillips
Beginning with a reflection on Roy Ascott’s famous Groundcourse and his turbulent 10-month presidency at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) in 1971-72,* this panel examines what it means to engage in radical pedagogies in art and design today and how such endeavours might configure incompossible futures.
Ascott developed the Groundcourse as a cybernetic art curriculum that encouraged students to reconceive the future through existential speculation and play (Sloan, 2019). Though Ascott’s curriculum met with resistance that led to an early dismissal (Shanken, 2003), the questions Ascott posited then, remain relevant today. Cultivating divergent possibilities within structured frameworks, Ascott’s pedagogical vision embodied a radical concept of plurality. His students explored alternative perspectives through behavioural projects, calibration exercises, and mind-mapping techniques that encouraged them to envision multiple futures (Sloan, 2019). These methods were not merely instructional but transformative, challenging students to develop approaches to knowing that maintain the openness of the future as possibly contradictory rather than collapsing possibilities into predetermined paths.
The panel builds on Ascott’s radical conception of art and design education as education of plurality. Resonating with RSD14’s overarching conference theme, we ask: How complex should we conceive plurality? How plural can we design complexity? Leibniz’s concept of incompossibility is valuable in this context. Incompossibility is essential to the diversity and relations of basic attributes that constitute possibilities. Conflicts can be conceived as emerging from the combinatorial nature of possibility itself (see Nachtomy, 2016; Jorati, 2016). This philosophical framing resonates with systems approaches developed by cybernetic pioneers, such as Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, and Margaret Mead, who emphasised the openness of possibility and the importance of maintaining alternatives as yet unrealised.
Following Gilles Deleuze, who gave the concept of incompossibility a productive turn (1998), one can extend notions of divergent synthesis explored in earlier work (Deleuze 1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Today, in an era of complex ecological, social, and technological challenges, the panellists consider how Ascott’s radical approach has informed contemporary pedagogies that foster relationality in complex systems through their own institutional programs. How might art and design education cultivate incompossible futures as a form of wisdom for navigating complexity in the pluriverse?
The four panellists, all former members of Roy Ascott’s PhD-level educational platform, the Planetary Collegium, will share their perspectives through a conversational online format with short position statements from each contributor.
References
- Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press.
- Jorati, J. (2016). Divine faculties and the puzzle of incompossibility. In G. Brown & Y. Chiek (Eds.), Leibniz on compossibility and possible worlds (pp. 175-199). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42695-2_8
- Leibniz, G. W. (1989). Philosophical essays (R. Ariew & D. Garber, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.
- Nachtomy, O. (2016). On the source of incompossibility in Leibniz’s Paris notes and some remarks on time and space as packing constraints. In G. Brown & Y. Chiek (Eds.), Leibniz on compossibility and possible worlds (pp. 21-35). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42695-2_2
- Shanken, E. A. (2003). From cybernetics to telematics: The art, pedagogy, and theory of Roy Ascott. In R. Ascott, Telematic embrace: Visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness (E. A. Shanken, Ed., pp. 1-95). University of California Press.
- Sloan, K. (2019). Art, cybernetics and pedagogy in post-war Britain: Roy Ascott’s groundcourse. Routledge.
- Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1972)
- Deleuze, G. (1988). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
PROFILES
Claudia Westermann
American Society for Cybernetics
Claudia Westermann is an artist-researcher and licensed architect. She has held faculty positions at the TU Vienna in Austria and Xi’an-Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, and, since September 2025, she is Associate Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Design and the Built Environment at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She is a licensed member of the German Chamber of Architects, Vice President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), and managing co-editor of Technoetic Arts, a journal that has fostered transdisciplinary and creative-practice-based research for more than two decades. Claudia Westermann’s projects have been shown in many prestigious exhibitions. She has received awards for her practice and teaching, including two provincial and three national awards related to studio teaching and a county-level award for a Philosophy of Art module. For her visionary engagement fostering systemic research and practice, she received the Margaret Mead Prize from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2024.
Chris Speed
RMIT University
Chris Speed FRSE, FRSA is Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, Melbourne, where he works with communities and partners to explore how design supports transitions toward regenerative societies. He has a strong record of leading major grants and educational programmes with academic, industry and third-sector collaborators, applying design and data methods to address social, environmental and economic challenges. From 2022 to 2024, he served as Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where he led the transformation of the historic Old Royal Infirmary into a world-leading centre for interdisciplinary teaching, research and innovation. Between 2018 and 2024, he directed Creative Informatics, a £7.4 million UKRI-funded cluster that supported data-driven innovation in the creative industries. From 2012 to 2022, he was Co-Director of the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, which he helped build into the College’s largest research centre and a nationally recognised leader in interactive media. In 2020, he received the University of Edinburgh Chancellor’s Award for Research and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Elisa Giaccardi
Politecnico di Milano
Elisa Giaccardi is a leading scholar in more-than-human design, known for her work on post-industrial and post-humanist design paradigms. Over her 25-year career, she has advanced research in design and human-computer interaction, focusing on the integration of natural and artificial intelligences to address planetary challenges.
She is a full Professor at Politecnico di Milano, where she leads the Design Intelligences Institute. Her international experience includes appointments in the UK, US, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and she was named Ambassador of Italian Design in the World 2024 by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Elisa’s research has been widely published and presented at leading conferences and organisations such as UNESCO and TEDx. She has secured funding from major research programmes, including the US National Science Foundation (Science of Design), the Dutch Research Council (Research through Design), and the European Research Agency (MCSA ITN), as well as private funders such as Microsoft Research and MIT Skoltech. She has also received multiple awards, including the TU Delft Technology Fellowship and Politecnico di Milano Chancellor’s Research Grant, as well as honours such as Fondazione ENI’s “Ideas for the Future”, Viva400 Netherlands, and Inspiring Fifty Italy.
Elisa has co-founded several interdisciplinary research and education initiatives, including the European DCODE network, TU Delft’s AI Initiative, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid’s Digital Living Initiative, and the University of Colorado Boulder’s ATLAS Institute. She also served as Ambassador of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions Institute, is Associate Editor of Human-Computer Interaction, and sits on the editorial board of the Design Research Foundations book series.
Mike Phillips
University of Plymouth
Mike Phillips is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Plymouth, the Director of Research at i-DAT.org, a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium and Co-Director of the CODEX Postgraduate Research Network. His R&D orbits a portfolio of PROJECTS that explore the ubiquity of data ‘harvested’ from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for revealing things that lie outside our normal frames of reference – things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum.
Phillips is an active member of an international transdisciplinary community that engages with immersive, interactive and performative technologies. He managed the Fulldome Immersive Vision Theatre (2012-2025), a transdisciplinary instrument for manifesting (im)material and imaginary worlds and is a founding partner of FullDome UK (http://www.fulldome.org.uk/).
He has secured a portfolio of national and international research funding, including: Arts Council England (GFA’s and National Portfolio Organisation status), NESTA, AHRC, EPSRC, British Council, EU (European Culture Programme, ESF, EU FP7), as well as significant industrial support and sponsorships. Phillips has extensive PGR supervisory experience with 77 completions across i-DAT, CODEX, Roy Ascott’s Planetary Collegium, and 3D3.
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