Studio profile

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, Superflux is a boundary-defying, award-winning design and experiential futures company, as well as a research and art practice. From climate change to algorithmic autonomy, future of work to more-than-human politics, our work aims to confront diverse audiences with the complex and deeply interconnected nature of the challenges we face today. We invite clients, collaborators, communities and wider participants to remain open to multiple possibilities and navigate precarity with active hope. For our 10+ years of contribution to the fields of speculative and futures design with a committed social mission, Superflux received the Design Studio of the Year Award in 2021. 

Using design to imagine hypothetical worlds as a critical strategy for businesses, whilst expanding public imagination was not prevalent thirteen years ago. In this space of possibility, Superflux willed itself into existence. Superflux is one of the first studios to pioneer the practices of speculative design, critical foresight, design fiction and experiential futures in business; producing impactful futures work for clients like Google AI, Cabinet Office UK, Anthemis, Suncorp, Sony, Samsung, Gov. of UAE, IKEA, UNDP and DeepMind. Parsing uncertainties, weak signals and wide ranging trends, we work with clients to imagine and build future worlds they could experience in the present moment. Such visceral engagement with multiple possibilities not only opens up undiscovered opportunities and helps identify blindspots, more significantly such imagination-led futures work enables strategic, informed and long term decision-making.

More recently, we introduced the idea of More-than-human Centred Design at the Interaction Design Conference at Lyon, France in February 2018. You can watch Anab Jain’s IXDA Keynote here. This concept of thinking beyond human-centred design has since gained traction with designers, businesses and cultural organisations.

Our business practice remains prescient and innovative because of our active, self-initiated experimental research and art lab; a space where Anab and Jon, with colleagues, have an opportunity to test new ideas and themes. Sometimes these experiments find home in client projects, at other times they take the form of cautionary tales, superfictions, future archaeologies and immersive simulations which have been exhibited at the National Museum of China, MoMA New York, V&A Museum, La Biennale di Venezia, MAK Vienna, Vitra Design Museum, Science Gallery, KUNSTHAUS Graz and more.

Recent Interviews:
Financial Times, ICON, Wallpaper, Offscreen Magazine, STIRworld, Business Insider, NPR Radio