We’re delighted to announce that Superflux are the recipients of the Dezeen Awards 2021 ‘Design Studio of the year’.

Anab Jain and Jon Ardern were invited to develop a manifesto for the Dezeen 15 digital festival, bringing together fifteen creatives across various disciplines to propose ideas that can change the world over the next fifteen years.

ICON magazine have featured an interview with Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in their ACTIVATE ISSUE, Winter 2021 edition.

Superflux’s co-founders Jon Ardern and Anab Jain have been featured in the Financial Times Weekend as part of the newspaper’s coverage of the Venice Biennale 2021.

The article, by Josie Thaddeus-Johns, discusses the thinking and process behind Superflux’s new work Refuge for Resurgence, currently on display in the Arsenale Corderie as part of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2020, running from 22 May to 21 November 2021.

Refuge for Resurgence considers how all forms of life on earth might come together around a dinner table to celebrate their ecological interdependence in a post-Anthropocene world – a symbolic home where all species can prosper with resilience, adaptation, and hope. Occupying a space beneath the arches of the Arsenale, Refuge For Resurgence presents a magnificent 4m-long table, hand-made in Didcot from the wood of a wild Surrey oak. Placed around the table are fourteen wooden stools, and on it fourteen unique table settings, each carefully customised for the creature it is intended for.

The article centres around the recent developments in Superflux’s thinking that led to the Studio’s most recent works, Refuge for Resurgence and its sister installation, Invocation for Hope. It tells of their desire to move away from a way of living based on the concept of human exceptionalism, and towards a more-than-human world. Read more about this in Superflux co-founder Anab Jain’s essay Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics.

You can find the full article at this link (opens in a new tab). Don’t forget to check out Superflux’s website for more details on Refuge for Resurgence and Invocation for Hope.

Superflux are in search of a creative producer/project manager to join us in bringing exciting new work to life!

ABOUT US
We are a design and experiential futures company based in Somerset House in London. We create worlds, stories and tools that provoke and inspire people to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world; imagining and prototyping different possible futures, to help people make better decisions today.

To date, we have partnered and produced commissions for V&A Museum, Google AI, DeepMind, Cabinet Office UK, United Nations Development Program, Red Cross, Ministry of Energy, Govt. Of UAE, Nesta and Forum for the Future. Our work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, National Museum of China, Vitra Design Museum, Ars Electronica, V&A, Design Museum London, CCCB Barcelona and ArtScience Museum Singapore. 

While we spent much of 2020 brewing projects in our remote studio, we are now looking forward to realising them across physical and virtual spaces throughout this year. We would love a passionate and experienced producer/project manager to join us and play a key role in bringing them to life. 

We are looking for someone with invaluable experience (min 3-5 years) of working on creative and experimental projects, across public, private and cultural sectors. Though not essential, experience of working and managing EU grant funded projects would be a huge benefit. 

Our ideal candidate will have the following attributes, expertise and experience:

QUALITIES & ATTRIBUTES
• A keen interest in and commitment to work in the area of climate change
• Experience working with small creative teams to deliver edgy, radical work
• Work closely with the team to understand their ebbs and flow and design efficient systems that help each of our team members to work with their creative rhythms
• An ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of people – from designers to non-creative stakeholders 
• An enterprising, organised, creative approach to managing projects
• Ability to build strong relationships with clients and gain trust of key stakeholders 

ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE
• A proven track record of producing, managing and successfully delivering multiple creative projects in different mediums. We are seeking someone with demonstrable production management experience of atleast 3-5 years.
• Experience identifying and addressing scope changes and ensuring appropriate actions are taken to maintain project profitability 
• Ability to balance the management of timelines, stakeholder expectations and budgets within the creative process
• Enabling our teams to work with the flexibility and freedom to produce their best work 
• Demonstrable experience in writing tenders, project bids and reports. 
• Experience planning, organising, coordinating, managing multiple projects to ensure deadlines are met 

DESIRABLE EXPERIENCE
• Experience in managing the delivery of large-scale multimedia installations, films, and strategy documents 
• Working and managing EU grant funded projects – providing support on processes 

DETAILS
Start date: This is a contracted role, initially for 6 months beginning on 1 March 2021, with the possibility of evolving into a longer term permanent role. 
Salary: £37k per annum (pro-rata)
Location: As we value the health and safety of our team, we will be observing COVID guidance/lockdown and work remotely during the lockdown.  However we hope to return back to our studio so London-based or the ability to be in London few days / week would be highly preferred.

If this sounds like you, please apply with a CV and cover letter, highlighting relevant and applicable experience within a creative environment to hello@superflux.in using the subject line: Creative Producer. 

Submit applications by 6pm on 19th February
Interviews to be held week commencing 22nd February 2021

We are an equal opportunity and Living Wage Foundation employer. We believe that inclusive and diverse teams make better decisions, deliver the best work and are more fulfilling.

We are delighted to announce that, in collaboration with Somerset House, we have been awarded the Emerging Future Fund grant from the National Lottery Community Fund. For this project, we are partnering with Somerset’s House Young Producers to imagine of hopeful futures for the hotter world of tomorrow.

In June, Anab Jain was featured on the Standing on the Shoulders podcast series hosted by social psychologist and Guardian technology journalist Aleks Krotoski, and produced by Storythings. Standing on the Shoulders interviews “metaphorical, inspirational, Giants [..] whose symbolic shoulders you can stand on to reach greater heights”.

The podcast series aims to tell the backstories and defining moments of a range of key thinkers and visionaries such as theatre director and producer Jude Kelly and columnist and Head of Entertainment at Facebook in the UK Anna Higgs to name a few.

In the fifth episode of the series, Aleks and Anab discuss Anab’s role as a futurist of colour, and the backstory and inspirations that led her to co-found Superflux studio with Jon Ardern in 2009.

Listen to the podcast here or read on for a summary of the topics discussed and some recommended further reading.

The podcast begins by discussing Anab’s cross-cultural perspectives, a result of her Indian upbringing. Anab describes growing up, not with western science-fiction, but instead with Indian “multi-species” mythology. She explores how this has impacted her approach and work at Superflux.

Different cultures think about human being-ness in this world differently. It makes me reflect that actually increasingly, we are going to need to live in a world where human exceptionalism or individualism must give way to collaboration and networks of care and multi-species understanding […] Multi-species ethnography is just this kind of noticing and an understanding and acknowledgment that we are one of many species.

– Anab Jain

The conversation moves on to Anab’s journey to where she is now: from school through to founding Superflux via a Degree in filmmaking; a Masters in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art; and positions at Nokia and Microsoft Research.

Anab and Aleks then discuss Superflux’s recent work, Mitigation of Shock. Mitigation of Shock was first exhibited as part of After the End of the World at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2017 and more recently as part of 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum Singapore. The installation invites visitors into a family home set in a future severely impacted by climate change. Visitors are able to explore the many ways the apartment’s inhabitants have radically adapted their lives to survive, and thrive, in these new circumstances.

In this instance, we chose to invite people into something that they experience every day, their homes, a very domestic space – but set in the future. What would our homes look like and feel like in a world that has been severely impacted by climate change? And so we built this London apartment set around 2050 or so, when Jon and my son, who was six at that point, would be around our age. It was far enough in the future to affect an entirely new generation of people.

– Anab Jain

The Standing on the Shoulders series aims to understand who the inspirational figures have been in each featured “giant’s” journey. Anab discusses the ways in which philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “Hyperobjects” and Anna Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins helped her and Jon Ardern to develop the ideas behind Mitigation of Shock. From the concepts of “multi-species ethnography” to the idea of “destruction as a productive force”, she discusses learnings about human expectations and social imagined futures.

We need to look at, and kind of “stay with”, these entanglements and observe them more closely – with nuance to see our own role in this world. So I think that’s how I see it anyway.

– Anab Jain

The podcast is rounded up with reference to the political situation today and why it is imperative that we apply these principles to begin to move towards more hopeful futures.

They’re all moving through such short political cycles that they are not able to make long term decisions. We are trapped in a short-term political cycle. And unfortunately, a lot of the senior level people have very strong vested interests, and things need to change at that level.

– Anab Jain

Even though, if you look around us, the way the future or our present is unfolding is complex, messy, chaotic, turbulent. The trends reports and the kind of visions that are presented to us by those who have the power to present those visions are often clean, white, shiny, seductive. And unfortunately, the future is not going to be like that. It’s going to be standing on the bones of our actions and decisions that we’re making today. So I think if we are able to liberate ourselves from this shiny future idea, we might benefit a lot.

– Anab Jain

We’d like to thank the Standing on the Shoulders team for bringing together this fantastic series. You can find the rest of the episodes on the Standing on the Shoulders website.

You can read more about the concept of “multi-species thinking” in Calling for A More-Than-Human Politics, originally given as a talk by Anab at Tentacular Festival, 2019.

If you’d like to read more about Superflux’s project Mitigation of Shock you can read our project posts on Mitigation of Shock, London at CCCB and Mitigation of Shock, Singapore at ArtScience Museum, or read about the process of developing food growing methods for Mitigation of Shock, Singapore on our blog.

Follow Superflux on Instagram to keep up to date on exciting new projects that we’re working on around the themes discussed in this podcast.

We are delighted to be invited to contribute a new work to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2020, now postponed to 2021.

Superflux is excited to announce that we are a partner on CreaTures: Creative Practices for Transformational Futures, a transdisciplinary project that will identify how the arts can address climate change and its effects through identifying existing, often hidden transformational, creative practices.