"In these conditions, how can we be optimistic?" asks Anab Jain

Superflux co-founder Anab Jain has been awarded this year's LDF Design Innovation Medal. In this interview, she argues speculative design can still be a source of hope even in dark times.

It's yet another 32-degree day in London's alarming summer of 32-degree days, and Jain has been telling her colleagues about her childhood in India.

It was a time of national emergency, with food rationing due to drought and crop failures, water for only one hour a day, stifling heat – and yet, young Jain was happy.

"I still had the best childhood, in a way," she said.

"It makes me think a lot about how what we have assumed are the perfect conditions for us to live happily might not necessarily be so, and how that sort of living – growing up fairly frugally but very happily, with no television, no telephone, being bored out of our minds, cooking up stories, and reading a lot about Indian mythology because that's all that was around – really shaped my worldview."

That worldview, with hope and resilience peeking out from behind a profound understanding of crisis and scarcity, has subtly infused Jain's 17-year body of work, which has won her the London Design Festival's (LDF) Design Innovation Medal for 2026.

"What if AI was used in the service of our rivers?"

As part of Superflux, the design studio she started in 2009 with her life and creative partner Jon Ardern, Jain has repeatedly cast herself into the future, addressing the challenges of climate change and social upheaval through speculative propositions and ecological thinking.

In 2018, she gave a talk at the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference in Lyon, turning the field's guiding concept of human-centred design on its head by proposing a "more-than-human-centred design".

Drawing on the work of academic Anne Galloway and her More-Than-Human lab in New Zealand, Jain argued for a practice of listening to, working with and creating for the planet's interconnected species and natural entities. At that time, no one knew what she was talking about, she recalls.

But the next year, she gave a similar presentation at Madrid festival Tentacular to a crowd that included John Bridle, who was in the middle of writing what would become the influential book Ways of Being, exploring the intelligence of animals, plants and natural systems.

Shoots of like-minded thought, inspired by indigenous knowledge and rights of nature theory, were starting to look like a movement.

Seven years later, it is difficult to find a critical design thesis that does not at least touch on the notion of the more-than-human world.

The roots for all of this are embedded in Jain's formative years. After her summers of paucity, she went on to study film – an unusual speciality for the design field that was offered at Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design, the school set up on the advice of Charles and Ray Eames to combine modernist approaches with a focus on the needs and traditions of India.

There, she was exposed to a great breadth of cinema, while also developing the skills that would inform the film, storytelling and experiential sides of Superflux's practice.

"We used to look at a lot of French cinema, a lot of Iranian cinema, a lot of Italian, Korean cinema," said Jain. "We didn't watch that much Hollywood."

"So in a way, I was aware of the fact that there are plural perspectives that exist in the world, that there are different stories that need to be heard and need to be told, and there is not just one way to be."

In 2008, after gaining her masters at the Royal College of Art in London, Jain went to work on machine intelligence at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge – the first place where she was prompted to think about intelligence in a non-human dimension.

Her experiences converge in Superflux projects such as the Ecological Intelligence Agency, which was included in last year's More Than Human exhibition at the Design Museum.

It started with a simple idea: "Instead of powering AI with natural resources, let's flip it, and ask what if AI was used in the service of our rivers and water systems instead," said Jain.

In the work, a large language model is fed multiple sources of data about Essex's River Roding, from ecological reports to community social media posts, and told to draw on English Romantic ballads, free verse poetry and the tongue of London spoken-word artists for style.

Then it is asked to speak for the river itself. Hearing this voice can be, for the listener, deeply moving, as well as a chance to envisage a radically different future for AI.

"In the short term, I think there's not much to be optimistic about"

Then there are the Mitigation of Shock installations – pragmatic imaginings of future apartments adapted for living with climate change.

In one version, heavy aluminium shutters provide protection from intense storms, while a kayak propped against a wall suggests how the residents travel through regular flooding.

At the same time, there are elements of what is sometimes termed 'hope-punk', such as bountiful indoor gardens that double as a reliable food supply.

The installation is emblematic of Superflux's version of optimism, based not on denial that climate chaos is coming, but on belief that human resilience, ingenuity and practices of care will shine through regardless.

Asked whether she stands by the defiant optimism she expressed then, Jain said: "In the short term, I think there's not much to be optimistic about, in all honesty."

She cites the widespread wildfires in Europe, energy challenges, proliferating wars, social disruption from AI and likely changes to the Atlantic current as reasons to be dour.

"These conditions point towards what you can call a closing down – more boundaries, people wanting to hold on to what they think is the right thing, the narrowing of possibilities, rather than an opening up of," she continued. "So, in these conditions, how can we be optimistic?"

This is where speculative design comes into its own. Previously at the margins of the design profession, the practice has recently become a part of its commercial sphere and looks increasingly like the approach best matched to the challenges of the present moment.

Here again, Jain has been an influential thinker, leading the Design Investigations course as a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and this year, publishing the book Designing Questions with her colleagues to outline a pedagogic pathway for the field.

"The work we do as Superflux in terms of making sure the future remains a possibility space, and that there are many possible futures within this possibility space, gives me hope and optimism," said Jain.

"There is still a chance to imagine, will, prototype, create, test all these other possible futures."

One beautiful possibility? "We may not get 24/7 water, but we may live a more cohesive, collectively happier life."

The photography is courtesy of Superflux. The portrait of Jain is by Jamie Salmons.

This article was originally written as part of our Dezeen Dispatch magazine for LDF 2026.

LDF 2026 is taking place at various locations around London from 12 to 20 September. To see what's on, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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