Dyason Fellow Public Lecture: Talking Water (Take 1) with Prof Jane Wolff
Margolese National Design for Living award winner Prof Jane Wolff discusses her work framing public conversations about complex and contested landscapes subject to change.
Wolff’s projects envision a role for design that is different from the proposal of specific solutions to singular problems. Instead, they offer widely accessible tools for deciphering, discussing and reimagining places whose trajectory will be decided through the collective decisions of citizens, policymakers and technical experts.
The goal is to help people recognise their own roles in the ecosystem and consider the impacts of their individual and collective decisions. In a future made uncertain by local and global forces, landscape literacy and landscape conversations are means toward conceiving and realising possibilities that are kinder, more just and more resilient than the status quo.
About the speaker:
Prof Jane Wolff uses drawing, writing and public conversation to decipher, represent and consider the web of relationships, processes and stories that shape everyday landscapes in the Anthropocene. Her projects translate between rigorous, specialised information and ordinary language to support discussion about complicated places among plural constituencies with a stake in the future. She is the recipient of the 2022 Margolese National Design for Living Award and a professor at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.