Future Ecologies and Media Lab

Engaging with the critical role of digital media in navigating environmental and social transitions   

This lab poses questions about how digital media can function as a social technology for cultivating regenerative futures, including through DIY, activist, feminist, and subaltern media practices. Through a variety of meetups and projects, FEM Lab addresses the future-making possibilities of critical media practices, pedagogies, and literacies. We pay close attention to the ethical, aesthetic, sensory, and political implications of new media (including AI), as increasingly embedded within planetary systems and the built environment, while building research methods that harness the affordances of digital media to address issues of social and planetary justice through speculative and relational (participatory/co-design) methodologies. 

FEM Lab welcomes queries for DERC members to join the Lab. To learn more about what’s happening, or to participate in Lab events, contact the lab leader.

Lab Leader

Dr David Rousell, Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT,  teaches across the areas of art and design education, critical policy studies, and education futures. He brings a strong commitment to social justice and creative pedagogies to address the shifting landscapes of 21st-century teaching and learning. His research combines theoretical work in affect and sensory studies, new materialisms, and post-humanism with his professional background as an environmental artist, designer, and arts educator. ​

Core Lab Members

Projects

Museum Digital Social Futures: Audience Living Lab as incubator for socially-engaged and situated media innovation

This project takes a future orientation to examine the role of digital media in the engagement, experience, literacy and inclusion of museum audiences.