Chris W. Email & Phone Number

Collaborated with leading partners across the cultural, governmental and industry sectors. Orchestrated participatory engagements for ideation of alternative governmental, social and economic systems. Generated new insights by employing play-write and scenario techniques as co-creative design methods. Synthesized and interpreted the learnings and activated these fictional worlds into life-size experiential installations and real-world products, infrastructure elements and architectural environments. Worked with leading partners across the cultural, governmental and industry sectors. Orchestrated participatory engagements for ideation of alternative governmental, social and economic systems. Generated new insights by employing play-write and scenario techniques as co-creative design methods. Synthesized and interpreted the learnings and activated these fictional worlds into life-size experiential installations and real-world products, infrastructure elements and architectural environments. Recent partners include Ali Forney Center, Autodesk Research, ComEd, Dubai Future Foundation, Ford Motor Company, Forum for the Future, Ginkgo Bioworks, Intel Research, Microsoft Research, National Center for Atmospheric Research, NYC Department of Education. NYC Emergency Management, Red Cross Climate Center, Storefront of Art and Architecture, UNICEF and Walker Art Center.see https://chriswoebken.com for more details

Leading an elective course that offers an introduction to critical design and strategies for rapid product prototyping and fabrication.

Developed a series of post-petro installations at 1014 that invited a group of researchers to playfully pre-enact these scenarios.

Brooklyn, Ny

On pause since Jan 2024Co-founded a studio that develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing and impacting future scenarios. Central to these methods is the creation of hypothetical future props and their deployment in familiar contexts such as 99¢ stores, science museums, vending machines and city sidewalks. With this work, the studio is exploring new territories for democratized futures by rapidly imagining, prototyping, deploying and evaluating visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.

Taught an undergrad elective that explores the concept of ‘othering’ and gaining perspectives from a more-than-human world through experimental prototyping.

Greater New York City Area

Introduced the tech-elective ‘Making Kin With Biomaterials’ where students examined mutual relationships to nature base processes and brought to life new approaches by growing and fabricating models and artifacts.

Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Co-taught ‘Design in the Posthuman Age’ at the RISD Nature Lab. Students developed more-than-human design projects.

Students conducted design-led research that investigates our relationships in post-oil scenarios through narrative techniques and design futures methods.

Co-taught the Industrial Design grad studios for four consecutive years. The most recent grad studio ‘Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes’ was co-taught with Paolo Cardini and Agi Haines.

Co-facilitated a studio seminar called ‘Weather Worlds’. The students designed pop-up public engagement interventions for the 24th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP24).

Greater New York City Area

Integrated design futures approaches in K-12 education.

Tutored the final studio projects in the ‘Hybrid Urbanism’ program.

Co-taught ‘Micro-Environment Exploration Lab’ which introduced the basic understanding of the state of current research in environmental microbiomes. Students got hands-on experience in learning the computational methods to analyze genomic data and then designed physical devices to interact with this invisible component of our environment.

Greater New York City Area

Co-taught ‘Weather Worlds’ a studio that explored the role that design can play in public engagement on climate disruption. Students designed a one day popup exhibition at the Queens Museum.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Collaborated with Kevin Slavin’s Playful Systems Group to develop an interface for bees to help visualize the urban metagenome in cities around the world. This project was presented at the Venice Biennale in May 2016.

Co-taught 'Testing Tomorrows', a futures method focused course.

Paired a group of graduate students with ongoing climate research at The National Center for Atmospheric Research. In collaboration with NCAR scientists, the students developed a series of speculative tools and instruments that might complement NCAR's future research focus.

New York City

Collaborated with Natalie Jeremijenko on the design of interspecies and environmental media art projects such as a grid of robotic buoys to allow a dialogue between humans and fish. We developed a series of public programs and exhibitions with organizations in NYC, Netherlands, UK and Iceland.

San Francisco

Contributed to a series of human-centered design projects for clients such as Bank of America and New Zealand Airlines.

Hamburg

Prototyped new interaction design paradigms for the Creative Suite products.

Hamburg

On the job training working on interaction design solutions for Creative Suite applications.

Los Angeles

Worked on setting up render farm hardware and scripted visual effects pipelines.

Hamburg, Germany

Produced online portals for streaming concerts and music journalism.