FAAR spotlight

We believe that all generations have a stake in creating the new world. Each month we select and share the works of emerging creatives on the topics relevant to the shared future.

nelly-taheri copy.jpg — Nelly Taheri is a designer, maker, and artist.

Her body of work varies in areas such as: social innovation, creative strategy, design technology, and biodesign.
Her art focuses on social, political, scientific, and philosophical questions. With mediums varying from modern surrealist mixed media, film, and photography.
With an abstract approach to design, Nelly hopes to spark questions and develop alternative systems and solutions to meaningful problems.
She is currently based out of Vancouver, Canada with a business degree in Strategic Design and Management from Parsons the New School for Design in New York.

My hope with the following projects is to stimulate conversation, curiosity, and creativity. I believe everyone has something to offer when it comes to designing the future. Outer Space and space travel has been something that I have always been interested in. However, often times it is difficult for us to visualize on micro and macro scales. Thus, my hope is to bring these imagined “futures” closer through design and storytelling. Once we open conversation, we give ourselves the opportunity and design space to solve problems as well as create beautiful things.

Space Education & Storytelling Futures

“Space Education” is a series of collages and dioramas I developed for Extrapolation Factory: “a design-based research studio for participatory future studies.” Extrapolation Factory conducted a speculative ideation workshop with a series of students and teachers to begin discussing the notion of “student experiences” in the future of education. Based on the 6 different stories groups constructed, I made representative mixed-media visualizations in the form of collage and diorama.

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This collage was based on a narrative that envisioned the future of education around the ability of virtual reality stimulating all of our senses.

This collage was based on democratizing education by allowing students to have a closer access to content through virtual reality. This image showcases a student going back and experiencing a protest he/she is learning about in class.

This collage was based on a narrative set in 2021. The future of education is envisioned to encase travel and a balance between structure and flexibility in creating "purpose driven learning".

Mars Products

Mars Products is a rapid speculative design workshop that focuses on Mars 2058 as a design setting. I conducted this workshop for myself to explore the possibilities of constructing an alternative future. In doing so, I did research on the conditions we would expect to witness in Mars (both physical and emotional), as well as speaking to material engineers. Based on these findings, I designed different products that I would envision being used in day to day life while living in Mars or traveling to Mars from Earth. My intention with this project was to evoke questions and push materiality and technology to think about the future in realistic and humanistic form. Through developing narratives and stories around these artifacts, my hope is to push designers, engineers, scientist, artists, lawyers, and all sorts of makers to join the conversation and begin to think about the future in a both fun and thought-provoking way.

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