Tobias Revell is an artist, designer, researcher and educator from London specialising in futures and technology through critical practice. He is Design Futures Lead at Arup where he leads the Foresight team in delivering large-scale strategic futures and sustainability projects for internal and external clients and developing futures literacy across the firm. He specialises in the use of design approaches to deepen engagement, enhance the quality of outcomes and question underlying assumptions in tackling complex problems. He exhibits, writes and lectures internationally on futures, art, design, technology and imagination.

PhD

Tobias is completing a PhD in Design at Goldsmiths on 'Design and The Construction of AI' which explores the different ways that design is implicated in reciprocating mainstream myths, tropes and imaginaries of AI and how critical practitioners use different creative strategies to trouble, disrupt and introduce alternatives to the mainstream. The PhD explores three main 'arenas' where AI is socially constructed; in the invention of users and use cases, the uncanny and the sublime qualities of AI and the delivery of performances and spectacles.

Other positions

Tobias is also an industry champion at the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Center, a visiting lecturer at University Arts London and London Interdisciplinary School, external examiner at Sheffield Hallam and Wolverhampton University and just over one half of research and curatorial power-brand Haunted Machines. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education and Academy with a focus on online education and the nature of the studio in design pedagogy.

Previously

Until 2021, he was Programme Director at London College of Communication, UAL where he managed, resources and led the teaching, research and knowledge exchange agendas of one of the university's largest deparments. In 2014 he co-founded design research consultancy Strange Telemetry which pioneered the use of speculative design in policy research for UK national and local government organisations. He was a founding member of Supra Systems Studio.

Education

He holds a BA Hons. (1st) in Design for Interaction and Moving Image from the London College of Communication and an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art from which he graduated in July 2012.