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Phoebe Walton

Design, Fictions, Art, Research, Film, Writing



I am a designer, working between Critical Design, Architecture, Art and Research. Using architectural tools, I interrogate urgent, systemic social and environmental issues, including those relating to technology, the Climate Crisis and the law. Through popular narratives, performance and film, my work seeks to widen public engagement with complex issues, to collectively and boldly imagine a more equitable present and future(s). Currently, I am a researcher at Forensis (sister company to Forensic Architecture), in Berlin. 

Projects

Design research resident for A Casebook for New Legal Imagination at Library Innovation Lab and NuLawLab [May - December 2023]

Researcher for The Killing of Sammy Baker [Forensis, October 2023]

Resident artist at Begehungen festival e.v. [August, 2023]

Researcher for Fire in Moria Refugee Camp [Forensis, March 2023]

Part of the Experimental Realism Mentorship Programme [2021] 

Design Research Resident at Heat Island [2021]


Publications

James v Birnmann - The potential of Critical Design for Examining Legal Issues to be published in Legal Design: Dignifying People in Legal Systems, Cambridge University Press [Summer 2023]

James v Birnmann published in Experimental Realism: (Design) Fictions and Futures [2022, RIBA]

Presentations and Discussions

Interviewed for Court of Tomorrow podcast by Emily MacLoud and Joaquin Santuber [soon to be released]

Part of the conversation “Radical Reimagining Future Courts” at Design Research Society 2024 [June 2024]

Presented The Police Killing of Sammy Baker at the Nieuwe Instituut Research Night [April 2024] 

Presented Forensis’ work in Juxtapositions Lecture series, Universität der Künste [February 2024]

Presented Forensis’ work at the Anti-Lecture at RWTH Aachen University [December 2023]

Presented the published peer-reviewed paper James v Birnmann - The potential of Critical Design for Examining Legal Issues  at Design Review Society Bilbao, for Theme Track 32 - What Legal Design Could Be: Towards and Expanded Practice of Inquiry, Critique, and Action [2022]

Presented the project PWSMPF1 at Heat Island, London [September 2021]


Exhibitions

ABSENCED, Malmö City Library (group exhib), June 2024

Begehungen Festival, Kultur Palais Lichtenstein (group exhib), August 2023

Exhibited James v Birnmann at the RCA show and online at RCA 2021

Exhibited at the RCA Work in Progress online show 2021

Exhibited at the RCA Work in Progress show in Kensington 2020

Exhibited at the Cambridge Architecture Show, The Barge House, Oxo Tower Wharf 2017

Exhibited at the Cambridge Architecture Show, The Barge House, Oxo Tower Wharf 2016

Exhibited at the Cambridge Architecture Show, The Truman Brewery, 2015
Exhibited at the Painter’s Guild, City of London, 2014

Teaching

Lecture on Forensis’ work and student tutorial at Studio for Immediate Spaces, Sandberg Institute April 2024

Harvard School of Design (GSD) J-term co-lead Designing Speculations from Moot Courts, January 2024

Awards

Awarded a travel Scholarship to complete thesis research in São Paulo, Brazil

Education

Architecture MA (RIBA Part 2) at The Royal College of Art 

Architecture BA (RIBA Part 1) at The University of Cambridge