Laura Watts is an award-winning Author, Consultant and Professor in Social Studies of Science & Technology. Her speculative methods and writing explores how the future gets imagined and made, and how it can be made otherwise in places at the edge. She has been collaborating with organisations and communities in the energy and tech industries for over twenty years.
Her last book ‘Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga’ (MIT Press) won the 4S Rachel Carson prize and was Shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year.
She is a Visiting Professor at Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA-T), Linköping University, and lives with two imaginary cats on an island in Copenhagen.
I make speculative futures from empirical evidence,
futures that are renewable, resilient, and anchored in remarkable places and people.
I’ve collaborated with organisations from Intel on the US west coast, to UNESCO on Lake Geneva, to the European Marine Energy Centre on Orkney, Scotland.
I don’t try and predict the future. I create methods for making the future together,
a solarpunk role playing game, graphic novel, science fiction short story, energy gazetteer, speculative writing workshop, short film, tech fanzine, graphic novel, card game, fold out book,
whatever works, whatever is needed, whatever blows open the possibilities.
On Sand14
Sand14 is a mnemonic for the edge.
Sand is largely constituted by silicon, atomic number 14.
Silicon is an element of the edge. It forms rocks worn away by the sea. And it is transformed into glass for fibre optic cables, quartz for piezoelectrics, silicon chips for a server.
Sand14 is where nature is inseparable from culture, what we in the theory trade call natureculture and technosocial, places where both can be imagined and made otherwise.