Dr. Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist whose work forges connections between process philosophy, design studies, critical technologies, and futures. She explores how philosophy and design can be brought into generative tension to rethink the role of uncertainty, speculation, and imagination in an age increasingly shaped by planetary-scale computation. Throughout her research runs a consistent thread: a commitment to developing hybrid methodologies and transdisciplinary practices that expand how we think, design, and coexist with complex technological systems.
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Her scholarship proposes that uncertainty is not a failure of knowledge but a vital resource for planetary thinking. This perspective brings depth and methodological rigour to contemporary debates on transdisciplinarity, positioning it not simply as a collaborative necessity but as a philosophical and practical framework capable of addressing the crises of a computational planet.
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Her work has shaped conversations across design research, philosophy, and technology studies, appearing in leading journals such as Design and Culture, Design Studies, and Digital Creativity, and in internationally recognised edited collections. Her new book, The Power of Maybes. Machines, Uncertainty, and Design Futures, brings together her long-standing interest in uncertainty as a form of resistance to the prediction-driven logic of digital systems. It argues that hesitation, ambiguity, and not-knowing can counter the extractive impulses of algorithmic culture and open up new ways of living and designing alongside machines. The book reframes uncertainty as a practical and imaginative resource for reclaiming agency in an algorithmic age. She co-edited Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies (Bloomsbury, 2021), which proposes a new framework for interaction design, and Deleuze and Design (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), the first book to mobilize Deleuze and Guattari in rethinking design theory and practice. She has served as Associate Editor of Design and Culture and regularly reviews book manuscripts for major design publishers.
Her practice extends beyond writing into shaping research cultures and educational futures. As Principal Investigator at UAL for the Erasmus+ project FUEL4Design — Future Education and Literacy for Designers, she developed tools for curriculum innovation that support designers in cultivating future literacy. She is a core member of STADHI Science/Technology and Art/Design Hybrid Innovation, the CSM–Science Tokyo transdisciplinary collaboration, and of STADHI's flagship industry training programme Hybrid Innovation - shortlisted in 2025 by the UAL Knowledge Exchange Staff Awards. At CSM she convenes Hybrid Futures Lab and the community of practice Technologies in Question, which brings together staff across disciplines to examine how creative practices critically engage with technological complexity.
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Her recent and forthcoming international keynotes and public talks include the Anticipation Conference at POLIMI (2026) and Art as Catalyst at Ars Electronica Tokyo (2023). Between 2018 and 2025 she served as WRHI Specially Appointed Professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, where she led research on transdisciplinarity. She supervises doctoral researchers at UAL and contributes to doctoral education at institutions worldwide, including POLIMI and Science Tokyo.
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Earlier in her career, she taught at the University of Essex and the University of Urbino. Her foundational research examined the politics and philosophies of body modification—particularly tattooing—through the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Spinoza. Her two Italian-language books, Ibridazioni (1997) and Segni Indelebili (2002), have become influential works of practical philosophy, grounded in her extensive firsthand engagement with permanent body marking.
For a full CV see here.
To contact Betti: bettimarenko@gmail.com