Dr Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist and Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Working at the unruly intersection of philosophy, design and technology, and grounded in process philosophy and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, her scholarship explores encounters between bodies, machines, ideas and material worlds, across epistemic and material transformations, technological hybridity and speculative futures.
At stake is the politics of what becomes possible: how futures are imagined, potential captured, and what remains available for invention in a world organised by predictive technologies and planetary computation.
Central to this inquiry is transdisciplinarity, understood as an encounter between heterogeneous forms of knowledge and practice. Frictions and productive incompatibilities become sites of experimentation, generating questions and methods that no single discipline could have anticipated.
From neo-animism and techno-animism to computational uncertainty and nonknowledge, her work challenges established accounts of agency, intelligence and human–technology relations. Her latest book, The Power of Maybes: Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures (Bloomsbury, 2025), confronts the predictive ambitions of computational culture and makes a philosophical and political case for reclaiming uncertainty.
Her writing appears in Technophany, New Formations, Design Studies, Design and Culture, Digital Creativity, Leonardo and Prometheus. She guest-edited Design and Unknowns (2024), a special issue of diid, and serves on the editorial board of Bloomsbury's Designing in Dark Times series. She co-edited the volumes Deleuze and Design (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Beyond writing, she is committed to making the conditions for different kinds of knowledge to happen. At UAL she founded and directs Hybrid Futures Lab, co-leads Technologies in Question with Stephanie Sherman, and is a core member of STADHI, the transdisciplinary collaboration between Central Saint Martins and the Institute of Science Tokyo. She was Principal Investigator at UAL for the European Erasmus+ project FUEL4Design, investigating futures literacy and curriculum innovation.
Between 2018 and 2025, she was WRHI Specially Appointed Professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, leading research on transdisciplinarity. Her international work spans research, experimental education and collaborations with cultural and commercial organisations. She delivers invited talks and keynotes internationally and supervises doctoral researchers at UAL, contributing also to doctoral education at Politecnico di Milano and Science Tokyo.
Her earlier Italian-language books, Ibridazioni (1997) and Segni Indelebili (2002), explored the politics of bodies, desire and material transformation through Deleuze, Guattari and Spinoza. This history continues to inform her interest in hybridity, becoming and the refusal of bodies, objects and technologies to remain within the categories assigned to them.
Contact: b.marenko@csm.arts.ac.uk