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.

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.

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.

Biographical details correct as of 29.04.26