Steph Troeth

Steph is the head of data & insights at dxw, a UK digital agency specialising in creating public services that improve lives. Prior to that, she has led teams of researchers, helped startups scale up their research practice, and was a senior researcher on contract at Google. She also previously led design research at the Telegraph and spearheaded European customer research with MailChimp.
 
Her passions extend beyond research to a parallel career in writing speculative fiction. When not bound to a digital device, she makes things by hand, grows edible flowers and has a tendency to cook enough to feed a continent at a time.

Here’s a dirty secret: data only has a view towards the past, and even when we try to make predictions, we strongly assume that patterns from the past will inform the future. Much like how Daniel Kahnemann describes our 'remembering self': we tell ourselves stories whether we mean to or not. But if we’re not careful, we can tell ourselves stories that render us inert, unable to act—or worse, make decisions that harm some of us, all of us, and the planet we call home.

In this conversation, Steph discusses approaches in speculative fiction, particularly in the Solarpunk genre, that can help ground our thinking, and provide us—as researchers and designers—tenets to consider our work, and, as humans, to strive towards a better future. 

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