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Margolese National Design for Living award winner Jane Wolff will discuss her work to frame public conversations about complex and contested landscapes subject to change. Wolff’s projects envision a role for design different from the proposal of specific solutions to singular problems. Instead, they offer widely accessible tools for deciphering, discussing, and reimagining places whose trajectory will be decided through the collective decisions of citizens, policymakers, and technical experts. The goal: to help people recognize their own roles in the ecosystem and consider the impacts of their individual and collective decisions. The premise: in a future made uncertain by local and global forces, landscape literacy and landscape conversations are means toward conceiving and realizing possibilities kinder, more just, and more resilient than the status quo.
Jane Wolff uses drawing, writing, and public conversation to decipher, represent, and consider the web of relationships, processes, and stories that shape everyday landscapes in the Anthropocene. Her projects translate between rigorous, specialized information and ordinary language to support discussion about complicated places among plural constituencies with a stake in the future. She is the recipient of the 2022 Margolese National Design for Living Award and a professor at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.