Artist and designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg discusses the nuances of what it means to design "a better world" in this video of her keynote at Dezeen Day.
Ginsberg, who is known for her work in synthetic biology, was one of three keynote speakers at Dezeen's inaugural conference on 30 October.
In the lecture she spoke about some of her latest projects, which spark conversations around the effects of climate change and the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence to "better" the situation.

She discussed the confusion around this term, and the idea that using synthetic biology could make biology better, and could even better nature itself.
"Designing a better world is a promise I hear a lot working as an artist in design and technology," she said. "We design to improve things, to transform existing situations into preferred or 'better' ones ? we assume that design makes things better, but what do we mean by 'better'""
"How does a word that has so much power in our contemporary world ? a word that we invest so much in ? not have a shared or fixed meaning""

As Ginsberg explained, design is used to solve problems, but often creates new problems in the process. This is because we are designing to solve problems with human measures, rather than thinking about what would benefit nature.
The artist spoke to the Dezeen Day audience about some of her work that aims to urge people to think more about their actions...