Suhair Khan is hard to describe, and even harder to pigeonhole. She describes herself as an entrepreneur connecting culture and technology. She is the founder of Open-ended, launched in 2021 as a “creative incubator and research lab for emerging tech and AI”. She is a board member of or adviser to a dazzling range of the UK’s cultural institutions and businesses, including choreographer Wayne McGregor’s studio, the Design Museum, the British Library, Sadler’s Wells, the London Design Biennale and the UK’s Museum of the Year prize. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins art school.
But above all she is, I quickly realise when we meet in a London restaurant, a believer. Her fervent belief in the force for good that can be created at the nexus of technology and culture informs all her eager, rapid-fire explanations of sometimes slightly airy notions, as well as her overriding mission to expand “the idea of technology as a hopeful, optimistic force in the world”.
Khan has described herself as “an Indo-Pak hybrid — they do exist” (her mother is Indian, her father from Pakistan). She grew up mostly in Pakistan, where she went to school, surrounded by a cultured family, then made the shift to the US for university and, after graduating from Cornell University, worked on Wall Street before pursuing a masters at Harvard in international development.
Next, she was recruited by Google, working in various areas of innovation and business strategy but principally, for most of her decade at the company, in Google Arts & Culture, on projects connected with culture and sustainability. Khan talks enthusiastically about her time at Google — “the people I got to work with were transformative”. A lot of the work, she says, was experimental and hasn’t come to the market, but gave her an understanding of the reach and potential of innovative tech thinking that has formed the rest of her career.
During this period came a move to Singapore, then to London in 2016, where Khan furthered a Google Arts and Culture programme of connections between artists, museums and machine technology. “We were working on augmented reality and hybrid reality all those years ago: very exciting, very innovative, very productive.”
Among these projects was the launch at the COP26 climate-change summit in 2021 of a cloud-based platform to help the fashion industry measure its environmental impact at the raw material stage. It left her with the firm view that “all tech companies should actively support culture and lean in to rapid cultural change and innovation.”
After being invited to run a Covid-moment architectural teaching programme at Central Saint Martins, framed around decolonisation and decarbonisation, she became more and more interested in spatial awareness, associated technologies and education. “I really felt technology should be working for society, it shouldn’t be vice versa.”
It was a turning point. “Almost my entire career had been in one structure and one large company: it gave me privileged access at high levels, which was wonderful” — but she felt the need, after spending time in Pakistan during the pandemic, for something different. She launched Open-ended Design, a platform where creative technology and innovation would meet, always with a firm eye on ethical practice and environmental awareness. The respect for tech’s power impressed on her at Google made her feel the need for “bringing machine learning into cultural experience and looking at the future through the lens of technology”.
Open-ended Design is essentially a gathering-place — in digital form — for practitioners working at the edges of their disciplines, creative or technological, usually both. She believes artists and technologists have a lot in common because both “are imagining futures, building new worlds, for themselves and for other people. I wanted to create a space where we could explore shared language.” As she describes it: “Our goal is to spotlight and connect innovators in culture, and technology from all around the world.” And “it was selfish in a way,” she says with a laugh, “since that kind of creative community, with colleagues from different disciplines, had been so meaningful to me.”
Eager to increase “the diversity that technology badly needs”, and thinking about the decentralisation of tech learning and development, Khan cites smaller platforms and tech innovators in the Middle East and Turkey, and frequently mentions Africa. The importance of this range, she stresses, is that there must be “less bias in data, less bias in AI algorithms”. If the same coterie of westerners are doing the designing and training, in other words, existing problems and global inequalities will simply be perpetuated.
The other connections being made, across Open-ended’s target communities, are of course with all the important tech giants — Google, naturally, but also TikTok and many others. The core community is loosely divided across art and design, tech, activism, sustainability and science. It includes an impressive roster of multi-achievers, from Azu Nwagbogu, whose wide-ranging cultural activities include founding the Lagos Photo festival, to architect Leila Meroue, who created the education-architecture NGO Let’s Build My School. Urbanist Blaze Lightfoot Jones-Yellin focuses on environmental justice and community-centric design in New York. The artists, designers and scientists are joined in the exploration of even wider and weirder shores: Sertaç Taşdelen, an Istanbul-based tech entrepreneur, has a psychic app dedicated to fortune-telling.
Everywhere, there’s an emphasis on “responsible AI” and ethical applications of emerging technologies. “Technology doesn’t have its own code of ethics,” Khan points out, “like most other professions — law, journalism, architecture. I find this fascinating.” For good and not-so-good: like so much else in this rapidly moving arena, the morality and accountability of tech have to be improvised as it goes along, by companies and individuals, she believes — especially in the light of advances in AI that put the engines beyond the control even of their creators.
The most important thing, she feels, “is that we continue to consider the importance of the values around which we design for the future — who sets the rules? Who builds? Who participates? Who benefits? How does it make us feel?”
And how, I wonder, are some of these very admirable aims to be achieved? Open-ended Design’s programme offers podcasts and discussion events: the next symposium, Technology & Design Lab on the Futures of Intelligence, takes place in London next month as part of London Design Festival and asks the question: “In an age of disruption & innovation: where do we go next?”
But is it enough to ask critical questions, to stimulate debate around new and sifting values? Well, there’s still the faith in the machinery, the invention and the programming. “Conversations are important,” she writes to me in an email after our meeting, “but so is being generative, and building for new outcomes. You can design by integrating values along the way.”
Technology & Design Lab on the Futures of Intelligence, September 20, londondesignfestival.com
