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about
BlueShift Whale Farm is a multidisciplinary studio using speculative design to explore complex systems and future scenarios. Through design fiction, we create educational experiences that activate neuroplasticity and train creative problem-solving: the distinctly human skills needed for challenges that can't be automated away.
We created this to spark the kind of original, interdisciplinary thinking that AI cannot replicate. By taking an absurd premise completely seriously - farming 20 million blue whales for carbon sequestration - the project forces engagement with biology, economics, ethics, engineering, and ecology simultaneously. It's a methodology for building the creative agility and intellectual courage humans need to stay ahead of machine intelligence.
"Engineering hope, one cetacean at a time"
dr. Machteld Zee
CEO and Founder of
BlueShift Whale Farm
Machteld Zee (1984) is a Dutch multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, design, science, and systems thinking. She founded BlueShift Whale Farm to explore how humans reason, collaborate, and make decisions when faced with problems that exceed conventional scale and logic - particularly in the context of climate change and artificial intelligence.
She holds a PhD in Jurisprudence from Leiden University and has worked across policy, research, and speculative design. From advising parliamentarians on counterterrorism to investigating environmental crime for the Dutch National Police and as a Marshall Memorial Fellow (2016), she observed how institutions default to conventional solutions even when facing unprecedented challenges. Her artistic practice transforms these observations into large-scale speculative systems that invite critical participation rather than passive consumption.
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The future belongs to people who can think in ways algorithms can't predict.
BlueShift Whale Farm trains that muscle.
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