SOFTER Social
How can we add more softness to the world of tech? Born in Copenhagen and making its mark in London, SOFTER - a movement for shaping softer digital futures - is finally coming to Amsterdam. To celebrate the arrival of SOFTER, we are inviting you to an evening of connection, exploration and soft vibes at Kas Hoftuin, a beautiful venue at the heart of Amsterdam.
Program
19:00 — Doors open
19:30 — Welcome with Valerie Fuchs
19:45 — A brief SOFTER history with founders Nicole & Ida
20:00 — Thoughts on Slow AI with Nadia Piet
20:30 — Reflections on Mbombo: Dream Echoes with Sondi
21:00-00:00 — Drinks, snacks and hanging out
Your ticket will include a welcome drink + snacks during the event.
We’re thrilled to see you at our beautiful gathering and can’t wait to celebrate with you!
This event is supported by Netcompany.
Introducing Nadia Piet
Nadia Piet (she/her) is a designer, researcher, and organizer exploring the intersection of technology, AI/ML, and (digital) culture. Her work examines how we shape technology and it shapes us in return, centering participatory, protopian, and feminist approaches. She is the co-founder and creative director of AIxDESIGN—a global community and decentralized research & design lab for critical, creative & community approaches to AI.
In her talk, Nadia introduces AIxDESIGN's Slow AI project. Inspired by slow fashion and slow food movements, it's unpacking and subverting corporate-first thinking, and re-imagining alternative AI narratives beyond Silicon Valley's algorithmic imaginaries with provocations such as Esoteric, Small AI, and Ancestral AI. Moving from protopian perspectives (neither hype nor hate), she'll share about their community-driven research approaches and playful critiques as ways for critical AI researchers, designers, artists, and the rest of us (that's you too!) are collectively crafting new ways of thinking about and relating to AI—prioritizing care, cultural preservation, and life-affirming futures over values of scale, efficiency, and profit.
Introducing Sondi
Sondi (she/her) is an artist and researcher from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands, Sondi works across virtual worlds, video games, and immersive environments. Her practice reimagines digital space as a site of resistance, critical reflection, and alternative ways of being, crafting narratives that centre voices often excluded from visions of the techno-future.
In this talk, artist and researcher Sondi reflects on her game Mbombo: Dream Echoes and her ongoing inquiry into how video game practices can become spaces of resistance, communal care, and slowing down. Building on this, she introduces her current research project, which explores how we might design technologies that embody these principles in their very structure.
Inspired by permacomputing and low-tech approaches, Sondi proposes an alternative to the dominant logic of speed, optimization, and hyperrealism in video games. Her work seeks to rewrite the narrative that technology must be hard, both in materiality and in process, imagining instead systems that are fluid and adaptable.
Through this lens of “softer technologies,” the talk invites us to rethink machines, tools, and instruments in ways that do not reproduce systems of power and extraction. What becomes possible when slowing down? How might softness guide us toward gentler, more sustainable forms of worldbuilding?