Annie Williams

Background

About Annie Williams

Conceptual Designer, Brand Marketer & emerging design researcher exploring the ethics, aesthetics and ecologies of digital envrioments. Currently working as Digital Content & Social Media Officer at Arts University Plymouth, I craft platform strategies and creative content that reflect the values of interdisciplinary learning, sustainability and inclusive community within the creative education sector. My role combines editorial storytelling with a strategic focus on SEO and analytics—ensuring that our digital presence is discoverable, accessible and aligned with audience behaviour across search and social. In September 2025, I will begin a Masters of Research in History of Design at the University of Oxford, focusing on digital environments, screen-body dualities, and the topologies of virtual space. Drawing from posthumanism, media theory, and design history, I’m interested in how artificial environments mediate intimacy, identity and political power, through lenses including digital pornography, surveillance capitalism, and aesthetic fascism. My past research interrogated metaspaces and transhumanism through a Marxist framework, and I write regularly on digital material culture via my Substack—covering topics like AI and aura, colour evolution online, and the politics of platform design. I'm inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Crary, Roland Barthes & Olivia Laing, and cultural makers like Derek Jarman and Audre Lordes. My broader interests span digital and environmental humanities, fast fashion, sustainability and the aesthetics of junk. I am especially drawn to the surreal, poetic and speculative in visual culture, working across virtual reality, generative design and experimental publishing. Long-term, I’m aiming to publish academically, speak at conferences and pursue a PhD exploring design’s role in shaping critical futures.