When Rejane Dal Bello graduated from university in the year 2000, she was expecting to see a world filled with flying cars and the systematic chaos caused by the millennium bug. “Our teachers told us four years before we graduated that there would be no other jobs than ones in tech, and there would be no way to survive in design without it,” she explains during her talk at Birmingham Design Festival.

The Brazilian born designer took her tutors’ word for it, and decided to become tech savvy. “I had to learn processing by myself because there was no support or internet to talk about it with people. It was a different world,” she says. The year 2000 came and Dal Bello was ready to fully embrace the world of tech but – as we all now know – there were no flying cars or millennium bug to to be seen.