Rep / Non-Rep & Foreclosure
Catching up with things, and the first of two posts this week, reflecting on events last week. Staying with this question of foreclosure – how do representational cultures of all kinds, foreclose on futures? The Brain Health Futures Summit led by the truly inspiring Bonnie Shaw last week revealed a further interesting ‘futures’ contradiction that remains, […]
“This communication is not for you.”
Looking to connect 2 recent events / conversations (as is my want) this time to explore a fundamental tension in how we approach AI’s relationship to power: are we designing systems that foreclose possibilities or ones that open compossible worlds? In July at Politics of the Machines Perth https://lnkd.in/gCxQM2YY a panel with Claudia Westermann and […]
Design Frequencies: Sharing International Practice in Design Research
Already deep into semester two here. Last semester School of Design RMIT College of Design and Social Context hosted three visiting speakers, and it’s taken some time to get the permissions sorted. But we’re good to share now! We used the title for the short series: Design Frequencies: Sharing International Practice in Design Research. And […]
The Labour of the Rejected / “Walk the Plank”
Still playing catchup with so many events. A few weeks ago during hashtag#DIS2025, Mafalda Gamboa and I organised an “unofficial, unsanctioned” side event to the main ACM conference in Funchal. Ten researchers signed up to present their rejected work to a willing audience. Pirate DIS 2025 – papers, pictorials, and works in progress that were […]
Design Contradictions
Two projects during Melbourne Design Week with collaborators Michael Dunbar and Liam Fennessy to explore connections across. A possible theme: how design simultaneously demands radical honesty about complex futures while maintaining professional facades that obscure the messy realities of practice… Fabulating More-than-Human Data with AI invited workshop participants to generate synthetic datasets for multispecies urban planning […]
Paradox of Collaborative Speed
Two events in Melbourne over the past 10 days week revealed a tension across contemporary technology debates: how do we build social/technical alternatives when urgency itself seems to undermine the very deliberation that collaboration requires? Trebor Scholz‘s talk on platform cooperatives (May 16th) and the No Harm Done #2 workshop on risk, technology, and climate […]
Slow Materials, Slow Money: Can Design Decelerate?
Two events that I’m trying to tie together to glean some connections. The CHI panel on Regenerative Material Ecologies in HCI, and the Workshop on the Future of Money and HCI. A connecting theme amongst many, might be how the two sessions tackled the same paradox: how do we slow down in urgent times? Smart, […]
From Food Networks to AI Governance
Back to reporting on events in Narme/Melbourne. From Food Networks to AI Governance: Reflections on Two RMIT Events. Rethinking Access and Affordability The Food Cultures and Practices Enabling Impact Network launch brought together academic and community expertise, exploring the challenges of food accessibility and affordability in our communities led by Natalie Jovanovski and Bhavna Middha: […]
Planetary Pedagogies
Following the launch of PlanetaryCivics two weeks ago, this is the second extension to contributions made to a co-authored paper on Planetary Pedagogies – found here: https://doi.org/10.25439/rmt.28477475.v3 Co-authored with Linda Daley Cathy Greenfield Kelly Hussey-Smith Julian Lee Brigid Magner David Rousell Naomi Stead Wendy Steele Professor Gary Thomas Bonnie Lester began the provocations which can […]
Space Debris to House Keys
Part 2 of catching up with the weeks of activity in Melbourne through February. From Space Debris to House Keys: Reflections from RMIT’s Australian Posthuman Summer Laboratory 2025… The 2025 Summer Lab is all over, but the conversations and activity continue into this week with the launch of the Planetary Civics Inquiry https://lnkd.in/gZ_FWxrm . Rewinding […]
Measuring our demise
Oh Melbourne, three parallel events that spanned the week: RMIT College of Design and Social Context’s Australian Posthuman Summer Laboratory the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and ACMI FACT So the first of a couple of posts that connect some dots. First, the roundtable with Orit Halpern and in conversation with […]
Design ‘by’ Data Imaginaries
Friends and colleagues will recall Prof Jon Oberlander who was at the heart of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh from the very beginning. Jon passed away seven years ago in December 2017 and was a huge loss to a wide community both as a friend and an intellectual guide as we became more entangled with […]
‘Open a joint account with a forest’
Final day of the Halfway to the Future conference and it’s proven to be a quite brilliant coordinate in going someway to answering the question that fell out of the Hackathon in May: Do we have the data sets to move toward a Regenerative Future? We evidently don’t, but Miek Dunbar and I have been […]
It’s all about time
I feel like a journalist these days, but the intention (perhaps after changing jobs, changing hemispheres and changing ecosystems) is to use events to help me process a wider ecology of thought and practice. This time 3 inter-related talks / conversations at the Halfway to the Future Conference in Santa Cruz that has an emphasis […]
DCODE / The Finale
At the end of the DCODE Network and time to live blog on the outcomes from the ESRs… Observation 1: The projects operate across 1. the promise that data-driven systems are able to look across social-technical systems at scale, 2. and somehow simultaneously afford individuals opportunity to pursue their projects and practices according to their […]
Every-thing is an Instrument
Three events that reflect on practitioners entanglements within complex data ecologies revealed the tensions of having material (data) extracted by platform technologies, as well as the position of authoring artefacts that rely on deriving data from other sources. 1. McKenzie Wark, This Hideous Replica: In her talk RMIT University Capitol Theatre, McKenzie Wark discussed the […]
Designing across and within ecosystems
Connecting 2 events, looking for correspondence seems is an emerging tactic in these posts, and two that proved fascinating in recent weeks was the Mapping Constellations for Regenerative Design conversation at DRS2024 Boston, & guest lecture by Danielle Wilde on Growing Collaborative Futures. The DRS Conversation with Ann Light, Prof. Andrea Siodmok OBE FRSA , […]
Gaps between Futures
A series of rich presentations and conversations aligned over the last few weeks to extend the question: Do we have the data sets to move toward a Regenerative Future? This time the question was triangulated by talks that explored the gap between futures – Futures mundane, and Futures imagined. During her keynote talk at the […]
Data + Regen Futures
Do we have the data sets to move toward a Regenerative Future? Using two events again to develop a space of enquiry, in particular about what are the data sets that we have, and what do we need to adjust our bearing toward a regenerative society. Last week Dr Bree Trevena, Bonnie Shaw Raffe Brennan […]
Post Human experiences and measurement
Very reluctant to get into the habit of offering monthly reflections on the move to RMIT and into Naarm, but the past 4 weeks have been quite extraordinary, hinging around the Australian Posthuman Summer Laboratory that was organised by Fiona Hillary and Troy Innocent. Extending over two weeks beginning with a conversation between N’arweet Prof. […]
Everything we think we know about the world is a model
A familiar approach is emerging in these monthly posts – to use two events within the RMIT ecosystem to reveal opportunities / tensions toward a Regenerative Futures initiative. This time a talk by Mariana Amatullo, PhD is complemented by a review of students pursuing the Master of Design Futures RMIT University led by Marius Foley, […]
“I miss you” / Design Performance
In February 2023 I was invited to contribute to a seminar / webinar curated by Dipali Mathur, a visiting Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). The event organised by IASH and the Centre for Data, Culture and Society (CDCS) at the University of Edinburgh was entitled: Re-materialising […]
FTML: Laundering Money / Data
In June a bunch of Design Informatician’s presented at DRS 2022 in Bilbao on the relationship between data and money. With Chris Elsden and Bettina hosting the track Designing New Financial Transactions: Theories, Case Studies, Methods, Practice and Futures, Chris Elsden and myself published Designing new money: Creative transactions on Twitch and myself and colleagues […]
Miromations
Miromations are short, highly participatory performances for 100’s of people within a Miro board. Following simple rules inspired by Craig Reynolds code for boids (1987), the moments manifest a ‘human murmurations’ as participants followed simple principles. The flow of cursors, each one choreographed to follow a ‘flight path’ on the Miro board, and adhering to […]