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 […]
The Future of… Things
I’ve been asked to provide a sort blog post following the question: The Future of… The proposition was intriguing, and allowed me to extend the human tendency toward ‘thingification’ that Barad mentions in Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter “Thingification—the turning of relations into “things,” “entities,” “relata”— infects much of […]
Climbing into the trolley: Cinema’s use of AI to extend moral and ethical dilemmas
Since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, film-makers have given AI human characteristics in order to create the kinds of moral dilemmas typified by the infamous ‘trolley problem’ thought experiment. But what does this say about the important ethical decisions we need to make in our relationship with AI technology? It is not hard to see why AI […]
Co-Transactions
Transactions with another Since 2017 I’ve been leading an EPSRC funded project with Oxfam to explore how the international NGO might use blockchain technology within their many complex projects. By the second year the team had identified with Oxfam an interesting opportunity for sending secure transactions across borders, with a capacity to confirm receipt. In […]
Matches that won’t light & hairdryers that won’t turn on
The closing scenes of Bella Tar’s eco-apocalyptic movie A torinói ló (2011) as the oil in the lamp refuses to light, presents a different possibility for artefacts within an Internet of Things, one in which they won’t comply with human desires, when ecological needs are greater. Balancing local demands with a national or international supply […]
New Economic Imaginaries
Amongst the works that have emerged through the ‘after money’ related projects which include the AHRC Design in Action, ESRC After Money, EPSRC OxChain and EPSRC PETRAS, a series of products and platforms have provoked a line of thought to consider the extent to which interaction with these prototypes are able to impact upon the […]
Apocalyptic Design in the Capitalocene: Every-day Geopolitics and Blockchain
OxChain conference paper at Postcards from the Anthropocene June 22-24, Edinburgh Chris Speed & Kate Symons This post is an edited version of a conference paper given at Postcards from the Anthropocene conference. In Design Informatics we have a series of projects that specifically deal with international development agencies. In particular, we have worked closely […]
Plastic Dinosaurs
Short 7 minute talk / intervention into the Talbot Rice Gallery / Exponential event on the 24th of April 2017 that was framed as: “Join an event that accelerates from 10 years to beyond 100 million in just 2 hours, moving from speculative talks to experimental poetic and musical performances. Taking the lead from the […]
Things2Things and the KASH Cup
As the term the Internet of Things reached peak hype according to Gartner in the summer of 2016, a collaborative project with Elisa Giaccardi (TU Delft), Ron Wakkary (TUE) and the Design United collective offered a chance to pause for a moment before the term tumbles into the trough of disillusionment. Working across the three […]
ArtCasting: Where does it take you?
In 1991, during my undergraduate Fine Art degree at Brighton Polytechnic I was part of a small three-person show entitled ‘Common Ground’. Along with Esther Lane, Ed Harper we set up a small show in the foyer of the Grand Parade site for what I recall was a chance to show off works during the […]
Bodystorming the BlockChain
Context In April Design Informatics was invited to develop a Lab of Labs for Martyn de Waals Design And The City programme in Amsterdam. Taking place over 48 hours, the workshops were intended to expose ‘contemporary design methodologies, and their relationship with living labs and smart cities’. The team (Larissa Pschetz, Dave Murray-Rust, Hadi Mehrpouya […]
Practising the Block Chain
For the past year I have been working with Debbie Maxwell (now York Uni) and Dug Campbell (Bitcoin Scotland) to make the blockchain accessible to designers to allow them to ideate through its possibilities. Although hyped, the blockchain represents (for me at least) a way of thinking that challenges some of the control and linearity […]
ThingTank
Way back in September 2013, I joined a week long ideas retreat in Moscow to develop solutions toward the design of new innovation platforms. Funded through the MIT-Skoltech initiative, part of the Skoltech, the week seemed to respond to the following question: “How can an institution or government seed, grow, and maximize technological innovation and […]
Ghost Cinema App: Temporal Ubiquity and the Condition of Being in Everytime
Last year Chris Barker and I worked on the Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface and Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge project. The AHRC-funded research project was conducted by the Universities of Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh in partnership with English Heritage (EH). The project aimed to complement The Survey of London (EH) work on the parish of […]
PuBliC: Future Everything one day living labs (x2)
During the Future Everything festival February 2015 Design Informatics were invited to develop and deliver a 48 hour workshop for the festivals Future Lab strand. Our proposal entitled PuBliC originally intended to offer a platforms across which Pedestrians, Bikes and Cars (or other road transport) could cooperate toward better travel experiences. In the end we […]
Toilet matters
A short blog post on the ongoing implications for a family home as it becomes reconstituted through the addition of data that is streamed from smart objects. Living in an environment that is equipped with an Internet of Things involves the placement of multiple sensors that record change in conditions, in order to construct a […]
“Is Your Marmite Watching You?”
Design Informatics took part in this year’s Edinburgh Fringe with the Beltane Public Engagement Network. It showed a new and improved version of Take Me I’m Yours which we have previosuly shown at the Expanded Narative Symposium and at Ubicomp. Is Your Marmite Watching You? explored what it might be like when all of the […]