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 […]
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 […]