3983 research outputs found
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Spectral transmissions: Fallen shrines: A new myth
No full textScrawled in spidery script on the torn remnants of the label on a scuffed C60 are the words: PART ONE: historical development. You take it home and press play: We found you! Thanks for subscribing! You'll receive an email confirmation in 1 hour. For now, here is your 10% discount code to copy and paste at the checkout: A team of people standing around a table, actively participating in a discussion and exchanging thoughts. A man and woman stand on the moon, gazing at a photo of themselves, surrounded by the vastness of space. Congratulations, you have successfully adjusted your set. Please find herein directions for Irregular operational activity. Find out how to Invoke a weirded and haunted modernity. Some listeners have been chosen arbitrarily. Others for their ability to haphazardly determine the thought of an era. A diverse group of individuals gathered around a table, engaged in conversation and collaboration. A shadowy group of figures looms by the roadside, their faces obscured, as darkness creeps in around them. Two individuals are depicted in police mug shots, showcasing their faces and identification details for law enforcement records. You have a chance to be one of them
Happenings
No full textHappenings—created over four years—forms an imagined timescape, alluding to both the celestial and the cellular. This work is an extension of my mind and body, firmly rooted in the physical. It is a meditation on process and time. Through the action of the hand, I seek order, quietness, and rhythm—a deeply human rhythm that allows me to slow down. This deliberate slowness heightens my perception of the moment, teaching patience and focus. Each stitch marks the rhythms of the hand, a delicate performance of obsessive intricacy. Stitching becomes a means to explore the subtle differences that emerge through ritualistic and habitual making—working in and with time itself. These differences only reveal themselves upon close inspection. From a distance, the marks dissolve into fields of binary tones. Through meticulous multiples of dots, I record time and map space. In quantum physics, time is not continuous but granular—appearing smooth and orderly at a large scale yet chaotic when examined closely. Carlo Rovelli describes this as the "frenzied swarming of quanta." My marks echo this granularity. Each seeding stitch acts as a comma or full stop, a signifier of lived time. Stitching serves as a metaphor for human life. The front of the embroidery, curated and precise, reflects the version we present to the world—a map of careful steps and past journeys. In contrast, the back reveals a dense, chaotic network—the unseen connective tissue essential to the whole. This interplay of order and complexity symbolizes the interconnectedness of everything. Displayed at the room’s centre, the work invites viewers to orbit it, seeing both sides as part of a complete and whole entity. As I make, I reveal. As I make, the world fades, replaced by an imagined landscape rendered onto fabric. In this way, materials become a site of consciousness and being
Toward intelligent product interaction: A medium-level stimuli toolkit supporting AI-powered product design iteration and innovation
No full textArtificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the landscape of product interaction design, yet its integration into iterative design processes remains underdeveloped. This study introduces the Inspirational Stimuli Toolkit for AI-Powered Products (ISfAI), a medium-level stimuli toolkit designed to support the ideation and evolution of intelligent product interactions. By providing structured and context-aware stimuli, ISfAI enables designers to explore the affordances of AI technologies and translate them into meaningful user interactions. An empirical investigation involving 21 senior industrial design students was conducted through questionnaires and practice-based design tasks. Results demonstrate that ISfAI significantly enhances iterative refinement by fostering divergent thinking, improving understanding of AI’s human-centered functions and capabilities, and advancing design outcomes across dimensions of novelty, usefulness, creativity, elaboration, and flexibility. This study offers valuable insights into how domain-specific medium stimuli can support the iteration and innovation of AI-powered products, providing a practical toolkit for creating more intelligent, responsive, and user-centered interactions
Design approaches to creativity support with embedded artificial intelligence
No full textThis research investigates designers' attitudes and approaches towards using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to support their creative work. It consists of three studies with people working in creative roles in the design industry: a survey (n=45), a month-long diary study (n=30), and a 21-day digital probe study (n=5). Mixed-methods data analysis identified several factors that influenced participants’ preferences for the type and level of creativity support they desired for a particular task, and their willingness to accept support from an AI system. These factors were found to divide into three groups: Categories, Confines, and Competencies of support. Three Categories of creative support were requested by participants: Information support, related to receiving the necessary data, references, or feedback need to complete a creative task; Generation support, related to direct help with the tools and processes of generating creative outcomes; and Situation support, related to organising and facilitating working environments, schedules and conditions for creativity. Of these, Information support was the most frequently requested. The Confines of support related to the participants’ distinction between creative tasks which they considered of personal value, and which they were less likely to share with an AI system, and tasks which were not considered of personal value. This was found to relate to the perceived originality and creativity of the task experience. The Competencies of support related to the participants’ perception of the knowledge and abilities required to support a task, and how this related to their own knowledge and abilities. Participants were more likely to fully delegate tasks to AI that they already had experience of completing themselves, and preferred to work directly on tasks that were new to them. These factors were tested across the different studies, and formalised into a Creativity Support Framework, which forms part of the contribution of this research, along with the design and implementation of an embedded AI digital research probe, used in the final study
Rojava
No full textA short excerpt on the ongoing revolution in Rojava, North Syria and what it means for social, political and territorial relations in the Middle East and across Left movements toda
The story of the interior: How we have shaped rooms and how they shape us
No full textThe story of the Interior will introduce you to its beginnings, its histories, the main protagonists in its creation, and the numerous exemplary spaces through which its story can be told. In the unfolding of this account, my intention is to tell this story in a manner that will allow you to comprehend the unfixed qualities of the subject, and the ambiguities that are inherent within it. By this, I mean that that it should be understood that any study of the interior is not always a straightforward undertaking. Unlike more established subjects, such as painting or architecture, where histories and the stories of their protagonists are ascertained and corroborated, the comprehensive substance of the story of the interior is a narrative yet to be fully told
Beyond the paper trail: Challenging traditional outputs in design research
Get PDFWe live in a world bloated with data yet starved for wisdom (Kapu'uwailani Lindsey, 2012). As sustainability challenges grow increasingly complex, the limitations of traditional, data-centric research approaches become apparent. This paper argues that the transition towards sustainability necessitates not just technological innovations, but a fundamental ontological shift in how we structure knowledge claims. Modernist systems of values in research, characterised by control, reductionism, and quantification (Latour, 1993), often marginalized tacit knowledge, indigenous ways of knowing, and intuition. Specifically, this paper advocates for the adoption of Research through Design (RtD) (Frayling, 1994; Zimmerman et al., 2007) as a methodological paradigm that bridges the gap between quantifiable data and the lived, context-sensitive realities that are vital for sustainable futures. Finally, we discuss the types of research outputs needed to support this shift, moving beyond traditional peer-reviewed papers and bibliometric quantification towards a more holistic and impactful approach to knowledge production
Out of the scriptorium: De-writing the journeywoman, re-wilding the domestic and making space
Get PDFThis practice-research redraws literary and natural landscapes via an original entanglement of geopoetics, feminist and literary theory, walking, and geometry.The project is translated through a process-orientated, materially-driven methodology. Using fresco, assemblage, domestic arts, biomaterials, sound and printmaking, the research dissolves literary texts in a process neologised here as ‘dewriting’. By testing the archetypal properties of paper, ink, and milk, the project creates imaginary libraries, books conceptualised as ‘desemic’ texts,‘pages’ made of laser-etched milk, and frescoed objects Using these methods and materials, I extract fictional and nonfictional women from their original stories, both from my past and from works by George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf. I focalise these women as art objects, reconfiguring them in new, communal narratives.The catalyst for all four women is my invented character known as May who has walked the natural landscape for hundreds of years. May is a composite woman; she embodies both the Medieval life-writer Margery Kempe, myself as a literary scholar, and the spirit of women who have walked the earth for centuries. May, who moves conceptually across wild terrain with her distinctive travelling library, creates a space that is enabling and unbounded for the women characters who come after her. She is both repository and synthesis.The central research question is whether May and her library can configure limitless, newly-readable possibilities for entrapped female characters travelling unfamiliar territory. Taking the form of a legend, this research dewrites restless, oppressed and neglected Maggie from The Mill on the Floss, Rhoda from The Waves, Lucy from Villette, and Susie, my impoverished great aunt born in 1899. In dissolving the literary and familial texts that hold these characters up, the project asks whether women can be re-embodied in new and mutually sustaining ways; what role might excavation (of both self and landscape) play in decoding and rewriting women as they walk without their texts? What might emerge from their newly materialised and reconfigured life stories? How can these re-visualised narratives draw attention to women’s ongoing struggle for intellectual enrichment? This inquiry uses a ‘seeing’ frame of the strange loop, a geometric form with a logic- defying ability to continually rise in height whilst returning to where it started. It is a democratic and equalising construct and, as such, is a leveller. A strange loop is infinitely expandable and, like a library, can be filled with new women and new texts, ad infinitum.The research assesses whether the self-referential construct of a strange loop can produce a new visual language for women in the landscape and address a series of political questions about their entitlement to walk unhindered and unjudged. Life-writing, with its infinitely flexible scope, extracts the project from the confines of the more rigid terms of ‘autography’, ‘autobiography’, or ‘abridgement’. In an original contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of life-writing and visual storytelling, characters are liberated from their fictions, dewritten, and entangled via visual-art.The work looks through and beyond the surfaces of past and future landscapes, giving space to fictional bodies and new narratives. It dewrites and rewrites a visual legend of potential inclusivity
Appropriate technologies: For regenerative practices and ecological citizenship, yielding planet centred design
Get PDFA planet without biodiversity cannot sustain life; biodiversity is no longer simply virtue but essential to planetary health and human survival. Prioritising the natural world is paramount and urgent, requiring navigation beyond traditional typologies. Governmental actions remain inadequate within planetary boundaries, hybrid and citizen-led initiatives become crucial in engaging planetary futures and distributing opportunities. In Appropriate Technologies (Patnaik et al., 2019), we unpack Ecological Citizenship-driven (Phillips et al., 2024) design propositions for diverse audiences—designers, strategists, technologists, and citizens—yielding tangible insights from live experiments. As environmental challenges are expedited, interdisciplinarity becomes vital in crafting innovative design proposals. Uniting traditional ecological knowledge with emerging technologies offers new pathways to resilience and regeneration (Whyte 2013). Authors critically analyse contemporary design-led technologies, illustrating a paradigm shift from extractive practices to regenerative methodologies. Examples span established case studies and innovative, UKRI pilot projects. Prevailing perceptions often depict technology as inherently oppositional to ecological sensibilities and behaviours. This perspective overlooks the potential of technology to act as a catalyst for ecological restoration and resilience (Rakova et al., 2023). Challenging this binary opposition, our examination seeks a perspectival reorientation towards technology as integrated within Ecological Citizenship, suggesting a new mode of technological engagement deeply embedded in its ecological and social contexts. This reorientation is further developed and articulated through specific design tools and principles, exemplified by case studies indicating preferable future trajectories for technology creation, deployment, and governance. By embedding regenerative principles into technological innovation, we advocate shifting from short-term efficiency to long-term planetary stewardship. Exemplifying case studies include: 1) The Citizens Air Complaint Program, empowering communities to actively report idling vehicles contributing negatively to local air quality. 2) Gain Forest, decentralized non-profit organization leveraging archival analytical methodologies for earth’s ecological data, facilitating transparent and inclusive environmental decision-making. 3) Experimental project AgLab, enabling farms to produce low-carbon, plant-based insulation blocks using existing agricultural waste materials and equipment. 4) Ecology of Things, innovative approaches to ecological-technological integration. Central to these case studies are design principles characterised as: Non-Extractive, 'Designed With, Not For,' Intent on Catalysing Autonomy Contextually Appropriate. Authors consider ‘technology’ not solely a logic of designed material artefacts, but as inextricably situated within a network of material, social, economic, and ecological relationships shaping their production and use; technology embedded in its planetary situation. Ubiquitous technologies like smartphones exemplify this inextricability: ore and its extraction (Jussi Parikka 2015), data centres with their physical infrastructure and extractions (Mytton 2021), online commerce portals (van Dijck, et al., 2018, p.10) and their capital flows, omnipresent signal networks (Bratton 2024), human labour and ecosystemic entanglements (Crawford 2021). Though often experientially transparent, these technologies are planetary in the extent of their presence and scale. Recognising this interconnectedness urges a shift from viewing technology as a neutral tool to understanding it as an active agent within socio-ecological systems. Appropriate Technologies provides an analysis of technology as a transformative influence on the emergence of Ecological Citizenship. It examines the characteristics of technological artefacts and processes as a means of reorienting their relationship to the complex entanglement of human and ecological systems, and reimagines the conditions structuring their behaviours and use. Our analysis finds support in theories which distinguish between instrumental and existential technologies (Antikythera 2023): those which transform as opposed to extract, tools that reconfigure our perceptions, values, and identities contrasted with those which solely engender specific, quantifiable ends. With an eye towards agential autonomy, we are motivated to initiate a move from extractive, inaccessible models of technology towards forms of technological behaviour and praxis that expand autonomy beyond ‘consumer choice’. By framing technology within ecological interdependencies, we challenge dominant narratives of progress that often ignore their unintended costs (Midgley et al., 2021). Avoiding techno-solutionist approaches that de-emphasise the role of technological praxis (Sætra 2023), we understand that Ecological Citizenship has co-emerged with technologies which simultaneously enable the possibility of understanding the same problems they produce (Gabrys 2016). To this end we are conscious of unintended consequences, perverse incentives and paradoxical solutions (Coad et al., 2020). We propose that Ecological Citizenship should not be an anthropocentric endeavor, and that this necessary feature represents a meaningful distinction from conventional categories of citizenship. Current discourses still often reflect the reproduction of ‘human values’, as with the discussion surrounding ‘AI alignment’. With this in mind, a focus on more-than-human ecologies and their entanglements across spheres of analysis (biosphere, technosphere) frames our discussion of Ecological Citizenship as it connects to increasing notions of deheirarchicalisation with regard to the centrality of our place in the world. The urgency of this reframing directly challenges entrenched paradigms that position technology as an instrument of extraction (Light et al., 2024), control (Zuboff 2019), and deterministic optimisation, operating in opposition to ecological systems rather than as an extension of them. By developing modes of technological engagement that are non-extractive, contextually adaptive, and structurally oriented toward autonomy, this framework questions the biases embedded in dominant technological paradigms. To shift the paradigms — From Extractive to Regenerative Design requires different roles. To designers, it provides a set of design tools that avoid universalist, top-down design methodologies, replacing them with an iterative, relational practice attuned to ecological and socio-technical interdependencies. This shift repositions design as a situated dialogue, enabling more responsive and adaptive technological interventions. To citizens, it offers a mode of interaction with technology that reinforces their agency within a dynamic, co-constitutive system. In doing so, this framework collapses boundaries between designer and citizen, repositioning design as a process of ongoing negotiation rather than unilateral prescription. Technological agency instead emerges through reciprocal adaptation within an evolving ecological field. More broadly, this shift from ‘for’ to ‘with’ reframes technological authorship (Almazán et al., 2024), distributing it across human actors and ecological systems in a way that resists pure instrumentalisation, proposing instead a model of technology that is entangled, situated, and generates new ecological affordances. This shift is significant not only in terms of physical assets but also aligns social and relational dimensions surrounding these technologies
Designing wearables: a Practice-led framework for enhancement technologies
Get PDFMy research asks the question How can design re-think the approach to enhancement technologies? I approach this question through reflective practice-led inquiry, designing wearable systems aimed at questioning, extending and reframing the very notion of enhancement. Through three projects and the thesis, I offer a new approach to enhancement focused on expanding an agent’s senses within its environment to access hidden affordances. My research aims at establishing a pragmatic and practice-led approach to enhancement systems that translates philosophical debates into actionable artefacts. The research’s intended audience includes researchers and practitioners seeking a pragmatic approach to design enhancement technologies that extend the sensory information available to an agent. It also contributes to theories of enhancement by developing a design-led methodology for sensory enhancement that uses ideas from theories of embodiment, affordance, and design cybernetics. The thesis builds on the debate concerning human augmentation, which has often followed subjective and ambiguous assumptions. Modern approaches to the subject – bio-conservatism and bio-liberalism – contend that enhancement technologies affect humanity’s essence despite different defining perspectives. I argue for separating the notion of “enhancement” from “human”, focusing instead on any agent’s body and senses, or lack thereof. I redefine enhancement as the practice of enabling agents to perceive environmental information they traditionally would not have access to. This information is presented to the agent through feedback loops that use the agent’s pre-existing senses. I define this practice as sensory layering. I first establish a body-centric framework that addresses enhancement technology agnostically as the enhancement of both humans and human-made agents such as robots. This acknowledges but deliberately sets aside much of the debate about what is essentially human. Within this framework, I redefine enhancements as devices expanding an agent’s senses in its environment to access hidden affordances. Next, I elaborate on five guidelines that facilitate cutting through the cross-domain knowledge needed to develop pragmatic enhancements. Finally, I explore these five guidelines through three case studies to enhance the navigation abilities of human and human-made agents. The five design guidelines for practitioners approaching wearable enhancement form parts of an overall design strategy and are concerned with: (1) selecting the hidden affordance to target, (2) selecting a pre-existing sense to design on, (3) deciding on how the feedback loop integrates with the agent’s pre-existing senses, (4) locating the wearable on the agent’s body, and (5) making the final design accessible to and reproducible by a larger community. The three case studies of wearable enhancements are used to gauge the guidelines’ value, utility and transferability. Further, they present several advancements in the state-of-the-art in robotics, Human-Computer Interaction and wearables. The first case is a robot’s resilience to motor faults. The project aims to develop a motor assembly that predicts a fault and switches to a backup system. The system allows a robot to keep moving by anticipating and preventing hardware failures. I employed on-device deep learning algorithms and a custom 3D-printed motor assembly. This project illustrates how the design guidelines apply to human-made agents. It highlights the importance of Guideline 3 when designing robotic enhancements. The second case study investigates how a human’s sense of direction can be enhanced by layering the perception of magnetic North. This project aimed to exemplify a design pipeline for body-moulded wearable enhancements, resulting in a wearable device moulded on the wearer’s body. To this end, I employed photogrammetry and 3D printing. This prototype highlights Guidelines 2 and 4. The final case study looks into layering digital audio information on humans moving through a physical space. This project introduces a hybrid bone and soft tissue conduction headset and a mixed reality experience that provides contextual audio feedback. The hybrid headset was designed to address the limited ability of off-the-shelf bone conducting headphones to reproduce a wide range of sound frequencies without occluding the ear canal. Further, the system employs centimetre-level accurate ultra-wideband sensors to track wearers indoors, streaming their position data to a simulation in real-time. Based on their position, the wearers receive layered sound cues about the environment they are navigating. This final prototype highlights the role of Guidelines 3 and 4. My contribution to knowledge is threefold. First, each of the three case studies presents a distinct design innovation: a novel redundant actuator in robotics, a body-centric design pipeline for wearable systems, and a hybrid bone and soft-tissue conduction headset for immersive audio experiences. Second, the research introduces and rigorously explores five design guidelines, forming a new, pragmatic framework for developing enhancement technologies. These guidelines provide practitioners with a method for navigating complex domains like design and robotics through sensory layering. Finally, this framework also advances enhancement theory by challenging traditional, human-centric views of enhancement, proposing an agent-centric – whether human or human-made – epistemology. My research materialises theoretical concepts, via experiential prototypes, to explore and reflect on the theory of enhancement itself