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Transdisciplinary design of trust-driven clinical decision support interface for cyber-physical human teams in long-duration human spaceflight
Full text linkAstronauts on future long-duration human spaceflight (LDHSF) missions will collaborate with artificial agents to enable crew medical autonomy and support Earth-independent clinical decision-making, working together as Cyber-Physical Human (CPH) teams. Although trust is a well-understood pillar of successful team collaboration, its incorporation into the design of onboard medical systems and clinical decision support (CDS) interfaces has not been systematically addressed. The work presented in this paper advances the development of onboard medical systems and CDS interfaces by integrating CPH team trust considerations from the early design stages. First, we present a framework to facilitate transdisciplinary stakeholder collaboration to envision solutions in the LDHSF future(s) context. Next, we describe the developed design research tools that allow stakeholders to consider CPH trust in the context of future LDHSF missions. Lastly, we illustrate a case-study application of the tools to derive trust-driven future CPH interface requirements and demonstrate how they are reflected within the conceptual development of the Exploration Medical Ecosystem Design Interface (ExMEDI)
Sound strategies: Music as ideological apparatus
No full textApplying the tools of critical theory, the book does not treat music as a series of case studies that test out theoretical concepts, but rather asks how the particular artistic practice that is the kind of music made by bands might be seen through the lens of political and philosophical writing, and how in turn such practice might illuminate ideas of this sort. We are interested not only in how music is made, but also in how art more broadly, as a kind of liminal space that always has as its horizon an outside to labour, nevertheless mimics the organisation of work in society in general. Labour is an explicit concern for many of the bands surveyed, but the book also asks how specific work conditions delimit what is possible in artistic expression and how these limits become aesthetic parameters. The book's fulcrum is the 1990s as a point of rupture, a time when "a culture of margins collapsed around a centre" and the music that we considered subcultural or alternative lost its oppositional status, submerged in a new pluralism. It opens with an account of transgression as a recurrent theme in industrial music that has been embraced by the right as a bulwark against politically correct censorship. Concentrating on Throbbing Gristle, we consider the function of extreme noise and violent imagery in the band's efforts to reassert the real in the face of mediated culture. But if transgression is foreclosed to us as a strategy today, there may yet be others to excavate within the project of industrial music. By looking at Lukács' articulation of critical realism, we suggest that it is actually in their less obviously transgressive moments that Throbbing Gristle's music most successfully captures the reality of the industrial decay from which they emerged, the horror of the everyday rather than the horror of the forbidden. The second chapter surveys minimal synth cover versions of rock 'n' roll classics, centring on The Flying Lizards. Like the minimalist art of the period, this music represents a modular understanding of commodities as comprised of units to be modified and rearranged at will. Rejecting modernist tropes of originality and invention, they used new technical capacities not to efface the role of the musician or singer as author or performer, but to foreground the construction of these figures. Our third chapter is devoted to Manic Street Preachers' project of media infiltration as counter-hegemonic strategy. Exploring Gramsci's ideas about the barriers to the emergence of a working-class organic intellectual, we consider the band's work in terms of its educational function. Living Marxism, a Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) publication notorious for its contrarian takes on the British left was hugely influential for both the Manics and Stereolab, who are the focus of our fourth chapter. Here, we track RCP's evolution from Trostkyist fringe to the heart of the tory establishment as a corollary to the musical transformation of Stereolab from Marxist indie band McCarthy to retro-futurist mutant lounge combo. We by no means claim that Stereolab took the same kind of reactionary turn. But their abandonment of straightforwardly anti-tory guitar music for an increasingly ambivalent quasi-Marxist dreampop made of ambient loops and burbling analogue synthesisers sits within the same post-political moment of cold war certainties being re-evaluated. Considered from the vantage point of an accelerationist response to an unfettered capitalism, both Stereolab and the RCP push the idea of progress to its limit. Their conclusions ultimately differ significantly, and yet identifying the continuities underpinning them may be useful in reformulating an idea of what the left might look (and sound) like today, or at least locate the points of tension that currently seem to be hindering this very necessary regrouping. Using Chicks on Speed's "We Don't Play Guitars" as our starting point, our fifth chapter discusses the performance of gender, framed by a consideration of why there have been no great women guitarists (to paraphrase Linda Nochlin). To answer this, we examine the circumstances under which such performances take place and their relationship to the conditions of labour that underpin the production of music in the context of electroclash. Our juxtaposition of Laibach and Britpop in the next chapter looks at several theorisations of nationalism and ideology, from Benedict Anderson to Louis Althusser, we propose that popular music is part of a wide constellation of cultural commodities that constructs identification with the nation as a form of fiction that constantly fluctuates between the sublime and the mundane. Our final chapter examines post-imperial Britain from without. Using a detailed analysis of Israeli band Mashina's appropriation of the music of Madness, we explore the consequences of an internalised orientalist view of the middle east. At the same time that Britain was trying to come to terms with its multiculturalism and xenophobia, 1980s Israel was rapidly moving towards market capitalism and caught in a bloody military conflict in Lebanon. Rejecting Adorno's dismissal of popular music as mere market ideology, we argue that duplication and circulation of ideas inherent in the medium can actually be used as critical tools. Throughout, we argue that these bands have used specific methods from which we can learn, not just as regards music production, but also conceptually, in terms of how cultural artefacts perform politics in different ways. The arguments that we make throughout the book about particular bands and movements all concern the relationship between music and ideology and consider music as a cultural strategy for producing new subjectivities. Sound Strategies therefore proposes new ways of listening to, thinking about and perhaps even making music as an artistic and political strategy
HCI opportunities: The Ecological Citizen(s) preferable futures deck
Full text linkThe triple planetary crisis [1] highlights interlinked issues that humanity and multispecies currently face: climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. For viable planetary futures, issues need unpacking in accessible and collaborative means. In contemporary times, it is critical to transition to less impactful distributed practices, external to governmental structures, based on contextual placed-based challenges. This article reports on the design of the Ecological Citizen(s) Preferable Futures Deck, focusing on ‘EC what if question creation’ for positive planetary futures and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) interventions. Its goal is to produce inclusive, accessible outcomes with design/non-design audiences intent on bringing agency/autonomy to their communities based on co-created What if? questions. It shares insights on cross-disciplinary development of the Deck, grounded with partners and leading peers. The HCI opportunity for Ecological Citizen(s) is expansive, but it follows the transition in designers’ roles outlined by the UK’s Design Council: Systems Thinker and Connector/Convener [2]. The EC project seeks to work collaboratively for planetary futures building on; lived, place-based and trained experience(s). The in-progress workshop sessions collated feedback from leading design experts and community voices, presenting applicable reciprocal HCI lessons for to cultivate a digital sustainable society, toward positive planetary design
Design stories Brussels
No full textA live recording of Design Stories Brussels, a panel discussion hosted at Design Museum Brussels on 23 January 2025, which explored the challenges and opportunities of curating around women in design. The panel was part of Looking Through Objects: Women in Contemporary Polish Design, a research platform exploring women’s contribution to social change through design and creative practices launched by London’s Royal College of Art and Warsaw’s SWPS University. The conversation was hosted by Disegno's editor-in-chief Oli Stratford, and featured Agnieszka Jacobson-Cielecka and Gian Luca Amadei, the curators of Looking Through Objects, as well as Nina Serulus and Marjan Sterckx, co-curators of Design Museum Brussels' exhibition Untold Stories – Women Designers in Belgium, 1880-1980. Design Stories Brussels served as a springboard for the upcoming Looking Through Objects exhibition showing at Design Museum Brussels between 9 May to 28 September 2025. The talk was a collaboration between Design Museum Brussels, Polish Institute Brussels, SWPS University and the Royal College of Art
Applying service design approaches to create a sustainable fashion retail future
Full text linkThis chapter explores how Service Design practice offers a valuable way to inspire and guide sustainable fashion retail. Service Design is considered an approach aimed at understanding people and systems, accommodating changes in behaviour on a system level over time. By analysing the work of students on a leading Service Design Masters programme in the UK, this chapter suggests that new Service Designers are already working on a range of emerging areas of interest in the fashion system: material innovation, behavioural change, business model innovation, and technology. They are applying Service Design to the fashion retail system in wide-ranging ways, from shaping behaviour change at the point of purchase, to building services that aid the diffusion of new materials and technology to helping fashion retail actors to identify and exploit intangible assets within the industry. Besides the value that Service Design provides, the findings also suggest considerable barriers to the use of Service Design in fashion retail, including the challenge of obtaining in-depth contextual knowledge and engagement with various players in the complex system. These challenges suggest the importance of dialogue and collaboration between Service Design and Fashion Design, as two seemingly discrete practices to create an interdisciplinary approach to the complex challenge of building a sustainable fashion retail system
Resonant passages: Painting as an allegorical machine
Full text linkThe present research project explores the ways in which painting can function as an "allegorical machine," a sort of alchemy lab where the flux and experimentation with images can provoke unexpected interactions between memory and imagination. In a context in which this relation is threatened by the strong standardizing pressure of current digital networks of production and circulation of images, the aim of this project is to develop an artistic practice capable of turning mere accumulation into different forms of aggregation and encounter. The working hypothesis that sustains this attempt lies in the assumption that such accumulation, usually referred as “media overload”, is not so much a problem of quantity but rather an issue about the redundant, cacophonic quality of the information that suffuses our everyday perception —pictures, documents, videos, data all around us. From this point of departure, the present research articulates a series of pictorial methodologies in which painting operates simultaneously under an archival logic as well as a practice that encourages speculative making and thinking. It is this twofold notion what triggers a pictorial synergy between memory and imagination, letting images to become, and eventually produce, “something other”. Under these considerations, the present thesis is organised around three main chapters. The first section aims to outline the main motivations of this practice-based research project, which arose at the time of integrating an archival dimension into my painting practice. Originally formulated as a strategy to deal with a personal creative crisis I was going through, this approach consisted of rethinking the internal logic of those visual sources that used to serve as a model for my pictorial work. However, from its very onset, this process soon revealed itself as an autonomous side of my practice, which was also capable of embodying a series of large-scale questions about memory and imagination in today’s media culture, largely shaped by the standardizing influence of algorithms. In this regard, the chapter seeks to give an account of this influence in relation to contemporary forms production and circulation of images. By discussing how standardization operates as a profitable form of contemporary iconoclasm, this section explores the scope of the double pictorial-archival configuration of my artistic practice, insofar as it can offer a response to this form of damnatio memoriae. The second chapter delves into the ways in which my practice began to shape this response, which broadly consisted of understanding archives as creative artifacts, not only oriented toward the preservation of the past but also to the production of the future. To that end, the second part of this thesis reviews the processes developed under this temporal layout, underpinned by a concept of record that was capable of incorporating the instability inherent in the highly personalized form of image production that painting entails. The analysis and evolution of these processes are exposed here according to some unexpected transformations in my own creative work, and how the fundamental reference of this research project began to become explicit in it: the work of the German historian Aby Warburg, and in particular, his famous, and to some extent still underappreciated, Atlas Mnemosyne project. The plurality of time both implied and provoked by Warburg’s approach to images is the model from which my own project seeks to devise ways of overthrowing the homogeneous and predictive logic that governs our current technological devices, provoking instead a vertigo whereby images exceed their own material, iconographic and epistemological limits, allowing all kinds of visual sources, previously considered unconnected or too distant, to resonate with each other. This second part of the thesis then seeks to expose the qualities of such an echoing reflection amid the unfamiliar in order to discover what determines the status of record in paintings, considering, as has been said, their highly personalized and unstable conditions of production. Finally, the last section of the thesis is focused on reviewing the creative possibilities that arises from such instability, as they were specifically put in action in the context of a solo exhibition that I held by the end this research project. By resorting to what could tentatively be called a 'poetics of encounter', this exhibition became the instance in which I was able to escalate all the pictorial and archival experiments I conducted along the research, as well as to measure their possible future developments, inasmuch as it was the occasion to observe how such poetic powers can engender the new through the permanent search for a radical otherness within and between images. By drawing upon a speculative drive as a constructive mode that refutes the catastrophic bias that comes from the prevailing model of the obsolete and the new, the research has taken instead the elusive but composing capacity of an aggregative logic as an alternative to the barren and predictable quality of media accumulation. The contribution that this project hopes to make consists of providing the methodological coordinates that have emerged throughout its development, and how they can be used as a sort of compass for navigating amidst the confusion of a global culture obsessed with the predictive mandate of its technological promises, yet increasingly confronted with the glaring evidence that the only secure prediction is that there may no longer be any world to be predicted. The allegorical machine can then be understood as a kit of possible exits from such enclosure, a poetic toolbox for all those who seek to overcome their creative self-fulfilling prophecies
Finding participation: Kathleen Raine's poetry and the search for meaning
No full textThis book offers the chance to (re)discover the remarkable work of Kathleen Raine (1908–2003). Including contributions on her views on nature and the sacred, Neoplatonism and education, the book features Raine’s powerful voice, which will resonate today with new generations yearning for a meaningful world
Green light vat‐photopolymerisation for 3D printing hydrogels with complex lattice structures
Full text linkMoving beyond UV curing systems opens new potential application spaces such as biological, portable printing solutions, as well as innovative chemistries and material properties. A novel visible light printer is proposed for the first time using green Digital Light Processing (gDLP) at a wavelength of 514 nm. Green LED lights are integrated into a commercial desktop DLP printer to 3D print hydrogels with complex designs at high resolution. A workflow process is presented to develop and optimize formulations for gDLP, resulting in two novel in-house photoresin formulations made specifically for green light printing. These formulations comprise PEGDA700 with and without acrylamide, using a type II photoinitiating system of Eosin Y, triethylamine, and N-vinylpyrrolidone. The photoresins are optimized to achieve highly vascularized lattice prints by modulating layer light exposure, chemical components, and photoinitiator concentrations. The gDLP successfully printed hydrogels with a layer height of 50 and feature dimensions as small as 0.3 mm by adjusting light duration per layer. 3D printed hydrogels using both formulations are tested for varying design complexity, including ISO/ASTM standards, and evaluated with optical imaging, SEM, and mechanical testing. This study highlights gDLP technology's potential for diverse applications in tissue engineering and sustainable materials
The magician, the alchemist and the assayer: Characters on stage and at court in early modern Europe
No full textBeyond obedient tools: A tensional-field relational ontology for human-AI co-creation
Full text linkDesign practice frequently characterises generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a compliant, tool-like extension of human intention; however, recent reports of atypical behaviours motivate a reexamination of this metaphor. Grounded in Object-Oriented Ontology, agential realism, and posthumanist theory, this paper introduces the Tensional-Field Relational Framework (TFRF) for human–AI co-creation. TFRF models collaboration as a flat network comprising five semi-opaque node classes: human designer, AI system, creative artefact, intentional vector, and sociotechnical environment, all linked by dynamically weighted edges and circulating flows. We operationalise this perspective as a diagnostic governance grammar: relations are instrumented as edges with quantified flows (data movement, permission transitions, reward cadence, temporal dynamics) and governed at Obligatory Passage Points (OPPs). A trace-based procedure reconstructs translation chains (prompts → platform mediation → model settings → versioned artefacts), thereby rendering “orphaned edges” and “uncontrolled flows” auditable and locating concrete controls (provenance, consent, and variability) at specific OPPs. The contribution is a reproducible lens that advances beyond conceptual assembly toward actionable diagnostics for risk identification and responsibility allocation in contemporary cocreation