Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges

Things we could design:For more than human-centered worlds

How posthumanist design enables a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, with whom we are entangled. Over the past forty years, designers have privileged human values such that human-centered design is seen as progressive. Yet because all that is not human has been depleted, made extinct, or put to human use, today's design contributes to the existential threat of climate change and the ongoing extinctions of other species. In Things We Could Design, Ron Wakkary argues that human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but is itself part of the problem. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, and numerous design works, he shows the way to a relational and expansive design based on humility and cohabitation. Wakkary says that design can no longer ignore its exploitation of nonhuman species and the materials we mine for and reduce to human use. Posthumanism, he argues, enables a rethinking of design that displaces the human at the center of thought and action. Weaving together posthumanist philosophies with design, he describes what he calls things--nonhumans made by designers--and calls for a commitment to design with more than human participation. Wakkary also focuses on design as" nomadic practices"--a multiplicity of intentionalities and situated knowledges that shows design to be expansive and pluralistic. He calls his overall approach" designing-with"-the practice of design in a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, and in which we are bound together materially, ethically, and existentially

Keeping the Data within the Garment: Balancing Sensing and Actuating in Fashion Technology

Fashion technology designs typically combine sensing technology and actuators to register and respond to information about the environment and/or the human body. The ways in which designers use and integrate these data into garments, however, varies on a scale from highly theatrical and outward-oriented designs to subtle and inward-oriented applications. This pictorial presents five garment designs created between 2013 and 2020, that occupy the more utilitarian and inward-oriented end of the fashion technology spectrum. We visualize and analyze how these five designs combine sensing and actuation, highlighting the benefits of direct biofeedback and of keeping the personal data within the garment. The pictorial aims to show that striking the right balance between sensing and actuation is pivotal to realizing the physical, functional, social and ethical wearability of fashion technology design

Digital Crafts-machine-ship: creative collaborations with machines

Learning a craft is to become undone in our relation to both the machine and the material. Crafts-machine-ship is the attempt to share our autonomy with the machine. The desire for such collaborations is driving our demand for different outcomes. The loom is an early machine, a distinctly human construction; it is seen to be the start of automation and industrialization, seen to replace human hands with abstractions and mechanical movements

Keeping the Data within the Garment: Balancing Sensing and Actuating in Fashion Technology

Fashion technology designs typically combine sensing technology and actuators to register and respond to information about the environment and/or the human body. The ways in which designers use and integrate these data into garments, however, varies on a scale from highly theatrical and outward-oriented designs to subtle and inward-oriented applications. This pictorial presents five garment designs created between 2013 and 2020, that occupy the more utilitarian and inward-oriented end of the fashion technology spectrum. We visualize and analyze how these five designs combine sensing and actuation, highlighting the benefits of direct biofeedback and of keeping the personal data within the garment. The pictorial aims to show that striking the right balance between sensing and actuation is pivotal to realizing the physical, functional, social and ethical wearability of fashion technology design