Redesigning Stewardship

The workshop provided an opportunity for UK Public Bodies invested in public engagement around estates, and practice researchers in Arts & Humanities to come together, to present and discuss interests, approaches and ambitions.   Arts & Humanities researchers introduced practices and interests related to stewardship and public engagement, setting some context for core issues. Representatives from the National Trust, Forestry Commission and the Canal and Rivers Trust presented their ambitions around Arts approaches to public engagement with estates and assets. Public engagement officers also discussed their own ambitions for Goldsmiths. The session took an inventive and open approach, with an ambition to foster intellectual excitement and creative possibility, while also considering concrete constraints and opportunities. What novel formats of stewardship, in relation to participatory encounters with the estates and assets of public bodies, might be supported through Arts & Humanities practice research

Take Me To Your River (Exhibition)

Take Me To Your River was a Design project undertaken by students from MA Design Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, inviting designs that activate novel encounters and experiences with rivers for local communities. The exhibition element was a public showcase in Ladywell Park in Lewisham on May 29 2023 in partnership with London Rivers Week 2023 and Thames21. The responses of the six groups at times support playful encounters with water as a material. At other times, invented ceremonies emphasise the river as a symbolic force, conveying our wishes to the ocean. The industrial and maritime histories of the Thames also feature here, with obscured and often contested fragments of the past reassembled. As an alternative to citizen scientists, these projects reimagine river users as creative civics, forging inventive associations with rivers as spaces of environmental sustainability and public enagement with placemaking. The projects were supported by the Civic Catalysts programme at Goldsmiths

Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement

This full paper offers a critical reflection of a design practice in which a speculative approach to design became entangled with upstream engagement with biotechnology research. Given that both practices claim to enable a public discussion about emergent technology, what is the nature of their mixing, and how should an analytical account of such a design practice be made? I start with separate reviews of the respective features of these two approaches, considering practitioner accounts and histories along with analytical literature where those practices are objects of research. Then I take the case of the public engagement project Material Beliefs to develop an empirical account of their confluence. Initially I discuss labs as sites where designers, scientists, and non-experts come together to discuss and to problematize accounts of biotechnology research. Next, I examine the process of making speculative designs, and here I emphasise the ways in which issues, materials and practices become compiled as exhibitable prototypes. Finally I consider the circulation and reception of these designs in public settings, including exhibitions, workshops, and online formats. I argue that speculative designs’ move on upstream PEST is an imbroglio that goes beyond mixing the formal features of practice, and requires a discussion concerning the actions of the designer in relation to a broader set of accountabilities. Authorship of the processes that lead to design outcomes, the description of design outcomes, and the effects of those outcomes become distributed and negotiated by an extended set of commitments coming from researchers, policymakers, educators, curators and promoters. Ultimately, I contend that this mixing provides an opportunity to foster a reflexive and empirical account of speculative practice, to engage in analysis of the organisations and settings that support a speculative approach, and to provide a critique of upstream engagement

Turning People into Workbooks

A review of a topic presented at a keynote panel session at Research Through Design 2017 in Edinburg

Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement

This thesis offers a critical reflection of a design practice in which a speculative approach to design became entangled with upstream engagement with biotechnology research. Given that both practices claim to enable a public discussion about emergent technology, what is the nature of their mixing, and how should an analytical account of such a design practice be made? I start with separate reviews of the respective features of these two approaches, considering practitioner accounts and histories along with analytical literature where those practices are objects of research. Then I take the case of the public engagement project Material Beliefs to develop an empirical account of their confluence. Initially I discuss labs as sites where designers, scientists, and non-experts come together to discuss and to problematize accounts of biotechnology research. Next, I examine the process of making speculative designs, and here I emphasise the ways in which issues, materials and practices become compiled as exhibitable prototypes. Finally I consider the circulation and reception of these designs in public settings, including exhibitions, workshops, and online formats. I argue that speculative designs’ move on upstream PEST is an imbroglio that goes beyond mixing the formal features of practice, and requires a discussion concerning the actions of the designer in relation to a broader set of accountabilities. Authorship of the processes that lead to design outcomes, the description of design outcomes, and the effects of those outcomes become distributed and negotiated by an extended set of commitments coming from researchers, policymakers, educators, curators and promoters. Ultimately, I contend that this mixing provides an opportunity to foster a reflexive and empirical account of speculative practice, to engage in analysis of the organisations and settings that support a speculative approach, and to provide a critique of upstream engagement

Empirical Speculation - US Invited Talks

A set of four invited talks hosted by colleagues engaged in design research at US universities. The talks were delivered at Parsons New School, New York, with the TransD group on 12th April 2016, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the Industrial Design Faculty on 13th April 2016, at Stanford University Institute of Design in the d.school on 18th April 2016 and at Georgia Institute of Technology in the Digital Media lab on 20th April 2016. The talk dealt with PhD thesis topics with a focus on empirical speculation as a methodology for designers engaged in practice research

Form and Movement in Domestic Networked Systems

It is increasingly desirable for electronic artefacts in the home to be grouped as sets, sharing data and properties across a network. A range of strategies can be used by a designer to explore the value and use of the systems for users, in particular through the properties of form and dynamic behaviours, including visual output and movement. This paper focuses on a range recent work which exploits rich behaviour and novel forms to highlight opportunities for user engagement in the home

Anatomy of a failure: how we knew when our design went wrong, and what we learned from it

In this paper, we describe the failure of a novel sensor-based system intended to evoke user interpretation and appropriation in domestic settings. We contrast participants' interactions in this case study with those observed during more successful deployments to identify 'symptoms of failure' under four themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. These themes provide a set of sensitivities or orientations that may complement traditional task-based approaches to evaluation as well as the more open-ended ones we describe here. Our system showed symptoms of failure under each of these themes. We examine the reasons for this at three levels: problems particular to the specific design hypothesis; problems relevant for input-output mapping more generally; and problems in the design process we used. We conclude by noting that, although interpretive systems such as the one we describe here may succeed in a myriad of different ways, it is reassuring to know that they can also fail, and fail incontrovertibly, yet instructively

The Prayer Companion

An electronic device developed by the Interaction Research Studio, in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London has been introduced into the lives of a group of nuns in York who otherwise abide by medieval traditions

Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social Science - conference delegate hand-out

Design and social science disciplines intersect at a number of points. While there is excellent work exploring many of these points of contact, there is also a tendency for social science to treat design as a topic (e.g. what does design do and how might this be accounted for in sociological terms?), and for design to treat social science as a resource (e.g. what useful knowledge does sociology produce and how can this be deployed to model users or construct scenarios?). This day conference aims to contribute to the move beyond this pattern. Collecting a group of leading practitioners in design and social science, the conference will present a series of dialogues and commentaries on a range of common, open issues. Specifically, the format runs like this: invited speakers (Harvey, Michelle, Pelle and Bill) will speak for around 25 minutes; there will then be a short response/reflection/ discussion from a local colleague (please see below), then 20 minutes open discussion. Each titled session is not rigidly defined, rather the topics are simply prompts to further thought, for instance: how might the practices of speculative or critical designers furnish social science with new insights into the study and articulation of society? How might social science’s interest in complexity contribute to the iterative process of making in design? In what ways might these fit together or articulate? In the final session, Lucy will make provide some general observations and comments and there will be a final open discussion