From Nuns to Monkeys: Research through Design as Situated Entanglement

In this age of totalising Big Tech and encroaching AI, design-led research offers possibilities to explore how technology may serve overlooked values and communities. This requires a combination of empirical attentiveness, conceptual openness and situated making that contrasts with current academia’s focus on theory development enmeshed in literature. Yet the results can offer compelling glimpses of alternative presents. I illustrate this with work from the last 25+ years, ranging from devices that repurpose internet content for spirituality and daydreaming, through speculative fictions of multispecies cities, to recent designs that offer new opportunities for zoo animals, and argue that neither intertextual analysis nor large language models can replace mindful, situated design practice.

About the speaker:

Bill Gaver is a Visiting Professor with the Animal-Computer Interaction Lab at the Open University, Emeritus Professor at the University of Northumbria and co-leader of the Interaction Research Studio in London. With the studio, he has developed a portfolio of work over 25 years that includes research products, methodologies and conceptual insights for and about practice-based design research, with an emphasis on ambiguity, ludic design, and emergence. His recent research has grown to focus on multispecies design practice with nonhuman animals.