The Cost of Being Connected: Dreaming of smart home futures through design fiction

For some, smart home living is a sign of the future, and provides an opportunity to solve major societal problems. For others, it is just a vague buzzword. This thesis project sought to explore the potential implications of living with smart and connected technologies in our most private spaces and to engage non-experts in a conversation about...

Spatial Robotic Experiences as a Ground for Future HRI Speculations

This work illustrates how artistic robotic systems can provide a reservoir of unfamiliarity and a basis for speculation, to open the field toward new ways of thinking about HRI. We reflect on a collaborative project between design students, a media art studio, and design researchers working with the baggage handling department of the Schiphol...

Challenging the concept of smart doorbells by designing new interactions based on privacy

In less than a decade, smart doorbells have become a household stable, introducing a new form of surveillance cameras. But while the cameras have given a new purpose to the doorbell, they also come with an array of privacy concerns. Much critique has been given to the management of data and the effect private<br/>surveillance has on society....

Sensing in the wild: A DCODE DRS Lab exploring a more-than-human approach to distributed urban sensing

The Sensing in the Wild Lab is a speculative experiment in designing a de- centralised urban sensing system from a more-than-human perspective. It is part of DCODE, an H2020-ITN project that explores the future of designing with AI. During the Lab participants assume different identities – roleplaying as children but also as moss, as municipal...

Social dreaming together: A critical exploration of participatory speculative design

While often seen as an elitist practice found only in artistic and academic circles, speculative design has grown in popularity and is now practiced in more diverse contexts and with a variety of participants. In order to gain a better understanding of this ostensible 'participatory turn', this paper presents an initial exploration of...

Designing Unique Emotions for Autonomous Delivery Robots

Robotic delivery services can provide contactless delivery, a highly sought-after service under mandates of social distancing since the coronavirus pandemic has arisen. With the rise of autonomous delivery robots, humans' and robots' collaborative existence has become a crucial topic to be discussed. This graduation project aimed to explore the...

Speculative Design as Thought Experiment

Speculative design is a subsidiary field of critical design practice. It generally involves developing scenarios based on a central object, often a prototype. Because it is concerned with alternative present and future states, many acknowledge the potential of speculative design for raising critical discussion and public engagement on science...

Encountering ethics through design: a workshop with nonhuman participants

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we...

Speculative loopholing: opening limitations in Ijburg block 44a's architectural power processes

The problem adressed in this text is the fixation of capacities to interact by laws, which limits the realization of valuable transformative potential in the built environment. The purpose of this text is twofold: First to uncover the processes behind such fixation-through-laws for the built environment and; Second, to propose a different ...