Technology and More-than-Human Design: Three Conceptual Shifts

In this talk, Giaccardi argues for fundamentally rethinking the ways in which we design. No longer a stabilising process, design must position the crafting of agency as foundational to our understanding of autonomous technologies as was once the notion of function to our understanding of tools. To illuminate this, Giaccardi introduces and discusses examples from healthcare, mobility and sustainability, unpacking how designers might consider what is uniquely human and uniquely artificial in the performance of agency, and how should they attend to the ethics of this co-performance as a decentralised act of design with probabilistic outcomes.

Elisa Giaccardi is Professor and Chair of Post-industrial Design at Delft University of Technology, where she leads the research group Connected Everyday Lab. Her work focuses on the challenges that a persistent digital transformation of society means for the field of design. After pioneering work in metadesign, collaborative and open design processes, her research over the last decade has turned to more-than-human design. In this space, she engages with how digital things today connect and learn, and thus actively participate in design in ways that previous industrially produced objects could not. Her work has contributed significantly to the development of post-industrial and post-humanist approaches in design and HCI. Elisa is currently the international research network and PhD program DCODE. (www.dcode-network.eu)