With the intersections between ‘Design’ and ‘Research’ still debated and open for interpretation, CAMD’s Center for Design promotes and hosts the annual “Design Research Week”, in partnership with the Design Museum Foundation, CHeT, Center for the Arts, Bouvé College of Health Sciences, The Magic and Medicine Lab, and more.
To register for in-person events, click here. To register to attend events virtually, click here.
Schedule of Programs
All events aside from the keynote conversation will be held in the Center for Design in Ryder Hall
12-1 pm Living Intimately with Machines: Can AI Be Disabled?
Hosted by Laura Forlano, in collaboration with the Burnes Center
The event will discuss the author’s research. Here is a snippet: “This is not a research project that I chose but rather one that landed on me in 2011 when I learned I was a type 1 diabetic. For four years, from 2018 to 2022, I used one of “the world’s first” automated systems for delivering insulin to manage and control my blood sugar. I identify, research, and write as a disabled cyborg. I am a cyborg not because my body is (partly) made up of machines (the insulin pump and sensor system) but rather because of my interest in cyborg knowledges, practices, and politics [1], which take disability into account in order to question the myth of technological perfectionism and solutionism while at the same time seeking out possibilities for more generative questioning and engagement…”
2-3 pm What does it mean to design AI?
Hosted by Ryan Bruggeman, in collaboration with the College of Engineering
Current design research focuses on the collaboration of designers and AI during the design process. This approach is hindered by the fact that design is only commenting on the collaboration with AI after it has been developed. What does it mean for design to engage with AI during its early development stages? What happens when the problem of developing AI becomes a design problem? During this presentation I will highlight the shifting role of designers, discuss how it is time to move away from the paradigm of adopting AI into the design process, and introduce how to develop the design process of AI.
3-4:30 pm Threads of Assumption: AI-service design and Weaving
Hosted by Sofie Hodara, Martha Rettig, U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, Maria Finkelmeier, Threads of Assumption Artists, in collaboration with Estefania Ciliotta
Relying on our expertise as artists and designers, we cultivate a meditative space for contributing sensitive stories. Participants will experience how hands-on activities, like writing and weaving, can personalize abstract and sensitive topics and make complexity tangible and accessible. Participants will leave with a blueprint of best practices for facilitating a workshop for qualitative data collection, tools for integrating physical making into workshop design, and an expanded understanding of how gender bias affects them, their communities, and the service design process.
5-6:30 pm Design and AI at Play: Ani Liu and Michelle Millar Fisher on Design as Research
Hosted in collaboration with the Center for the Arts. The keynote conversation with artist Ani Liu will take place in West Village F, followed by a short reception at Gallery360.
Ani Liu is a research-based artist working at the intersection of art & technoscience. Through her work with emerging technologies, Ani examines the biopolitics of reproduction, labor, care work and motherhood.
Liu’s project A.I. Toys, which explores the role of emergent technologies and how they shape our perceptions of “play,” is featured in Gallery 360’s current exhibition At Play. On Thursday, March 23rd, Ani will be in conversation with curator and design historian Michelle Millar Fisher in West Village F, followed by a post-keynote reception in Gallery 360, located on the first floor of Curry Student Center. They will discuss the role of A.I. in developing this project, her research-based artistic practice, and the future of teaching the next generation of designers and thinkers with emergent technologies. To learn more about the current exhibition, “At Play,” click here.