We hope to see you at her lecture. Details below.

“Imaginative Interventions: Design as Inquiry”
Daniela K. Rosner | Human-Centered Design and Engineering | Tactile and Tactical Design Lab | University of Washington
Friday, March 18th | 2:30pm | Engineering / Computer Science (ECS) 108 | Poster

As the fields of media and technology studies gradually integrate experimental and collaborative approaches, they face new challenges around emerging modes of knowledge production and transmission. To understand these developments, I present a series of case studies examining interventionist projects through three lenses: interjections that foreground dominant sociotechnical logics, responses that specify technological counter-narratives, and extensions that amplify specific concerns underlying technology projects. Each of these heuristics draws on design-lead forms of inquiry such as critical design and making (DiSalvo 2012; Galey and Ruecker 2010, Ratto 2011) to generate fresh understandings of design products and practices. In reflecting on these cases I show how social inquiry may help analysts understand design—enabling them to theorize and imagine design differently. Conversely, I show how an engagement with design may help scholars clarify social investigation.

Daniela K. Rosner is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington, co-directing the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT lab). Through fieldwork and design, her research examines emerging sites of digital production—from hobbyist fixer groups to feminist hacker collectives—and their surprising connections to broad-scale engineering developments. She has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS), holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago, and a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 2009, she has contributed to Interactions Magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI, as a regular columnist and forum editor.

Post by Victoria Murawski, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Poster by Victoria Murawski.

“Pixels in the Material World: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Marching Cubes”
Jesse Colin Jackson | Electronic Art and Design | University of California, Irvine
Thursday, December 3rd, 2015 | 10 AM | MacLaurin D114 | Poster

Digital images consist of pixels: squares that carry color and brightness values. The three-dimensional world can also be understood to be composed of rectilinear units, such as bricks, blocks, or voxels. Conceptions of area and volume as assemblies of discrete units are increasingly predominant in the digital age, as these units are easily reduced to a binary series of zeros and ones. In this talk, Jesse Colin Jackson will demonstrate that a unit-based understanding of space can be illuminated by the architectural ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Marching Cubes algorithm is an early method for making a surface binary, still commonly used in computer graphics; Jackson will describe his interactive installation that, through an intervention inspired by Wright, permits tactile engagement with this algorithm, and generates dialogue about the ways in which information technology shapes contemporary culture.

Jesse Colin Jackson is a Canadian artist based in Southern California. His practice focuses on object- and image-making as alternative modes of architectural production, manipulating the form and ideas found in the human landscape through the expressive opportunities provided by digital visualization and fabrication technologies. Jackson has received project funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design, the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, and the Ontario Arts Council. He is a 2014 Hellman Fellow at the University of California, and was a 2008 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto. Jackson is an assistant professor of electronic art and design at the University of California, Irvine; he taught previously at the University of Toronto and OCAD University.

Post by Victoria Murawski, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news and fabrication tags. Header image care of Jesse Colin Jackson. Poster by Victoria Murawski.