- Friday 26 September
This session brings together a group of speakers selected from the open call “Entangling the Maker-Researcher-Artist-Activist-Citizen in the Real World.” The presenters share artworks, installations, and prototypes grounded in their design and research practices, responding to the call’s theme and the urgent complexities of our time - from technological entanglements to sustainability challenges. These design practitioners approach creation as a deeply situated, political, and relational act. Through participatory, adaptive, and regenerative methods, they foreground questions of agency, ethics, and critical engagement. Rather than offering fixed solutions, the session opens alternative design futures shaped by more-than-human thinking, embodied knowledge, and sensory aesthetics.
Presentations
The Maker as Includer: Personal Bias, Empathy & Making Way
“Drawing on my recent thesis project focused on inclusive design for older adults and digital gaming, I will share insights gained through empathetic explorations and highlight the transformative power of acknowledging personal bias and assumptions in the design process.”
– Caitlin Herd
Caitlin Herd (she/her), Research Assistant at Malmö University, MSc in Interaction Design, British
More-than-Human Empathy Building: Implementing Sound and Making Strange in the Interactive Sound Installation "Calls by the Sea"
“Our interactive sound installation Calls by the Sea aims at fostering empathy with bladderwrack algae to shift human perspectives on it. To approach this, we offer an exploration of its motion and haptics mediated by sonification and touch. This encounter is enabled by the method of making strange, achieved through the mapping of bladderwrack motion values to sound output, promoting a reorientation of a human’s perception of the plant.”
– Carl Julius Sälzer
Carl Julius Sälzer (he/him) Graduate Designer, German
Andrei Beretean (he/him) Interaction Designer, Romanian
Adrián Brito (He/Him) Industrial Designer, Spanish
Titapa Ritthichot (she/her) Interaction Designer, Thai
Johan Lundgren (he/him) Interaction Designer, Swedish
Sensory engagement with what we leave behind: Politics through aesthetics in a mixed reality walk for cemeteries
“This presentation will cover how a critical sensory engagement with technology and site informs my embodied composition techniques for mixed reality walks in public space. I will share the process of Av jord är du kommen / Ashes to Ashes, a mixed reality walk for cemeteries created in 2025.”
– Marika Hedemyr
Marika Hedemyr (she/her). Dr/PhD, Swedish
Staring Right Back – a critical design project that investigates the invisible complexities behind the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower
“Through the installation Staring Right Back, we challenge the assumption that the sunflower automatically generates empathy. Fact is that it is not reality. The installation staged the experience of being stared at and assessed and prejudged. We have worked at the intersection of design, activism, and personal experience, using the body as a tool for insight and a point of entry for dialogue.”
– Rikke van Hauen
Rikke van Hauen (she/her), Roskilde University MA student, Digital Transformation - Digital Design, RUC, Denmark
This session is presented by Roskilde University