Emerging situations and 2025 summer workshop invitations
We're diving into GenAI for kids, launching workshops, and exploring design's future!
Hello!
Emerging Situations
Over here at Design Research Works Central we are continuing the work.
New colleague Violet Owen is building on our work to do with using Design Research to figure out how to introduce primary school kids to GenAI.
Another new colleague Saadia Shah is doubling down on the many workshops we ran during our Lab Engagements Programme during which we explored the idea of an Observatory for Design Research (weirdly, via the metaphor of Soup, which we published about!). The idea is to curate and share a collection of the best examples of Design Research. Got something to share? Reach out to me or Saadia (s.shah12@lancaster.ac.uk) and let us know what it is.
Meanwhile our realtime GenAI system PromptTank is going from strength to strength and will feature at the V&A Museum’s Digital Design Week and the Shambala festival, in August and September respectively. The same system is fostering collaborations with Keith Saha in a Theatre context and KlangHaus in the immersive musical realm.
Invitations
The motivation for writing the email was to send invites to three workshops I’m going to be involved with. The first two are both going to be at the DIS conference on Madeira in July.
Six Degrees of Speculation - https://www.sixdegreesworkshop.com/
This one is focused on unpacking (or fastforwarding) understandings of time and temporality when we speculate - an underrepresented but very powerful concept in Design Research.
From Dead-Ends to Dialogue: Third Workshop on GenAI & Design Research - https://willemvandermaden.com/DISworkshop2025
This will be the third time this bunch of people have got together, and it’s always a great discussion. This time we’re getting deep into the idea of ‘Semantic Stop Signs’ - those little ideas that just stop a discussion from forging ahead into rich territory. These things are increasingly becoming a problem when trying to work through the impact of GenAI.
Data Craft as Boundary AI Practice - https://sites.google.com/view/datacraftworkshop
This one is going to be held at the CHI Italy conference in October. My contribution will be to give some kind of keynote talk or activity. It plugs right in to the work I’ve been doing about Prompt Craft and, I think gets to the burning heart of how Design Research is such a powerful tool at this moment in the (rapid) adoption curve of many data-driven AI technologies.
Like Alt.CHI?
I discovered that the rather wonderful thing that is known as Alt.CHI is changing (or maybe disappearing) and was minded to create this little survey - it has garnered over 160 responses so far, including lots of amazing insights about the value of the venue. I will be sharing it with the people who have influence over the future of Alt.CHI, so, if that’s of interest, please do go add your name and stories.
End
If you got to the end. Thanks for reading. I know time is short.
What’s going on with you?