Anuradha Reddy

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

Research through Design is centered on making things, services and systems as a way to construct knowledge. At the same time, the act of making happens behind-the-scenes, often overlooked, outsourced or rushed through. We would like to propose a one-day workshop of making at DIS. Specifically, we propose the making of samplers as a site for constructing a shared space to contemplate the interplay of memory and imagination in design research, inspired by traditional needlework samplers as well as modern subversive stitchwork [24]. By making together, we aim to take time to consider our personal and collective commitments and stance within and outside our roles as design researchers.

The capabilities of humans and AI systems to be creative and perform alongside one another have given rise to new practices of ‘artificial creativity’. In this article, I argue that artificial creativity demonstrates the potential to empower individuals to interface and critically dialogue with computational systems. Reframed as artificial ‘everyday’ creativity, I focus on the curious, joyful and adjacent modes of everyday creativity by including hybrid materials that embrace alternative pedagogies of code and computation. Through the interdisciplinary design approach of ‘critical making’, I craft two unconventionally-coded artefacts that dialogue with AI systems, namely CryptoCrochet-Key and Internet of Towels. Both artefacts are analysed using a four-pronged creativity framework to understand the material translation processes in the artificial everyday creativity practice. With rising concerns about AI's role in misinformation, bias and discrimination, the discussion explores the generative value and limitations of artificial everyday creativity towards the broader goals of civic data literacy and user empowerment.

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part.