Send in the clowns is the account of a post-disciplinary, critical, creative practise that over the course of 6 years explored the subject of ‘digital innovation’ and ‘innovating in the digital’. The digital in this context is interpreted in the widest possible sense and includes any instance where cybertechnology relates to/with humans. This framing has put forward my proposed concept of the digiscape; a phenomenological interpretation of cyber-technology. In 3 distinct interventions (Ch.3,4,5) I have appropriated literatures on inventive methods, sustainable (...) design and diffraction for my thinking. Through the lessons learned from each intervention I have constructed my own interpretation of non-representational theory and methods. I make the case that these can be a fertile ground for emancipatory politics concerning research and development in/on the digital. Seeking to test my claim that such approaches can be deemed valuable to practising innovators, I have submitted my hypothesis together with a non-representational experiment (‘Lickable Cities’) to CHI 2018 [a] (the pre-eminent journal in the field of Human-ComputerInteraction). The submission was accepted. Ch.6 discusses the implications of this on the scholarship of non-representational-theory and philosophy. Thus myconclusion is that non-representational approaches are indeed of value to innovators as a means to catalyse a type of awareness(es) that makes otherwise inutterable questions possible. I am claiming that through fostering alliances across methods, traditions, disciplines, writing styles, ethnicities, media and epistemologies- with the help of non-representational theory- more inclusive research is enabled and method itself can be invigorated (Ch.7). As mywork is concerned with knowing about knowing, and knowing about ways of knowing, myworkis firmly placed within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and is written for an STS audience. [a]The ‘ACM’ Conference on ‘Human Factors in Computing Systems’, the principal venue for research in the f ield of ’Human-Computer Interaction’ (HCI). (shrink)

This paper will examine what I have called the 'cybernetisation of the exhibition’, namely the process through which the exhibition came to be conceived as an informational and communicational medium. Focusing on the seminal exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA in London in 1968, I will reconstruct and situate the event within a critical historical trajectory shaped by institutional and informational infrastructures, characteristic of cybernetisation, which one could see as an agent and symptom of ‘system shifts’ (...) around the 1970s. Firstly, I will retrace how cybernetic formulations – which redefine all entities, living and non-living, as information processing systems according to dynamics of regulation and feedback – informed the artworks and ‘cybernetic artefacts’ on display, paying particular attention to cyberneticist Gordon Pask’s environment the Colloquy of Mobiles. Secondly, the exhibition as a whole will be discussed against the backdrop of its host institution, the ICA, which to some extent offered a case of a cyberneticised gallery and institution characteristic of the new European post-war social, political and technological formation. Finally, I wish to expand and open up this analysis to recent examples of cyberneticised exhibition-making by discussing documenta15 and the concept of lumbung in relation to ‘second order cybernetics’. (shrink)

The term ‘social design’ is used in a variety of contexts, but—or maybe because of this—it is far from clear what it means. The starting point for this paper is that there is a need for stronger and more critical community discourse to understand and clarify what social design is and what it does. By analyzing key texts, the paper identifies commonalities, disagreements and unresolved questions in relation to social design. Drawing on the example of citizen science, the paper argues (...) for a need to develop principles for social design for further inquiry and discipline-building for social design. The paper offers twelve principles that focus on the notion of the social in social design, its methods and practices and its normative intent, as well as its critical reflexivity. These principles are intended as a ‘potluck’ boundary object to kickstart a stronger social design community. The paper reports feedback from two workshops where these principles were discussed and tested with design academics suggesting how the principles can be applied. (shrink)

Science and sensibility positions the artist at the focus of exploration into the living world through a combination of scientific process interpreted and developed through the sensibility of an artist's hand and eye. This essay is a developed form of a paper originally presented at the colloquium: Image in Science and Art in Lisbon.

The famous quantum physics experiment 'Schrödinger's cat' suggests that some situations are undecidable, i.e. they exist outside of the normative distinctions between 'truth' and 'false' because both states can co-exist under certain conditions. This paper suggests that photography has very close links with this state of affairs, because photography allows one to move from the world of certainty into the quantum dimension of undecidability and indeterminate states.