Our collection of a dozen papers, each from a different field, is now available:

Prototyping Across the Disciplines

June 15-16, 2020, Stan and Milena led an online but synchronous design workshop for a dozen leading researchers in the Digital Humanities.

On November 28, 2019, Milena gave a presentation at the Designing for People research cluster in the University of British Colombia. The title of her somewhat provocative talk was “From Style to Humility: 150 years of design progress.”

From October 18-22, 2019 Milena and Stan met with other members of the qlab and gave a series of talks hosted by the Games Institute. Their subjects included the intersection of feminism and human-computer-interaction (Milena), transformational design research (Stan), and a workshop on techno-tampons (Milena).

Following up on the workshop in January 2018 in Guaviare, Colombia, four members of the lab helped to deliver in August 2019 a series of sessions on imagining a better future. Approximately 100 people from Tumaco and vicinity, as well as elsewhere in Colombia, spent two weeks working on 10 design projects on topics such as luxury cacao production, making musical instruments, children’s playgrounds, and the fashion industry. At the same time, we worked on achieving an improved understanding the value systems of the various participants from Tumaco.

On June, 7th 2019 Ricardo presented part of an ongoing research program at UIUC: the project as a tool for merging competence and issues. The audience consisted of design researchers, teachers and students (graduate/undergraduate). The presentation was named “Rethinking Design and Designer.”

Stan was a visiting scholar for the month of March at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA), hosted by Petra Ahde-Deal of the Wearables lab. He gave two public talks: one on the use of prototyping to investigate concepts; the other on design for peace and reconciliation in Colombia. He also ran a workshop on using prototypes to define and address research questions.

Stan was guest editor of the 13th issue of Disena magazine, which came out in Fall 2018. Here is the video introduction he made: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1S77L2gM5mIdzTJVMifL9RDP2Oeb6mis1

On Sept 17, 2018, Stan pitched a project to the 5th Health Care Engineering Systems Symposium on using VR to teach medical students about drug design, as well as how specific drugs work. The proposal builds on two years of work Stan did with a mathematical chemist (David Minh) up at IIT. Basically, the person wearing the VR headset can see the protein they hope to interfere with, and try various attachment sites for the ligand. Here is the short video (1 min 30 sec) of the presentation.

Stan was invited to speak on “The Design of Preferred Futures” in Vancouver on Aug 12, 2018, as part of the first Business Symposium at the annual SIGGRAPH conference. SIGGRAPH is the largest conference held by the Association for Computing Machines (ACM), with over 17,000 participants. Its focus is on film, gaming, and emerging technologies.

From the abstract:
We have all heard from researchers and entrepreneurs that the future already exists but is just not evenly distributed yet. But entrepreneurs need to simplify things, because they have something to sell. In fact, there is never just one future, and the ones we have on the radar now will be vastly different once they are evenly distributed. What design offers is not one preferred future, but instead a choice among possible futures. Designers at their best will imagine these futures, visit them, and bring things back for the rest of us to compare. In this talk, we will examine three cases: the design of a multinational information ecosystem, design for post-conflict zones, and the design of an autonomous train.