2024 Research Speaker Series
Threaded Thoughts: Toward Making Technoscientific Knowledge Otherwise
What can we learn from a stitch? A cut? A thread? This talk explores legacies of fiber arts and their uncanny encounter with computing techniques. Putting perspectives from history of science in conversation with critical design studies, I examine how the interlocking of artistic knowledge and technoscientific techniques expose the ideas and labors that get activated—or expropriated—through an engagement with fiber. Informed by case studies in algorithmic systems development and medical practice, this talk considers how connecting adjacent tools of intellectual inquiry helps reimagine the relationship within.
Dr. Daniela Rosner is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. She has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Adobe Systems, Nokia Research and as an exhibit designer at several museums, including the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Rosner's work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. In her book, Critical Fabulations, she investigates new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility (MIT Press, 2018).
The HCDE Research Speaker Series is hosted Thursdays in Autumn Quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.