okay so where do you start a TEDx talk
I’m going to start my TEDx talk with
another TEDx talk so I watch this TEDx
talk maybe two years ago and it really
changed the way that I started to think
about design and think about my own
making process this one is about animal
architecture and what the practitioner
talks about is about what they would
call about rewilding a city so how do
you think about architecture and bring
in animals back into the city and
sharing the spaces that we we live and
work here with non-human animals so I’m
gonna use that term quite a lot as I as
I go through the talk this idea of a
human animal and a non-human animal and
then after watching the talk I started
to think about my own making process and
and how might I think slightly
differently about the way that I design
games and work the way that I design
playful objects and because I’m a
lecturer and I work with students all
the time I used one of these examples
with my students to try and challenge
them into thinking slightly differently
about games and play and how we might
design for other sorts of creatures so
other sorts of animals so I’m gonna use
this example of cat fishing to soak up
fishing to was commissioned by Friskies
the cat food company part of Nestle and
and what they wanted to do was to create
a game for cats so a video game for cats
to play on an iPad and what’s really
interesting about the iPad is it closes
down some of the kind of what we would
talk about is control schemers so that
joysticks and mice that you would use
for the playing games and it makes it
quite tactile which is great for animals
and there’s a whole series of these
different examples iPad games for
lizards etc so this is this
is interesting to me because it’s
slightly different and I know that
there’s something is something
ridiculous about designing games for
cats and and as we go through the talk
I’ll start to talk about designing video
games for horses as we head towards
again which is a ridiculous idea but
it’s an interesting idea and there’s
something interesting inside that space
so when I talk about design I talk about
design in a slightly different way so
any kind of design for me is is
political
so we’re thinking about new futures
whenever we make a product whenever we
make a an object or a game to go out in
the world we’re trying to change
people’s minds or give them a different
experience which for me is a kind of
highly political act is an artistic
thing but it’s also about changing the
world that people live in how could you
use then design as a process to think
slightly differently about the world
that we live in instead of trying to
make designs which are kind of locked
inside consumerism trying to make good
products for people to make money for me
how could I use the design process to
start to think and challenge people and
challenge the way that they think about
the world so we took all this process a
critical design or speculative design
practice so using design as a process to
try and change the way that people think
now my original I teach Media Studies
now but my original degrees in sculpture
I went away and I was going to be the
kind of next Damien Hirst
so I thought when I went to university
and what I realized was that in an
article I was doing a lot of that stuff
I was calling a sculpture but at the
same time it was this idea of a
speculative design was was coming about
this idea that you could make objects
and they can challenge the way that
people think when they see them and that
there’s another rising processing design
which is this idea of what we call
participatory design so instead of me as
a designer making objects or games for
audiences how do I get the stakeholders
so the audiences or the consumers as
part of that making process so the
stakeholders engage in every aspect of
that making process which is is a new
kind of mode of designing at the moment
and quite kind of
quite an interesting way for designers
to design but there’s a problem in that
so something like the Friskies example
that i used is designed for cats it’s
not designed with cats so how could you
possibly design for something which is
non human something which I’ve never
experienced before I don’t know what
it’s like to be a cat and neither
designers of the games and I don’t know
what it’s like to be a horse
look I use technology in games and play
to open a space where I could start to
consider what it must be like to be a
different species so I’m going to draw
on some work by some philosophers like
Neagle who talks in his very famous
essay about the idea of being a bat so
the idea is that that we understand the
world from a very fixed human centric
point of view okay so I can’t really
understand what it must be like to be a
a different creature a different
non-human animal I can’t understand what
it’s like to be a bat the idea of
experience in the world we don’t just
experience the world through to kind of
peep holes looking out at the world our
experience of the world is a very bodily
experience so for a human can never
really understand what it’s like to be a
bat in the world it can never understand
what it’s like to be a Martian as as an
eagle would say or I can never really
understand what it’s like to be my wife
or my son or my daughter they our
experience of the world is is not
something mechanical it’s something
which is wrapped up in our history and
and also our kind of construction of
about the way that we see the world so
we talk about this process as an
anthropocentric process I go so
anthropocentric breaking that down it’s
about putting humans at the center of
the world and we’ve seen those old maps
where we used to plot the the the world
of the earth as the center of the
universe and we used to think that the
planets orbited around Earth and and now
we kind of understand the world in the
universe slightly differently and for me
that’s a good analogy for the idea of
anthropocentrism so this idea that
humans at the centre of the world and
will change the world around us to meet
our needs without really considering
what it must be like to be a different
creature in that environment or a
different organism inside that space so
what must it be like to be a cat inside
a front room looking at a TV how does a
cat understand a TV how does it count
understand an iPad and when a cat plays
that game is the cat really
understanding what it’s doing or is it
really just an amusement tool for a
human to kind of control the play over
another animal so we talked about being
restricted by the resources that we have
I have two arms two legs two eyes mouth
my century apparatus is a human sensory
apparatus and I understand the world
around me from a very human point of
view but maybe I could maybe I could
make something which might help me
understand what it’s like to be a
different sort of creature in the world
a different sort of animal in the world
it’s also important in the design
process whenever we think about design
or we talk about design we talk about it
as a process of empathy so for me to
design for a different person or design
for a different market I have to
empathize with that other market which
means that I have to build an
understanding about what it must be like
to be that those other people or other
things in the world which is very very
difficult if I’m trying to empathize
with a different species which have has
a completely different kind of motor
scheme or it moves around the world
differently has very different sensory
apparatus to understand the world around
it so how might I design for a different
creature if really I don’t understand
what it’s like to be that creature in
the world so where do we start we just
start with some design objects so this
is by an Irish artist and they came up
there’s a pair of them they came up with
a series of things called
meta perceptual helmets so these meta
perceptual helmets help just start to
simulate some of the eyesight of
different creatures so this one’s a
hammerhead shark and it uses mirrors and
lenses to kind of change the optics of
the human so it essentially takes your
eyes and it’s like two periscopes and it
puts it on the side of your head so that
that’s the meta perceptual helmet and
there’s also the goatman project so this
is another speculative designer who
created a an exoskeleton to help him
move like a goat and created a external
stomach to help him digest brass and a
helmet which was designed to try and
shut down some of the cognitive
processes of his brain using
electromagnets to help him start to
think like a goat this is a really
dangerous space to start to be in in the
world and he writes a really interesting
book about what it must be like to be a
goat and kind of goes through this
speculative process and one of his
friends says to him what happens if you
goes too far
happens if you go too far and you can’t
come back and you actually become goats
in that process you’ve you’ve kind of
crossed that border and become a
nonhuman animal there’s there’s new
projects like bird Li now bird Li is an
interesting one because it uses
immersive technologies which is I’m
going to get onto him
my work shortly but birdly gives you
these two wings which you can kind of
flap and it gives you this VR headset
and it gives you the kind of view of a
bird flapping across New York but what’s
interesting if at the back of the
picture you’ll see that the eyesight is
actually the eyesight of human so that’s
a human’s eyesight inside the body of a
bird because birds are eyes aren’t on
there the front of the heads they they
don’t have the same vision as us they’re
often on the side of the head so really
what we’ve done is we’ve taken the
bird’s vision and created an apparatus
around the human which gives it some of
the movement of a bird but without the
embodied eyesight this this project
animal superpowers is another
interesting example there’s a Serie
whole series of objects in the series
this one helps children see like an ant
so there’s a headset and it shows you
what’s coming through at the hams and
you move the hands through the grass and
you can kind of get the point of view of
an ant as it moves through the grass
this idea of opening up a space to
consider what it must be like to be a
different sort of creature inside the
world or a nonhuman animal inside the
world so have my first prototype
I call this Aquinas I have two children
which I mentioned earlier
Maeve and Ronan we have a piece of
wasteland out the back of our house and
it has a horse that lives on on the
wasteland and maven Ronan a really
really interest in this horse the horses
come and go and they have different
different names
Captain America horse left in summer and
as that was named by Ronan and brassy
stripes is is the new horse that lives
there and names by Maeve but they’re
really interested in the horse and what
it must be like to be the horse they’re
very concerned about whether the horse
is too hot too cold
whether it has enough to eat and what
the experience of the horse is like what
happens to the horse whenever they leave
and go to the preschool in nursery and
that really interested me this idea that
they were so concerned about the
experience of the horse and what it must
be like to be that horse inside the
field whenever they’re going away
to school to learn these things what
does the horse ting since then we’ve got
a hamster and um I was I was asked the
other day by Maeve what what Freddie the
hamster does whenever she goes to school
and where the Freddie the hamster can
read and write and I said well no
Freddie a hamster doesn’t go to school
and that’s why you go to school you go
to school to read and write and if you
had a hamster school then Freddie could
probably learn to read and write along
along with you and she shows him the
books and whatnot it’s it’s lovely to
watch but it’s also this innocence of in
understanding what it must be like to be
an animal inside that space so we have a
tendency to anthropomorphize creatures
we think about the cat as experience in
the world the same as we do so whenever
we go out to work and we leave the cat
or the dog in the house how does the cat
and the dog experience the environment
that they’re in um and what must it be
like to be a cat or a dog inside that
space so I start to prototype a helmet
which we could use to understand what it
must be like to be a horse so it takes a
an immersive head say it takes an oculus
rift headset and it takes two cameras
emits them on the side so you can start
to get the vision of of what it must be
like to be a horse and it has this this
kind of weird cardboard thing in the
middle and then I found that when I
decide to do more research into horses
not only do they have obviously they
have their eyes on the side of their
heads but they have these large eyes and
those large eyes work like fisheye
lenses which means that a horse can
actually see 350 degrees around it so it
can see everywhere apart from its back
which is really interesting as well so
yeah it actually experiences the world
in a very different way than the way
that we experience the world this
picture is of some color chart in that
we did turns out a horse can’t see red
so just start to simulate what it must
be like to be a horse had to come up
with a computer program that could strip
all of the color red out of the spectrum
so we now have a new prototype so this
new prototype has two fisheye lenses and
the computer package that sits in the
back end of it strips out all of the
color red out of a spectrum so when you
put it on it essentially takes your eyes
and puts them on the side of your head
puts fisheye on it so you can see almost
all the way around yourself and strips
out all of the color red
so you were starting to get to somewhere
where we can start to experience what it
must be like to have the the eyesight of
a horse at least now this is all
prototyping at the moment and it’s still
early days this is part of the the
helmet so for me it’s very important to
put a head on so it’s like putting a
mask on and becoming something different
and this is me wearing the mask and a
final picture of me trying to experience
what it must be like to have this
separate body so we’ll never I’ll never
really experience what it’s like to be a
horse inside the world but using some of
these new technologies these new
immersive technologies I could start to
open up a space where I could start to
consider my relationship with animals
and start to consider what it must be
like to be grassy stripes inside that
field or another animal inside that that
area so I’d really call on you to start
to think about the idea between the
border between us as a human and
non-human animals thank you [Applause]
I’m going to start my TEDx talk with
another TEDx talk so I watch this TEDx
talk maybe two years ago and it really
changed the way that I started to think
about design and think about my own
making process this one is about animal
architecture and what the practitioner
talks about is about what they would
call about rewilding a city so how do
you think about architecture and bring
in animals back into the city and
sharing the spaces that we we live and
work here with non-human animals so I’m
gonna use that term quite a lot as I as
I go through the talk this idea of a
human animal and a non-human animal and
then after watching the talk I started
to think about my own making process and
and how might I think slightly
differently about the way that I design
games and work the way that I design
playful objects and because I’m a
lecturer and I work with students all
the time I used one of these examples
with my students to try and challenge
them into thinking slightly differently
about games and play and how we might
design for other sorts of creatures so
other sorts of animals so I’m gonna use
this example of cat fishing to soak up
fishing to was commissioned by Friskies
the cat food company part of Nestle and
and what they wanted to do was to create
a game for cats so a video game for cats
to play on an iPad and what’s really
interesting about the iPad is it closes
down some of the kind of what we would
talk about is control schemers so that
joysticks and mice that you would use
for the playing games and it makes it
quite tactile which is great for animals
and there’s a whole series of these
different examples iPad games for
lizards etc so this is this
is interesting to me because it’s
slightly different and I know that
there’s something is something
ridiculous about designing games for
cats and and as we go through the talk
I’ll start to talk about designing video
games for horses as we head towards
again which is a ridiculous idea but
it’s an interesting idea and there’s
something interesting inside that space
so when I talk about design I talk about
design in a slightly different way so
any kind of design for me is is
political
so we’re thinking about new futures
whenever we make a product whenever we
make a an object or a game to go out in
the world we’re trying to change
people’s minds or give them a different
experience which for me is a kind of
highly political act is an artistic
thing but it’s also about changing the
world that people live in how could you
use then design as a process to think
slightly differently about the world
that we live in instead of trying to
make designs which are kind of locked
inside consumerism trying to make good
products for people to make money for me
how could I use the design process to
start to think and challenge people and
challenge the way that they think about
the world so we took all this process a
critical design or speculative design
practice so using design as a process to
try and change the way that people think
now my original I teach Media Studies
now but my original degrees in sculpture
I went away and I was going to be the
kind of next Damien Hirst
so I thought when I went to university
and what I realized was that in an
article I was doing a lot of that stuff
I was calling a sculpture but at the
same time it was this idea of a
speculative design was was coming about
this idea that you could make objects
and they can challenge the way that
people think when they see them and that
there’s another rising processing design
which is this idea of what we call
participatory design so instead of me as
a designer making objects or games for
audiences how do I get the stakeholders
so the audiences or the consumers as
part of that making process so the
stakeholders engage in every aspect of
that making process which is is a new
kind of mode of designing at the moment
and quite kind of
quite an interesting way for designers
to design but there’s a problem in that
so something like the Friskies example
that i used is designed for cats it’s
not designed with cats so how could you
possibly design for something which is
non human something which I’ve never
experienced before I don’t know what
it’s like to be a cat and neither
designers of the games and I don’t know
what it’s like to be a horse
look I use technology in games and play
to open a space where I could start to
consider what it must be like to be a
different species so I’m going to draw
on some work by some philosophers like
Neagle who talks in his very famous
essay about the idea of being a bat so
the idea is that that we understand the
world from a very fixed human centric
point of view okay so I can’t really
understand what it must be like to be a
a different creature a different
non-human animal I can’t understand what
it’s like to be a bat the idea of
experience in the world we don’t just
experience the world through to kind of
peep holes looking out at the world our
experience of the world is a very bodily
experience so for a human can never
really understand what it’s like to be a
bat in the world it can never understand
what it’s like to be a Martian as as an
eagle would say or I can never really
understand what it’s like to be my wife
or my son or my daughter they our
experience of the world is is not
something mechanical it’s something
which is wrapped up in our history and
and also our kind of construction of
about the way that we see the world so
we talk about this process as an
anthropocentric process I go so
anthropocentric breaking that down it’s
about putting humans at the center of
the world and we’ve seen those old maps
where we used to plot the the the world
of the earth as the center of the
universe and we used to think that the
planets orbited around Earth and and now
we kind of understand the world in the
universe slightly differently and for me
that’s a good analogy for the idea of
anthropocentrism so this idea that
humans at the centre of the world and
will change the world around us to meet
our needs without really considering
what it must be like to be a different
creature in that environment or a
different organism inside that space so
what must it be like to be a cat inside
a front room looking at a TV how does a
cat understand a TV how does it count
understand an iPad and when a cat plays
that game is the cat really
understanding what it’s doing or is it
really just an amusement tool for a
human to kind of control the play over
another animal so we talked about being
restricted by the resources that we have
I have two arms two legs two eyes mouth
my century apparatus is a human sensory
apparatus and I understand the world
around me from a very human point of
view but maybe I could maybe I could
make something which might help me
understand what it’s like to be a
different sort of creature in the world
a different sort of animal in the world
it’s also important in the design
process whenever we think about design
or we talk about design we talk about it
as a process of empathy so for me to
design for a different person or design
for a different market I have to
empathize with that other market which
means that I have to build an
understanding about what it must be like
to be that those other people or other
things in the world which is very very
difficult if I’m trying to empathize
with a different species which have has
a completely different kind of motor
scheme or it moves around the world
differently has very different sensory
apparatus to understand the world around
it so how might I design for a different
creature if really I don’t understand
what it’s like to be that creature in
the world so where do we start we just
start with some design objects so this
is by an Irish artist and they came up
there’s a pair of them they came up with
a series of things called
meta perceptual helmets so these meta
perceptual helmets help just start to
simulate some of the eyesight of
different creatures so this one’s a
hammerhead shark and it uses mirrors and
lenses to kind of change the optics of
the human so it essentially takes your
eyes and it’s like two periscopes and it
puts it on the side of your head so that
that’s the meta perceptual helmet and
there’s also the goatman project so this
is another speculative designer who
created a an exoskeleton to help him
move like a goat and created a external
stomach to help him digest brass and a
helmet which was designed to try and
shut down some of the cognitive
processes of his brain using
electromagnets to help him start to
think like a goat this is a really
dangerous space to start to be in in the
world and he writes a really interesting
book about what it must be like to be a
goat and kind of goes through this
speculative process and one of his
friends says to him what happens if you
goes too far
happens if you go too far and you can’t
come back and you actually become goats
in that process you’ve you’ve kind of
crossed that border and become a
nonhuman animal there’s there’s new
projects like bird Li now bird Li is an
interesting one because it uses
immersive technologies which is I’m
going to get onto him
my work shortly but birdly gives you
these two wings which you can kind of
flap and it gives you this VR headset
and it gives you the kind of view of a
bird flapping across New York but what’s
interesting if at the back of the
picture you’ll see that the eyesight is
actually the eyesight of human so that’s
a human’s eyesight inside the body of a
bird because birds are eyes aren’t on
there the front of the heads they they
don’t have the same vision as us they’re
often on the side of the head so really
what we’ve done is we’ve taken the
bird’s vision and created an apparatus
around the human which gives it some of
the movement of a bird but without the
embodied eyesight this this project
animal superpowers is another
interesting example there’s a Serie
whole series of objects in the series
this one helps children see like an ant
so there’s a headset and it shows you
what’s coming through at the hams and
you move the hands through the grass and
you can kind of get the point of view of
an ant as it moves through the grass
this idea of opening up a space to
consider what it must be like to be a
different sort of creature inside the
world or a nonhuman animal inside the
world so have my first prototype
I call this Aquinas I have two children
which I mentioned earlier
Maeve and Ronan we have a piece of
wasteland out the back of our house and
it has a horse that lives on on the
wasteland and maven Ronan a really
really interest in this horse the horses
come and go and they have different
different names
Captain America horse left in summer and
as that was named by Ronan and brassy
stripes is is the new horse that lives
there and names by Maeve but they’re
really interested in the horse and what
it must be like to be the horse they’re
very concerned about whether the horse
is too hot too cold
whether it has enough to eat and what
the experience of the horse is like what
happens to the horse whenever they leave
and go to the preschool in nursery and
that really interested me this idea that
they were so concerned about the
experience of the horse and what it must
be like to be that horse inside the
field whenever they’re going away
to school to learn these things what
does the horse ting since then we’ve got
a hamster and um I was I was asked the
other day by Maeve what what Freddie the
hamster does whenever she goes to school
and where the Freddie the hamster can
read and write and I said well no
Freddie a hamster doesn’t go to school
and that’s why you go to school you go
to school to read and write and if you
had a hamster school then Freddie could
probably learn to read and write along
along with you and she shows him the
books and whatnot it’s it’s lovely to
watch but it’s also this innocence of in
understanding what it must be like to be
an animal inside that space so we have a
tendency to anthropomorphize creatures
we think about the cat as experience in
the world the same as we do so whenever
we go out to work and we leave the cat
or the dog in the house how does the cat
and the dog experience the environment
that they’re in um and what must it be
like to be a cat or a dog inside that
space so I start to prototype a helmet
which we could use to understand what it
must be like to be a horse so it takes a
an immersive head say it takes an oculus
rift headset and it takes two cameras
emits them on the side so you can start
to get the vision of of what it must be
like to be a horse and it has this this
kind of weird cardboard thing in the
middle and then I found that when I
decide to do more research into horses
not only do they have obviously they
have their eyes on the side of their
heads but they have these large eyes and
those large eyes work like fisheye
lenses which means that a horse can
actually see 350 degrees around it so it
can see everywhere apart from its back
which is really interesting as well so
yeah it actually experiences the world
in a very different way than the way
that we experience the world this
picture is of some color chart in that
we did turns out a horse can’t see red
so just start to simulate what it must
be like to be a horse had to come up
with a computer program that could strip
all of the color red out of the spectrum
so we now have a new prototype so this
new prototype has two fisheye lenses and
the computer package that sits in the
back end of it strips out all of the
color red out of a spectrum so when you
put it on it essentially takes your eyes
and puts them on the side of your head
puts fisheye on it so you can see almost
all the way around yourself and strips
out all of the color red
so you were starting to get to somewhere
where we can start to experience what it
must be like to have the the eyesight of
a horse at least now this is all
prototyping at the moment and it’s still
early days this is part of the the
helmet so for me it’s very important to
put a head on so it’s like putting a
mask on and becoming something different
and this is me wearing the mask and a
final picture of me trying to experience
what it must be like to have this
separate body so we’ll never I’ll never
really experience what it’s like to be a
horse inside the world but using some of
these new technologies these new
immersive technologies I could start to
open up a space where I could start to
consider my relationship with animals
and start to consider what it must be
like to be grassy stripes inside that
field or another animal inside that that
area so I’d really call on you to start
to think about the idea between the
border between us as a human and
non-human animals thank you [Applause]
Please follow and like us: