What happens when we give physical things their own money to spend? How can this alter power relationships and shift social dynamics? Chris Speed will explore these questions by highlighting the use of smart contracts in design, from a coffee machine that lets you vote for your coffee bean and pays those who clean it, to a hairdryer that trades on the energy market to offer the best price for drying your hair. Design is increasingly adopting a more-than-human position in order to better understand the limitations of human-centered perspectives that marginalize other living and non-living actors. By introducing projects that disrupt human agency, Chris Speed will explore how ‘apocalyptic design’ case studies for the Centre for Design Informatics reconfigure human and more-than-human relations and how they rebalance the use of agency away from the user.

Prof. Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where he collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt and create products and services within a networked society. He is the Director of the Institute for Design Informatics that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of interaction design, temporal design, anthropology, software engineering, and FinTech as well as the PhD, MA/MFA, MSc, and Advanced MSc programs.

The lecture will be held in English.

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