Thinking with Owls
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Thinking with Owls
In February 2023, faculty, students, and administration from the University of Waterloo (UW) and Arizona State University (ASU) collaborated with conservationists from Wild at Heart in Arizona to think through the challenges of rehoming burrowing owls at ASU. Through meetings with critical stakeholders, workshops on unmapping and value sensitive design, and burrowing owl habitat site…
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Technocriticality
See excerpts from our zine below Download the full electronic version here
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Speculative Approaches to Chimney Swift Habitats
During the Fall 2022 term, students from Professor Marcel O’Gorman’s Critical Design Methods class engaged in a value-sensitive design workshop with citizen scientists and Waterloo Region Nature members to create speculative designs of chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica) habitats. Downtown Kitchener, where the Critical Media Lab is located, is home to a small but significant population…
Read more about Speculative Approaches to Chimney Swift Habitats
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CML Food for Thought
Food for Thought episodes will recap details from the latest Critical Tech Talk while our host, Alexi Orchard, and special guests share some delicious snacks. The first episode in this new series Hot Wing Hootenanny debriefs Critical Tech Talk 2: Wendy Chun, which took place on February 10, 2022. Special guests are Jia Rong Wu…
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CAFKA 21 Project
At this year’s CAFKA Art Exhibition, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, Professors Marcel O’Gorman (CML Director) and Jennifer Clary-Lemon (CML Faculty Collaborator) present Hirondelusia: A Creative Turn Towards Species at Risk. As their project website explains, Hirondelusia is a barn swallow habitat modified from designs approved by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and…
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Heads-Up User Group (HUUG) Research Project
The “HUUGers”, six students from the MA English and undergraduate Systems Design Engineering programs, wore Focals by North smart glasses for three weeks while blogging about their experiences with the glasses. The participants then discussed their experiences with the glasses in a focus group. Abstract Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ASRG) are a recent development in…
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Critical Design Methods Course Projects
The pieces below were submitted as final projects for Dr. Marcel O’Gorman’s ENGL701 Critical Design Methods Fall 2020 and Fall 2021 classes. Despite the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, students used a variety of media and materials to engage with the question “What is critical design?” The range of projects, some of which are…
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A Program for Posthuman Fitness
By Andy Myles, MA XDM Transcending the limits of our fleshy husks: this attitude – that the fitness and wellness industry uses to target you – has a lot to do with how we got into this mess in the first place. But that’s not what this guide means by “posthuman.” Rather, it’s about understanding…
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Infrastructural 8-bit Games
For ENGL 799, Winter 2019: Critical Media Infrastructures, students submitted mini projects composed of several parts: they selected old pieces of media or technology that are no longer in use, created miniature Bitsy games that highlight aspects of the selected device’s infrastructural histories, subjects, or contexts. Sid Heeg, Farming Evolved “Farming Evolved” is an exploration…
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Technically Buddhist
By Megan Honsberger, XDM MA Graduate. From the state which pioneered Zen Buddhism, California’s Silicon Valley has a new spiritual beacon: mindfulness. Technically Buddhist calls attention to the curious instances of technical products and experiences seeking to remedy the ‘disconnect’ of technoculture using decontextualized Buddhist philosophy and digital technology itself. For this installation, an augmented…
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Waterloo Region Cyborgs
By Miraya Groot, XDM MA Graduate. How do pedestrians’ behaviours differ when they pass through Victoria Park versus Charles Street Terminal? Sitting in eighteen outdoor locations across Waterloo Region’s three cities, I observed over 50 paths where cyborgs revealed themselves. The resulting speculative data enables the comparison of digital technology usage in various urban environments. Ultimately, Waterloo Region Cyborgs aims…
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mindflUX
By Megan Honsberger, XDM MA Graduate. With the advent of wearable technology like fitness trackers, XDM student Megan Honsberger’s mindflUX explores what it means to be online and continuously connected. mindflUX combines a capacitive touch sensor bracelet with visualizations from neopixels which show how often and when an individual uses their device.
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Sleep Mode
By Julie Funk, XDM MA Graduate. Sleep Mode is a digital media project for those who are so connected to their phones they take them to bed. This project emphasizes how attached we have become to our mobile devices, and the separation anxiety we feel when those devices are inaccessible. Sleep Mode asks users to…
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Greyfield/Brightfield
By Julie Funk, XDM MA Graduate. In Canada, “A greyfield classification is applied to shopping malls with less than CDN $150 in sales per square foot [per year] and a vacancy rate of at least 10-15% (Parlette and Cowen 2011). A greyfield indicates a dead space. An infrastructure void of life. Inspired by the dead…
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Pacetaker
By Julie Funk, XDM MA Graduate. Pace-Taker is a bio-art and digital media art project that challenges the user to recognize their own feelings of anxiety through interaction with digital technology. Borrowing the notion of “pleasing anxiety” from Soren Kierkegaard’s ontotheological work, The Concept of Anxiety, Pace-Taker aims to create an experience of mindful anxiety…
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iAbstain
By Caitlin Woodcock, XDM MA Graduate. Take your non-use on-the-go with iAbstain. Place your phone in the mobile carrier and proudly display your choice to actively resist the distractions of digital technology. While your phone is out of use, its battery will slowly deplete, allowing you to focus on the world beyond the screen. Go…
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Basket Case
By Caitlyn Woodcock, XDM MA Graduate. Inspired by local Mennonite communities, XDM student Caitlin Woodcock’s BasketCase is an experiment in digital abstinence. When a mobile phone is placed in the handwoven basket, a sensor measures how long it rests there. When the phone is removed, the screen displays a percentage comparing the length of time…
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Quilters Can’t Be Users
By Caitlyn Woodcock, XDM MA Graduate. Grab a few friends and catch up without the compulsive need to check your mobile devices. Inspired by the communal nature of quilting bees, Quilters Can’t Be Users only works if all four pockets are filled. Watch as your time to BE together adds up, then compare that to…
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Sifter
By Tyler Crick, XDM MA Graduate. Sifter is a browser toolbar that displays meta-information for websites, fact-checking of content by scraping Snopes and Politifact, fake news website detection by querying established databases, and performs light linguistic analysis of internet content. The underlying goal is to help make the internet a bit more transparent and draw…