Finding Our common ground: potential, resistance and power in creative technology for design research

Nearly all design is interaction design (Wiltse, 2025). You may, however, have noticed that the world and its digital twin aren’t looking too healthy right now. We take the position that Big Tech and its unrelenting advances towards winner-take-all-AI is harming society and the planet. Through our panel’s collective experience in design, research, teaching and practice in creative technology, we have seen the techno-optimistic landscape of digital technologies and the internet that was held at the start of this century turn into a dystopian battleground for just a handful of gatekeeper corporations. Creative tech approaches have been used to turn the design lens from making-the-machine to revealing the machine. Work such as Chatting’s (2024) Designerly Hacking, creative approaches to materialising data (Shorter et al, 2022), Culén et al’s (2023) investigation of technologies and democracy, Pilling et al (2023)’s combination of technology repair with design fiction, and Fass et al’s (2022) combination of technology with placemaking, and many more, all sit broadly within a Critical Design paradigm (Dunne and Raby, 2001).

This Conversation proposes a space for the DRS community to collectively examine the question “What now for creative technology?” in light of the intersecting crises of democracy, climate, and social inequality. Drawing on perspectives from design research, critical making, speculative design, civic technologies, and socio-technical studies, the conversation aims to surface shared concerns, tensions, and emerging questions. The DRS community includes many researchers who are also educators, and questions around how designers learn and understand through making, prototyping, and studio environments (e.g. Jones et al, 2022) resonate with issues of openness in technologies.