[BOOK TALK] Critical Design Research Methods

Join Machine Agencies research group for a a book talk with author Katerine Reilly.

The ecological, social, and political challenges of our time require creative, more-than-human, and futures-oriented engagements. However, our experience of information systems and datafication can leave us feeling alienated from our capacity for imaginative, caring, engaged, or collaborative thinking, making, or doing. How can the field of communications address this challenge?

This talk will explore the power of community engaged design processes to create space for embedded, embodied, and emergent thinking. This approach and its results will be illustrated with projects about data literacy, environmental education, and digital sovereignty.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Data increasingly forms the backbone of systems and processes that shape how we do things and how we relate to each other. Datafication – the uptake of data to reorganize social processes – is reshaping everything from loyalty programs and digital identification systems to credit card payments and rental pricing platforms. Artificial intelligence accelerates these processes.

Making sense of what these changes mean for our everyday lives is no easy task. Datafied systems are highly technical and designed to be convenient and seamless; we tend to encounter them in brief moments of individualized transaction, which makes them difficult to see, let alone read, and their illegibility makes them very challenging to respond to. Communing Data Literacy offers a novel set of concepts and tools to help people make sense of how technology is altering their communities and their social interactions. Building on three years of design research by digital rights organizations in Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the volume analyzes people’s everyday experiences with datafication, rethinking data from the perspective of community and offering practical techniques for community engagement.

Communing Data Literacy pushes back against the individualism and technocentrism of Western data literacy practice and scholarship, providing English readers the opportunity to engage with Latin American perspectives.

ABOUT KATERINE REILLY:

Katherine Reilly is the lead author on Communing Data Literacy: Tools and Concepts for Social Engagement (MQUP, 2025), “Data in Motion: Creating the Possibility for Other-Than-Human Worlds” (Somatechnics, 2025), and Dialogando Sobre Datos: Un Audiolibro Sobre el Colonialismo de Datos (Tierra Común, 2025). She is a member of the Latin American data colonialism network Tierra Común, as well as Simon Fraser University’s Imaginative Methods Lab, and Scholarly Communications Lab. She is an Associate Professor in SFU’s School of Communication.

ABOUT MACHINE AGENCIES:

Machine Agencies is an experiment between human and machine intelligences. We are a collection of researchers located within the Milieux Institute investigating artificial intelligence technologies, the culture of AI development, and AI’s social, political, and environmental consequences. As a research community, we encourage cooperation and play, resisting the antagonism of more instrumental approaches of AI. Our members are working on fascinating projects that bridge the gaps between engineering, artistic creation, academic debate, policy development, and public discourse.

🗓 November 20, 2025
🕒 12-1:30 PM
📍EV 11.705