Where we devise and construct a variety of prototypes such as Messaging Kettles, Indigenous language speaking toys, and Ambient Birdhouses.
Ambient Birdhouse
Plays the sights and sounds of local birds and other soniferous animals in your home. Sensitizes people to the sounds of nature outside.
The IoT Un-kit
A co-design approach for generating personally meaningful IoT applications
The Messaging Kettle
Connected kettles to foster communication and engagement with an older friend or relative who lives remotely, during the routine of boiling the kettle.
Social Communication Technologies
Collaborating with people with disabilities, their families, and support workers to explore novel designs of communication technologies.
SleepBeta
A web application for logging sleep-correlated factors, to retrieve Fitbit sleep and activity data, and to explore the relationship between the logged factors and their sleep
Crocodile Language Friend
Co-designed with the Wujal Wujal community, to foster children's use of the Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal language
About Us
At the Design Participation Lab, our projects have a humanitarian or environmental focus. We undertake research with a variety of communities and groups who are often overlooked in technology design. These include older people, children with autism, Indigenous communities, and people with intellectual disabilities. We seek to understand how they appropriate technologies and how we might co-design desirable technologies. We value pluralism, seeking to make technologies that reflect the rich diversity and idiosyncrasies of people and the ways in which they wish to interact.
Recently we have extended our work to exploring interaction between people and nature. Working with ecologists, ecoacoustics researchers, communities, and government organizations, we aim toward new kinds of socio-enviro-technical systems that make it easier, more interesting, and more fun to monitor and understand species.