Alex Wilkie is a designer and sociologist of science and technology whose work addresses two interrelated questions: how should design change if we take nonhumans seriously, and how can design help us rethink the social?
For more than two decades, these questions have guided a body of research that has helped shape the intersection of design and Science and Technology Studies (STS). His work explores design as an empirical and speculative mode of social enquiry through which agency and participation are redistributed across materials, technologies, environments, infrastructures, and other human and nonhuman entities involved in the composition of worlds to come.
Working across design research, STS, sociology, and human-computer interaction, his research examines how design participates in the making of social, technological, and more-than-human worlds, from computational technologies and healthcare to public engagement with science and technology and socio-ecological crisis. Across these domains, he develops a sustained theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary programme for understanding, intervening in, and composing futures irreducible to the human. He is Professor of Design and Societies at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Books
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Enfolding Design and STS is the first sustained account of the intersections between design and science and technology studies. Written with Mike Michael, the book traces how these disciplines have inflected one another as objects of enquiry, sites of critique, and methodological repertoires, developing an original framework for understanding their ongoing convolutions. Drawing on A. N. Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, it treats design/STS encounters as events in which diverse elements, human and nonhuman, come to feel and affect one another. The book proposes a topological approach for scholars and practitioners navigating the generative convolutions between the two disciplines.
“The fields of Design and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have informed and inspired one another for decades, with scholars frequently moving between them. Although substantial scholarship in Design draws on STS, and vice versa, there is comparatively little work that critically examines the interplay between these fields in depth. Enfolding Design & STS does precisely this, and is a significant and timely contribution to both disciplines. Wilkie and Michael are uniquely positioned to provide this analysis and insight, given their extensive experience working across and between Design and STS. This book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students, offering a framework for collaboration and shaping future research trajectories.”
“Responding to the growing realisation of design as a social practice, this book is an insightful study of the intersections and synergies between Design and Science and Technologies Studies (STS) and the various epistemic dialogues and 'matters of concern' that emerge in their versatile webs of practice. Meticulous, filled with insightful examples and analytically refreshing, it is a must-read for every student, academic and practitioner interested in the production of design knowledge and the social and political nature of the outcomes of design.”
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More-than-human Aesthetics proposes that the socio-ecological crisis demands not only new ways of knowing and acting, but of experiencing and feeling. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead and Félix Guattari, the book develops aesthetics as central to all more-than-human forms of experience, proposing that feeling and knowing are indivisible in cultivating more liveable futures. Contributors explore how this generalised aesthetics reshapes knowledge practices across biomedicine, geological forensics, nuclear waste, race, arts and education.
“Alfred N. Whitehead’s daring protest against the ‘bifurcation of nature’ called for the liberation of aesthetics from human exceptionality. More-Than-Human Aesthetics turns this protest into a compelling multifaceted exploration. How would our practices be transformed if we recognized that none of them can be divorced from an aesthetic experience which humans share with all other inhabitants of the earth?”
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Inventing the Social brings together researchers from sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology and digital media developing new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. Invention in the title is deliberate: it operates as a demand to engage with the inherent creativity of social life, rather than a narrow view of social phenomena as engineered by knowledge practices. The collection presents concrete projects alongside reflections on their wider contexts, opening alternatives to the instrumentalist approaches that have dominated recent social theory.
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Energy Babble traces the design and deployment of a set of computational devices developed with UK community energy groups. Like automated talk radios, the Babbles algorithmically synthesise voices, jingles, policy announcements and social media to create an ambient presence for energy in everyday life. The book tells the Babbles' story from intertwined design and STS perspectives, exploring how design can become an interventionist research practice and how STS can inform the making of emerging technologies.
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Speculative Research is an invitation for scholars and practitioners to take up the challenge of speculative thought and cultivate alternate ways of thinking and making futures. Drawing on a lineage that runs from William James, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead through John Dewey, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, the collection argues for research that is faithful to the empirical but not bounded by it, adventurous in its methods and careful in its commitments.
“Speculative Research is a truly unique collection that offers much needed inspiration for thinking beyond present conditions and the futures they seem to make impossible. It invites us to engage with a generative tradition of speculative thought that has yet to fulfil its radical practical potential. The stimulating contributions to this volume offer remarkable examples of what thinking speculatively can mean in encounters with specific research fields and problems: faithful to the empirical but not bounded by it, an adventurous yet careful inquiry. In composing this volume, Wilkie, Savransky and Rosengarten have achieved both a generous prolongation and innovative experimentation with speculative thought.”
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Studio Studies is a systematic account of the studio as a site of socio-material production. The laboratory has long been seen as a primary site of knowledge-making and the politics this entails, whereas the contributors in this book bring the same ethnographic attention to the studio, enquiring into the operations, topologies and displacements through which creative and cultural work is shaped and distributed.
“Studio Studies is a much needed work of enquiry: the studio is by turns an obvious and an unknown thing today. They are far more common and influential spaces than the laboratories about which we know so much – and yet no such signature has existed until now. It will be a defining collection by extraordinary contributors.”
“This book offers an excellent introduction to one of the defining projects in social studies today: the performative analysis of creative practice. Combining case studies and interviews by outstanding scholars in the study of science, technology and culture, it shows how the studio enables the assembly and negotiation of relations between art, design, markets, publics and social studies themselves. It thereby offers a welcome empirical handle on an especially complex contemporary phenomenon, the valuation of creativity across domains.”
“In this sophisticated and theoretically astute collection, the authors make a case for the studio as a rewarding site for ethnographic research. But more profoundly, the studio is offered up – in its ad hoc procedures and modes of emergent organization – as an empirical model for social life and creativity more generally. It makes the studio mundane while showing how the worlds outside – factories, firms and so much more – share in the ‘studio-ness’ that makes things happen.”
Practice
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To err is more than more-than-human: Patient safety and the aesthetics of a Never Event
The aesthetics of more-than-human design: Speculative energy briefs for the Chthulucene
Before the idiot, the poet? Aesthetic figures and design
How well does ANT equip designers for socio-material speculations?
Speculative Method and Twitter: Bots, Energy and Three Conceptual Characters
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Alex established and co-directs the Design Societies Research Unit, which investigates how design participates in making, contesting and transforming worlds. Based at Goldsmiths and working internationally, it brings design and science and technology studies into productive relation, developing research that directly engages climate change, ecological crisis and sociotechnical futures. The unit supports researchers and cultivates networks committed to inventive, practice-based enquiry at the intersection of design and social life. Before this, he was co-director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, inaugurated by Bruno Latour.
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Alex’s designs range from experimental prototypes and tools for exploring public issues to collaborative interventions. The Pedestrian Leisure Prototype (RCA, 1999) was among the first designs to explicitly engage nonhumans and climate change. The Issue Crawler and Issue Maps, developed with Richard Rogers and Noortje Marres at govcom.org around 2000, have been used by academics, activists and journalists to map and study public and technoscientific controversies, and prefigured later developments in digital sociology and digital methods. At the Interaction Research Studio, Goldsmiths, he contributed to designs for households, communities and wider publics, including Energy Babble, The Photostroller, The Prayer Companion, Local Barometer and The Plane Tracker, which were used in everyday settings over extended periods as part of empirical research. His practice also includes workshop-based and participatory formats for research, engagement and public experimentation, alongside editorial, graphic and publication design.
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Dis-positions: Troubling Methods and Theory in STS is a book series co-edited by Alex and Mike Michael, published by Bristol University Press. Turning the mirror on STS, the series creates space for adventurous projects that redraw disciplinary boundaries and refuse settled methods. It fosters inventive frameworks that respond to pivotal shifts in social enquiry, from climate change to computational technologies and posthumanism.
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Alex’s research moves between practice-based and experimental design research, inventive methods and empirical social research, actively relating the problems and matters at hand to the ways they are addressed. Underlying this work is a long-standing concern with how nonhumans demand a rethinking of social life and collective futures. These concerns have informed work on users, creative practice and design practice itself, publics, communities, and participation, speculation, digital issue and controversy mapping, patient safety, and climate change, energy transition and preparedness.
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Alex’s teaching approaches design as a practice that helps constitute worlds and futures, and pedagogy as a way of bringing design, STS, and social research into a shared practice of sociomaterial enquiry. Across BA, MA, and doctoral teaching at Goldsmiths, he has developed interdisciplinary methods including issue mapping, script analysis, and more-than-human ethnography, through which students learn to conduct empirical enquiry, develop their own theoretical approaches, and intervene in social, technical, and ecological worlds. He devised and established an MA in Interaction Design as one of the first programmes to explicitly combine design and STS, has played a leading role in shaping postgraduate and doctoral education in design, and has extensive experience in programme development, doctoral supervision, and doctoral research governance. He has supervised nine PhDs to successful completion across topics including patient experience; migration and borders; multispecies design; critical computing; activism and housing; sociocomputational assemblages and bots; artistic and activist practices; and feminist technoscience, care, and research.
Contact
Alex welcomes enquiries about speaking, media, collaboration, and research. He is keen to hear from practitioners, journalists, policymakers, academic colleagues, and prospective doctoral researchers.