Opening Keynote Speaker
Prof. Stacy Alaimo:
Designing Encounters with Deep Sea Life: Creaturely Aesthetics in the Anthropocene
About the keynote
As the planet becomes all too human, what role can design play within entangled global environmental crises, including those of biodiversity and extinction, climate change, and sustainable oceans? How can design respond to one of the most enduring challenges posed by ocean conservation, that of inspiring connection to distant creatures who seem weird, insubstantial or unreal? Indeed, deep sea life is often depicted as unknown, unknowable, or even alien-beyond the realm of human concern. Some depictions of deep-sea creatures, however, provoke a potent sense of encounter, connection, and care. Such scientific and aesthetic “captures” of deep-sea life not only spark a sense of aesthetic awe but can provoke speculations about the being of each creature and their unfathomable biomes. These highly mediated but seemingly intimate encounters can expand environmental concern to the bottom of the sea. They craft a reflexive aesthetic appropriate for the Anthropocene, dramatizing how glimpses of these spectacular life forms are made possible through scientific and aesthetic captures and the art of design. From the art of Else Bostelmann in the 1930s, to recent videos and creative data visualizations that oppose deep sea mining, design has been crucial for creating enticing and potent encounters with deep sea life. The abyss stares back, demanding concerns.
About the speaker:
Stacy Alaimo is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She researches, writes, and speaks on environmental theory, science studies, literary and cultural studies, and the blue (oceanic) humanities. She is the author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010) which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). She co-edited Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman, edited the 28-chapter volume Matter (2016) in the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, and edited a special volume of Configurations on Science Studies and the Blue Humanities. She co-edits the Elements series at Duke University Press. Her work has been widely reprinted and translated into at least 13 languages. Her research has inspired art exhibitions, artworks, architecture, a Portuguese play and an activist Greek zine. Her research currently focuses on the ocean, including her new book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (2025).
Special Keynote
Prof. André Tavares:
Architecture Follows Fish
About the keynote
This lecture addresses the architecture of the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In Architecture Follows Fish, André Tavares presents the eponymous book and explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and terrestrial landscapes, the focus oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Up until now there has been no history of architecture from the perspective of fish, although there are counterparts for meat, timber, oil, and many other industries. Tavares provides a counternarrative to the traditional history of marine environments, which tends to focus on water ecosystems, and instead forms a bridge between what happens at sea and what happens on land.
About the speaker
André Tavares is an architect, researcher at Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto where he is the principal investigator of the project Fishing Architecture funded through a European Research Council grant. Since 2006 has been founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. He is the author of several books, including The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Lars Müller/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), Vitruvius Without Text (gta Verlag, 2022) and Architecture Follows Fish (MIT Press, 2024).
https://www.fishingarchitecture.com
Closing Keynote Speaker
Prof. Meredith Ringel Morris:
HCI for AGI
About the talk
The past few years have seen rapid advances in frontier AI models, demonstrating increasing performance and generality. As progress continues toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), HCI scholarship and practice has a critical role to play in ensuring that AI technology is useful to and usable by people to accomplish tasks they value. HCI insights can help us maximize the benefit of AI technologies to individuals, communities, and society while allowing us to understand how to mitigate harms. In this talk, I will describe a research vision for the field of HCI in the AGI era, examining how HCI researchers can innovate in interaction techniques, interface designs, physical form factors, design methods, evaluation methods, benchmarking approaches, and data collection techniques.
About the speaker
Meredith Ringel Morris is Director of Human-AI Interaction Research at Google DeepMind. Prior to joining DeepMind, she was Director of the People + AI Research team in Google Research’s Responsible AI division. She also previously served as Research Area Manager for Interaction, Accessibility, and Mixed Reality at Microsoft Research. In addition to her industry role, Dr. Morris has a faculty appointment at the University of Washington, where she is an Affiliate Professor in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and also in The Information School. Dr. Morris has been recognized as a Fellow of the ACM and as a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy for her contributions to Human-Computer Interaction research. She earned her Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. More details on her research and publications are available at http:merrie.info.