From interspecies relations to Archipelagic AI: ITI researchers at DRS 2026
Researchers from the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI/LARSyS) presented five contributions at DRS 2026, the Design Research Society Conference in Edinburgh, with work addressing posthumanism, interspecies relations, intimate health, more-than-human temporalities, bioregional materials, and speculative approaches to AI.
Mariana Pestana, Katerina Inglezaki, Carlos Pastor, Mathilde Gouin, Bernardo Gaeiras, Fernanda Costa, and Mariana Simões, all from ITI/LARSyS, presented the paper “Interspecies: a collaborative curatorial inquiry into New Romanticism”. The paper reflects on the making of the Interspecies exhibition and presents a situated, plural, and horizontal curatorial methodology grounded in posthuman thought, interspecies relations, and critical engagement with the complexities of the climate crisis.
Renata Rocha, Ayşe Özge Ağça, and Teresa Almeida, all from ITI/LARSyS, presented the paper “Does taboo constrain self-knowledge?: A design-led inquiry into the intimate health of older women”. The paper explores how taboo and sociocultural constructs shape self-knowledge around intimate health in later life, drawing on a design workshop with women aged 65+ in Portugal and reflecting on design considerations for designing with taboo.
Mariana Simões, Mariana Pestana, Frederico Duarte, and Valentina Nisi, all from ITI/LARSyS, presented the paper “Tagus estuary color swatch: Materials as affective mediators in more-than-human temporalities”. The paper presents a Research-through-Design exploration of bio-pigments derived from local plant, mineral, algal, and waste streams, reframing material catalogues as tools for sensing and engaging with the ecological rhythms of the Tagus estuary.
Fábio de Almeida, Valentina Nisi, and Nuno Jardim Nunes, all from ITI/LARSyS, together with Pedro Sanches, from Umeå University, presented the paper “Designing Archipelagic AI: Challenging the coloniality of AI through speculative metaphors”. The paper introduces Archipelagic AI, a speculative framework that uses metaphor-making to challenge colonial epistemologies in AI and to propose situated and more-than-human approaches to AI design.
Mathilde Gouin, Valentina Nisi, and Nuno Jardim Nunes, all from ITI/LARSyS, together with Daragh Byrne, from Carnegie Mellon University, and Larissa Pschetz and Keili Koppel, from the University of Edinburgh, presented “Kinship Time: Designing with More-Than-Human Temporalities”. The presentation explored more-than-human temporalities through kinship time, embodied reflection, and place-based approaches.
Together, these contributions show ITI’s engagement with posthuman, more-than-human, situated, and interdisciplinary approaches to design research.
