Doctoral course - Speculative design future(s)

Bio Noura Howell

Howell's design research explores future feelings - how might everyday emotional and sensory experiences shift to support more diverse worlds-making and futures? Her conceptual work offers fabulation and related tactics for design futuring to include more idiosyncratic, culturally specific, social, and emotional considerations. In calling for more diverse perspectives on design futuring, this work necessarily happens collaboratively, co-authored with many others. Her design artifacts explore ways of sensing, feeling, and knowing with emotional biodata - data about people's bodies and behaviors and, more controversially, thoughts and feelings. Through designing and building tangible, embodied artifacts that sense and display biodata in realtime, Howell explores the promise and peril of enrolling emotional biodata to know ourselves and others. Through this, Howell's research agenda seeks to advance an affirmative biodata biopolitics with feeling and fabulation.

Howell is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, US. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in the BioSENSE lab in the School of Information. She has worked as a full stack web developer and human-centered designer and engineer in Singapore, Morocco, and China, as well as at the MIT Media Lab, Intel Labs, Microsoft, and music startup The Echo Nest, later bought by Spotify.

Schedule and content of the course