Join us at the Games Institute to hear two talks about exciting research from new Waterloo professors and GI members!
You can watch the event in person at the Games Institute or online via Teams.
In an effort to save on waste, we encourage you to bring a mug with you if you would like to have tea or coffee.
Masks are required for this event.
From IG Grids to IRL Tables: Feminist Design Praxes for Small-Scale Community Building - Dr. Brianna Wiens (English Language and Literature)
Drawing on my interdisciplinary work as Co-Director of Feminist Think Tank (with Dr. Shana MacDonald), this short talk will reflect on FTT’s research-creation process of talking, thinking, and making together as a form of engaged research. Focusing on our Instagram account (@aesthetic.resistance) and our related community work with the Kitchener-Waterloo Coalition of Muslim Women, I’ll outline how we position these projects as contemporary, although differing, examples of intersectional feminist scholarly practice that contribute to the building of small-scale community dialogues and relationships through their design interventions into prevailing digital culture. Ultimately, this talk will emphasize the importance of engaging in both digital and material solidarities––in slowing down our digital encounters into material, multimodal, and embodied interactions to strengthen community building.
A Question of Space: Towards Responsible Narrative Design Questions for Virtual Reality - Dr. Daniel Harley (Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business)
This talk presents a reflection that draws on my research into designing virtual reality (VR) narratives, striving to interrogate (and ultimately extend) the conceptual boundaries of the ‘design space’ of VR. Looking specifically at design that leverages physical and sensory interactions, the work raises questions about how design research might responsibly engage with the messy real-world contexts of virtual reality.
Brianna I. Wiens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her work leverages queer and intersectional feminist perspectives to examine the rhetorics, politics, and design of technologies, digital artifacts, and digital culture in order to explore how people use media in critical and creative ways to foster community and speak back to power. Dr. Wiens is Co-Director of Feminist Think Tank, a research-creation collective that advances work on feminist media, art, and design.
Daniel Harley teaches digital media and design at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. His research offers critical examinations of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of interactive technologies, as well as collaborative design-based projects that propose tangible and embodied interactions for multimedia storytelling. Currently, his work focuses on the XR (or, Extended Realities) sector, including virtual, mixed, and augmented reality.