Book Talk: Critical Design Research Methods

The ecological, social, and political challenges of our time require creative, more-than-human, and futures-oriented engagements. However, our experience of information systems and datafication can leave us feeling alienated from our capacity for imaginative, caring, engaged, or collaborative thinking, making, or doing. How can the field of communications address this challenge?

This talk will explore the power of community engaged design processes to create space for embedded, embodied, and emergent thinking. This approach and its results will be illustrated with projects about data literacy, environmental education, and digital sovereignty.

About the speaker

Katherine Reilly is the lead author on Communing Data Literacy: Tools and Concepts for Social Engagement (MQUP, 2025), “Data in Motion: Creating the Possibility for Other-Than-Human Worlds” (Somatechnics, 2025), and Dialogando Sobre Datos: Un Audiolibro Sobre el Colonialismo de Datos (Tierra Común, 2025). She is a member of the Latin American data colonialism network Tierra Común, as well as Simon Fraser University’s Imaginative Methods Lab, and Scholarly Communications Lab. She is an Associate Professor in SFU’s School of Communication.