This page presents a selection of research probes with the purpose of critically examining, challenging, and reimagining how human–AI relations are formed, negotiated, and contested. These probes are not solutions, outcomes, or products, but research-, activist-, and artistically driven interventions and prototypes developed through experimentation, play, and critical inquiry.
Situated at the intersection of research, design, art, and activism, the probes are used to surface tensions, disrupt established technological narratives, and render abstract or otherwise invisible dynamics of AI systems tangible and open to discussion. They function as exploratory and situated experiments rather than as instruments of optimisation or closure.
The work is informed by the framework of discursive design, as articulated in
Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things by Stephanie M. Tharp and Bruce M. Tharp. Within this approach, artefacts and systems operate as materialised arguments through which psychological, sociological, ethical, and ideological questions are embodied and examined. Design, in this sense, becomes a mode of inquiry rather than a means of resolution.
The probes also draw on traditions of speculative design, particularly as articulated by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, whose work positions speculation as a method for making reality more malleable. Rather than predicting futures, speculative design opens up alternative possibilities by challenging assumptions about what is normal, desirable, or inevitable. By freeing ideas from dominant technological, economic, and ideological constraints, speculation enables the exploration of unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or marginal scenarios.
Within this combined discursive and speculative framing, the probes function as critical and discursive devices. Their purpose is not to explain or solve, but to provoke reflection, disrupt assumptions, and speculate on alternative realities in which humans and human-like, relational AI systems coexist differently. In doing so, the work foregrounds artistic and creative practice as a vital site for engaging with the ethical and responsible development of AI—demonstrating how artists and creative practitioners can challenge established norms and imaginaries, and actively participate in shaping alternative technological realities that spark new ways of thinking across disciplinary, cultural, and public contexts.
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