02
2025
What happened at 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival
The Institute for Design Informatics celebrated another successful year of the Edinburgh Science Festival last month with five impactful events across the City of Edinburgh. Our academics and researchers who led these events shared some of their insights and highlights of their events.
Design Data and Beyond
Written by Bettina Nissen
This year’s “Design Data and Beyond” exhibition brought together 20 creative explorations of planetary and ecological relations between species and humans, cosmos and bodies, and between Design Informatics Master students and fellow students across the University of Edinburgh. The students interpreted this year’s Science Festival’s theme ‘Spaceship Earth’ by connecting space exploration with our natural environments as well as our inner space for wellbeing. Designing with a wide variety of data – ecological, embodied or cosmic – the projects invited visitors to participate in creative experiments from microcosmic explorations of small creatures to macroscopic connection of sending pulses into space. Some tackling current issues of pollution, migration, loss and waste alongside more speculative future concepts of space travel and life beyond earth. Using a variety of technologies from sensors and body tracking to immersive projections and mixed reality interactions, projects ranged from dynamic data sculptures, data-driven games or real-time participatory data collections to augmented, immersive and kinetic installations. From trying on mixed reality space suits to walking under a canopy of frog migration data. From eye tracking responsive kinetic clothing to subtle drapes emphasising the fragility of our ecosystems. From gesture-controlling planets’ cosmic sounds to drawing migration patterns or making soft robotics bloom.
ORAgen Fables
Written by Frances Liddell
Over the last week of the Science Festival, the DECaDE team were showcasing ORAgen Fables at the National Museum of Scotland. ORAgen Fables is a story writing interactive platform that explores how emerging technologies could shape how users track and engage with content online. It invites users to create and build upon each other’s ideas to create multiple but connected story threads.
At this year’s Science Festival visitors were invited to help tell a story about Space Rice with a mind of its own, and a 3D printer on the international Space Station known as the ‘Astrocrafter’, with the simple prompt, ‘what happens next?’. 75 contributions were made over the four-day event with story threads ranging from dancing grains of rice, rice transforming into prepackaged pasta, to space monkeys being crowned with 3d printed crowns, and robot wars in space. The process also raised some interesting conversations with visitors about what makes a well-designed prompt to continue the story, at what point can someone be defined as an author, and the possibilities of AI in remix.
In the coming weeks, contributors to ORAgen Fables will receive two stories based on these contributions, one generated by AI, and a second created by storyteller Gerry Durkin, and invited to take part in interviews to explore more critically the technologies underpinning ORAgen Fables.
AI for All: Designing Responsibly at the Edinburgh Science Festival
Written by Nicola Osborne
On Friday 11th April 2025, IDI was delighted to present the first Designing Responsible NLP (Natural Language Processing) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) exhibition at the 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival. This was the first of our annual events, showcasing emerging work by our PhD students but also helping the wider community better understand AI, and specifically how Natural Language Processing underpins many of the most well-known AI systems they are encountering out in their day-to-day life. For this first event we were further excited to welcome Science Festival attendees to join us in the large Canopy Café seating areas in EFI on the same day as the EFI building was undergoing its official opening by the University’s Chancellor, HRH The Princess Royal.
All 11 of our first cohort of PhD students shared their current research, asking our audience to explore their concerns, opinions and hopes for AI, and giving them an insight into a diverse range of research areas associated with Natural Language Processing. As people of all ages and backgrounds (from those entirely new to AI, to those asking detailed expert questions) popped in throughout the day, they were able to get hands on with NLP. Exhibits enabled our participants (amongst other things) to explore the potential for writing with AI, weave their experiences of AI onto a collaborative loom, vote with ping pong balls between two AI-generated statements to decide which was the most persuasive, listen to synthesised Scottish accents (and provide their own reviews of their authenticity), explore gendered language in LLMs, and see for themselves how it feels when digital systems treat more unusual names and diacritics.
We were thrilled to welcome 238 visitors – of all ages and backgrounds, many with no experience of NLP or AI – across the day and were particularly pleased that so many of them chose to spend a significant amount of time with us, engaging with the exhibits, talking with our students, and sharing their questions and ideas. We’ve received some lovely positive feedback so far and both our students and the CDT team are looking forward to building on our learnings as we plan for next year’s Science Festival!
Operation Biodegradable
Written by Ruby Marshall
Before taking part in the Science Festival this year I could not have predicted what the journey would be like, as I hadn’t previously organised an exhibition. With the alignment between the Science Festival’s theme of Spaceship Earth and the sustainability theme of our research, it was the perfect opportunity to creatively engage a wider community and have fun along the way.
Initially it had seemed a great avenue to showcase the work we had been producing through our research, facilitate collaboration with some of our undergraduate students, and create a platform for the students and Department of Clinical Neurosciences resident artist Phoebe Leach. It was all those things, and so much more. Creating the exhibition became part of our process and practice, producing additional work stimulated by fresh collaboration, experimentation, and the need to consider our project from a variety of angles and depths to communicate our work effectively.
It was then wonderful to engage with those who attended, the exhibition itself and the two evening events, to hear the questions that were sparked and to be part of the now on-going discussions around the exhibition themes. Much like some of the mycelium sculptures that were on display, the project behind the exhibition will continue to grow.
