Design Connections 10x10 will return this year on Wednesday 19 September, showcasing a selection of the best emerging design talent in the UK, in collaboration with the Design Museum. We caught up with speaker Matthew Plummer Fernandez to find out more about his practice. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently making an Augmented Reality app called Echo Youth. It generates virtual protests, constituted of placards made by young people, to echo and transmit, through AR, their voices. The work prototypes a new form of protestation, reflecting on how media is continuously implicated and evolving how protest events reach wider audiences. It is a co-authored work, pooling together contributions from young people that will be developed in workshops. The work has been commissioned by Somerset House for their upcoming exhibition Good Grief, Charlie Brown!

What key issues are you addressing with your work?

My work increasingly seeks to be participatory, not so much as enacting ‘user’ interaction but involving others in constitutive entanglement with the work; the work is rendered possible by the (sometimes unrelated) activities of others. My role is to make connections between things towards an assemblage of human and computational elements, that enables contingent outcomes.

One agenda of my work is to rethink the way we do practice, in more co-operative ways – constitutive of both human and nonhuman agency. I also want to challenge the normative figurations of the ‘machine’, ‘algorithm’, ‘AI’ and so on, as being somehow independent entities that ‘impact’ on society. I often use humour to characterise software agents as anything but the usual tropes.

Tell us about something you’ve seen that’s inspired you recently? 

I’m currently devoted to my PhD and work everyday at the British Library from opening hours to closing hours, and it gives me a huge deal of satisfaction and stimulation. The library itself is very inspiring, and the new welcome sign at the entrance that begins “welcome, researchers on a bit of a mission” reflects how they genuinely care about what we do there. The authors that currently inspire me are Lucy Suchman, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad.    

To hear more about Matthew's work, join us at 6pm on the 19 September at the Design Museum. Find out more and book your tickets here.