The Public Interactives Research Lab (PIRL) believes in smart, responsible design that proceeds multi-dimensionally in order to produce interactive technologies that are hardened enough to work in open public spaces. The lab is commited to design research that moves beyond more traditional interaction design concerns, such as user experience. Instead, PIRL pursues speculative design practices to foreground design’s relation to public context. The projects that PIRL develops strive to inspire in publics collective modes of engagement and spontaneous sociality. It mobilizes questions, content, and technologies in order to delight and inspire awareness. PIRL does so to create contexts for cultivating understanding about the meanings of emerging technologies and how technologies shape our relations to each other and the world in which we find ourselves.

PIRL investigates how technologies take place in public spaces. We are interested in what kinds of cultural work they do. We place the public at the center of what we do. We understand the public to be a citizenry, not simply consumers. We are guided by three basic principles. One, all mediated experiences are situated experiences; they happen somewhere. Two, mediated experiences are always sites of possibility for new awareness– about place, history and/or society. Three, new awareness becomes a point of departure for different kinds of social engagement; new awareness opens onto new habits of thinking and doing, new conversations, and new shared understandings.

PIRL researchers have installed Public Interactive experiences around the world: San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, California, Salt Lake City, Utah, Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, Denver, Colorado, Dallas, Richardson, Austin, Irving, and Pearland, Texas, New York City, New York, Nashville, Tennessee, Raleigh, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Orlando, Florida, Jersey City, New Jersey, Singapore, New Delhi, India, Mexico City, Xalapa, Los Mochis, San Luis Potosí, Tijuana, and Veracruz, Mexico.

PIRL has been active at three universities. Since 2016 the lab’s home has been at the University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC). Lab members include ATEC faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. The lab, like ATEC, is trans-disciplinary in nature. Researchers are generally interested in cultural and social studies, media studies and theory, communications studies, engineering, computer science, fine art, and, design. Through research projects researchers investigate, explore, build, and, analyze Public Interactives, which are emergent interactive communications technologies designed and deployed in public or shared spaces. Researchers are particularly interested in tracking Public Interactives’ impact on the development of culture through their deployment in these spaces.

PIRL has meetings every Monday from 4:00pm-6:00pm at ATC 1.705 (On MS Teams until at least 2/4/2022). If you are interested in joining a meeting, email Dale MacDonald.

Events

Weekly meetings every Wednesday
4:00pm-6:00pm
ATC 1.705