Forum on Emerging Technology

Pickering brings a foundational theoretical frame for understanding agency through cybernetics, emphasizing systems that adapt, learn, and act in unfolding relations with their environments. His perspective situates today’s agents within longer histories of performative, non-deterministic systems, offering conceptual grounding for designers navigating emergent ecologies of action and responsibility.

Gram offers a historian’s and designer’s view of how shifts in tools, rhetoric, and institutional arrangements repeatedly remake what design is and does. Her contribution helps situate agentic systems within broader transformations of design practice, illuminating how disciplines evolve and how pedagogy, ethics, and professional norms must adapt to new technological actors.

Danzico brings a deeply human-centered and practice-oriented sensibility to the design of emerging systems, emphasizing collaboration, communication, and care over control. Her perspective highlights how designers shape relationships between people and technologies, and how attentiveness, trust, and shared agency become essential materials when autonomous systems act within complex organizational and cultural contexts.

Sterling contributes a cultural and speculative lens, drawing from fiction, design criticism, and media theory to reveal how imagined futures shape real technologies. His perspective underscores the narrative and conceptual inheritances embedded in today’s agentic systems, helping participants see how past visions, myths, and prototypes quietly inform what – and whom – our systems now act for.

Winograd provides historical depth from early work in AI, language, and interaction, showing how formative ideas about conversation, commitments, and situated action helped establish an ontological design tradition – one in which technologies shape the meanings, roles, and practices available to their users. His perspective clarifies how these foundational commitments continue to structure today’s agentic systems, and which assumptions must be reexamined as agents become persistent actors in lived environments.

Matuschak brings a contemporary view of agents as partners in cognition, learning, and long-term knowledge work, demonstrating how modern systems actively participate in shaping attention, understanding, and everyday practice. His contribution highlights the ongoing relevance of ontological design: how agents remake the conditions under which thinking and doing unfold, and how their behaviors must be carefully crafted to support meaningful, reflective relationships between humans and computational actors.

Rogalski brings a builder’s perspective on the infrastructures that make contemporary agents behave, and the concrete design choices about what agents notice, remember, prioritize, and ultimately do on behalf of their users.

Forlizzi offers a design-research lens on behavior, embodiment, and interaction, emphasizing how systems are shaped by – and in turn shape – human routines and expectations. Her contribution clarifies how designers can operationalize concepts like legibility, predictability, and social cues to craft agentic systems that behave responsibly and meaningfully within everyday environments.

Ju brings expertise in human–robot interaction and situated behavior, highlighting how subtle actions, timing, and spatial cues influence perception and trust in autonomous systems. Her insights help participants understand how agents communicate through motion and presence, and how interaction design principles translate into reliable, accountable behavior in complex real-world settings.

Poupyrev provides an applied, industry-facing view of agentic systems built from continuous sensing, physical-world modeling, and real-time adaptive behavior. His work illustrates how interfaces dissolve into ambient intelligence, raising concrete questions of power, authorship, accountability, and service operations. He grounds the conversation in what is technically feasible today and what infrastructural agents may soon become.

Salvaggio contributes a critical data studies perspective grounded in artistic and research practice, revealing how archives, images, and built environments become datasets that structure agentic perception and action. His work exposes the ideological gaps between datasets and lived spaces, offering methods for contesting and reshaping the computational imaginaries embedded within spatial systems.

Griffiths explores how algorithmic systems reorganize labor, governance, and rights across homes, workplaces, and cities, treating AI as a political and spatial force. Her research and creative practice make visible the hidden infrastructures and power asymmetries encoded in machine learning, offering speculative and documentary strategies for challenging normative design logics and imagining counter-algorithmic futures.

Witt brings a systems-oriented architectural and computational design perspective grounded in the work of Certain Measures, where physical and digital worlds are fused through data-rich spatial design. His contribution highlights how agents perceive, interpret, and reshape built environments, demonstrating how computational modeling, simulation, and software enable new forms of spatial intelligence and infrastructural agency across cultural, industrial, and civic contexts.