Right to Roam: Artist Talk & Reception

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus.

Right to Roam

An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the lens of the river Forth

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus. This new body of work extends Calmus’ ongoing creative research into water, exploring it as a living body with a voice and not primarily as a resource. She is particularly interested in exploring the intersections of climate change, data, and the fundamental freedom to move.

Come along to this talk, to hear more about this work in progress and to immerse yourself in these first visual experiments by Calmus created specifically for Inspace City Screens, inviting you to connect and find commonality through the lens of water.

Image Credit: Installation photo of ‘Oh vatten, Oh uisge (Oh water, Oh water)’, by Sarah Calmus, Hidden Door 2025. Photography by Chris Scott

Artist Talk and Reception

Date: 12 Feb 2026
Times: 18:00-20:00 (2hrs) | Free/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB
Audience: General public
Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible

Event Running Order:
18:00 Doors Open
18:15 Artist Talk with audience Q&A
19:00 Reception
20:00 Event End

This event has limited capacity and so registration is preferred. Drop-ins are welcome, but participants with tickets are guaranteed entry.If you have any enquiries about the events and venues, please contact event organisers at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Venue Access Info

Please note this event will be recorded and photographed by Design Informatics and Studio Sumlacs – Video and Photographs will be used for future marketing, promotional, reporting and archival purposes. If you would prefer not to be filmed or photographed, please let us know at the event.

Data Protection Statement

How we use and store your data – In providing this information, you are giving explicit consent for us to use your data in our programme and event monitoring, reporting and evaluation processes. The data is managed confidentially. Your data will be collected and held by the Institute for Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh (who operate Inspace), it will also be shared with event partners and organisations for this event/talk (e.g. Studio Sumlacs). Your data will only be reported or published in anonymous aggregated forms and will always be processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and therefore also in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Data retention period – We will hold this information for a maximum period of 5 years from the date of the event, after which it will be disposed of. Please read the University’s privacy and Data Protection notice (https://data-protection.ed.ac.uk/notice) for further information.
Opt out – If you do not wish to share your information, or would like to modify your consent to collection and processing of personal information, please email us at: designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Speaker

Sarah Calmus, Right to Roam project lead, is an interdisciplinary artist, programmer, and creator of large-scale immersive installations and provocations, working across a multitude of mediums such as light, sound and print. Accessible, multisensory, sustainably produced experiences are central within Calmus’s practice, where works often draw focus on environmental concerns that build equity for participators and critique and explore ecosystems of varying scales. Interested in building spaces to connect and reflect, her practice is intentionally interdisciplinary and participatory, viewed as a series of experiments underpinned with explorations into interaction.

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Uisge

Right to Roam City Screens showcase

This event is part for Right to Roam City Screens showcase marking the launch of Uisge, seven screen projected moving image work by Sarah Calmus which reflects on ideas of water as a living body by exploring the voice of the river Forth. Usige is the first presentation of Right to Roam, an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the exploration of water, with focus on the river Forth, which will be followed by an extended immersive installation in Inspace in May 2026.

Inspace City Screens

Dates: 9-22 Feb, 2026
Times: 17:00 – 1:00 Daily | Free/Street viewing daily
Location: Inspace City Screens Exhibition, Potterrow, Edinburgh

Right to Roam is a project by led by Sarah Calmus, funded by Creative Scotland and supported by Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics.

Image Credit: Uisge film still, Sarah Calmus 2026

Supported by

Announcing Inspace 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival Programme

Sat-Sun, 4-19 Apr

We are delighted to be back again this year partnering with the Edinburgh Science Festival to bring you two featured exhibitions.

Science is more than knowledge – it’s a shared pursuit that transcends borders, uniting people, ideas, and discoveries in a global endeavour to create a future that’s fairer, healthier and sustainable for all.

Exploring the theme Going Global, Edinburgh Science Festival 2026 will showcase the research and innovation created through international partnerships that address shared challenges, directly aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Festival will highlight Scotland’s contribution to scientific advances through research, innovation and its extraordinary people.
Edinburgh Science

Check out the programme highlights below and we look forward to seeing you there!

Programme highlights

Designing Global Data Interactions

Sat-Mon, 4 – 6 Apr, 20256

Designing Global Data Interactions exhibition at Inspace features the work of Design Informatics MSc/MA students presenting a series of creative prototypes which explore global interactions with data, technology and people. Visit this exhibition to explore societal challenges through embodied, virtual and playful interactions.

Between Glass and Magnetic Fields

Thurs, 16 Apr, 2026

Between Glass and Magnetic Fields interactive talk, accompanyies an art installation by Gregory Alliss, emerging from his time as Creator in Residence for STEAM imaging VI: Resonant Connections through Design and Data, at the Fraunhofer MEVIS Institute for Digital Medicine.

Design Informatics

Website: designinformatics.org

Instagram: designinformatics

Twitter: @DesignInf

TEXT

Facebook: designingwithdata

Vimeo: Design Informatics

Flickr: design_informatics

Inspace

Website: inspace.ed.ac.uk

Instagram: inspacegallery

Twitter: @InspaceG

Design Informatics Research Seminar Series is Back!

We are delighted to announce Design Informatics upcoming research seminars, open to anyone, taking place at Inspace and kicking off this Winter/Spring.

Seminars will mostly take place in Inspace, Design Informatics public facing venue, but there will be some changes, so please check individual event venue details closer to the time. Details of the seminars will be released on this website the week before the event. So do check back regularly for speaker updates.

Design Informatics Seminars usually feature works-in-progress or new projects exploring design, data and technology from different perspectives. We encourage speakers to share new methods and techniques that use data in design/creative processes in innovative ways, and/or look at the agency, autonomy and power of data in how we design systems and experience the world.

This series seeks to bring together local, national and international research community members, creating an open environment for anyone to get involved in current research discussion and debate.

This series will take place February – May 2025, more speakers to be announced soon.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Seminar Speakers

Michelle Westerlaken

[remote speaker]

Impact Fellow at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

Talk Title: Vital Biodiversity Systems: Reconnecting Ecological Relations within Digital Data Technologies

Date: Thurs 5 Feb, 2026
Time: 16:00-17:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, EH8 9AB

Stephanie Lamprea and Robert Laidlow

[in-person and remote speakers]

Colombian-American soprano
AI+ Academic Senior Fellow in Music, Kings College London

Talk Title: Process Talk: Ecstatic Visions – the process of creating Ecstatic Visions, a new album of works for voice and electronics.

Date: Thurs 19 Feb, 2026
Time: 16:00-17:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, EH8 9AB

Iryna Kuksa

[in-person]

Senior Research Fellow and a Lead of Design Research in Nottingham School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University

Talk Title: Reclaiming Personalisation: Design Interventions for a Sustainable Future

Date: Thurs 5 March, 2026
Time: 16:00-17:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, EH8 9AB

Lise Autogena

[in-person]

Danish-born artist and professor of Cross Disciplinary Art at Sheffield Hallam University

Talk Title: Bridging the gap between global data and local lived experience

Date: Thurs 19 March, 2026
Time: 16:00-17:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, EH8 9AB

Barbara Sellers-Young

[remote speaker]

Senior scholar and Professor Emerita at York University

Talk Title: Lived Body in Motion

Date: Thurs 26 March, 2026
Time: 16:00-17:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, EH8 9AB

About the Institute for Design Informatics

In the Institute for Design Informatics, we fuse design and creative methodologies with data, data science and data-driven technologies. We create prototypes and experiences that make real to people the ideas that underpin the data society, and aim to ensure that new technologies sustain and enhance human values.

END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE Student Workshop & Procession

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE Student Workshop across the afternoon of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, is hosting an experimental event in the form of a funeral procession. This event will mark both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence and the end of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository – the final iteration of the artist’s Variations series, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship.

Beginning at Stills and concluding at Inspace, participants are invited to convene at Stills for a practical workshop facilitated by Felicity Hammond to collaboratively assess, sort, and reconfigure materials in order to design and produce costumes and props for the procession. Responding conceptually and materially to V4: Repository and using its processes of archiving, categorising, and recontextualising as a framework for collective making.

Participants will work with an assortment of found, discarded and functional materials that form an improvised archive (participants encouraged to bring materials). Through acts of sorting, grouping and labelling materials will be evaluated for their symbolic, aesthetic, and performative potential before being transformed into wearable garments and processional objects.

Aims

To foster a critically and creatively engaged response to v4: repository, drawing on its exploration of archives, repositories, digital residue, and material tracing.
To explore themes of loss & decay and how these can be communicated through material form.
To combine photographic practice with performance, design and sculpture.
To consolidate assessing, sorting, and archiving materials together as a creative act that parallels photographic/archival processes.

Event Details

Audience: Please note this workshop is for students from Edinburgh College of Art, who are interested in photography, sculpture, performance, costume, and interdisciplinary practices. No prior experience with costume-making or performance is required. Members of Stills volunteer team will be on hand to support participants and assist facilitation.

Workshop & Procession

Facilitator: Felicity Hammond and Ot Pascoe
Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 13:30-17:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location:
Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP [START]
Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB [END]
Capacity: 10
Duration: Approx. 3.5hrs
Event organiser/contact: Stills – daisy.mason@stills.org

Venue Access features: All areas of the building are fully accessible by wheelchair including lifts and toilets. Guide dogs are welcome.

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Running order

13:30 – 14:00 Meet at Stills for a walkthrough of the exhibition and to explore the archives within, followed by a discussion considering the movement of physical archives into the digital space and the parallels of the artist archive and data repositories.
14:00 – 14:45 Work collectively to sort, classify, and assess a shared pool of materials, treating this process as a creative and critical exercise. Identify materials for their symbolic, functional, and performative potential.
14:45 – 15:00 Comfort break and check-in (Tea & Coffee/snacks provided)
15:00 – 16:00 Design and create garments and handheld props using selected materials. Discussion prompt when making/focus working: Experimenting with movement/chants and collective ‘togetherness’ to form a collective procession.
16:00 – 16:20 Clean up/adorning garments and props.
16:30 – 17:00 Leave Stills adorned in the created garments and props, and perform a procession through Edinburgh’s Old Town, ending at Inspace.

Please note this event will be filmed and photographed by Stills, Photoworks, Design Informatics and invited Press – Video and Photographs will be used for future marketing, promotional, reporting and archival purposes. If you would prefer not to be filmed or photographed, please let us know at the event.

More about Facilitators

Felicity Hammond is an artist and educator based in South London. She is a senior lecturer on the MA Photography programme at Kingston University. Recent solo exhibitions include V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and V4: Repository at Stills, Edinburgh. Hammond has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally including Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal, Higher Pictures New York and Saatchi Gallery London, amongst others. She has worked on a number of high profile public art works, including a site-specific work for Photo 2021 Melbourne, Australia and a large scale installation for Colchester and Ipswich Museum, UK. Her work has received and been nominated for a number of awards, including being the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship, 2023.

Ot Pascoe is a visual artist based in Edinburgh. With a broad interdisciplinary practice exploring storytelling and worldbuilding, their work weaves together illustration, broadcasting, wearable sculpture, event production and community work. Previously a Director of artist-run gallery Sett Studios, and currently a breakfast radio broadcaster at community radio station EHFM, Ot has exhibited in Edinburgh and London, collaborated with renowned galleries and festivals, and has been nominated for a World Illustration Award.

Data Protection Statement

Data retention period: We will hold this information for a maximum period of 5 years from the date of the event, after which it will be disposed of.

Please read the University’s privacy and Data Protection notice (https://data-protection.ed.ac.uk/notice) for further information. You can also view the Stills privacy policy (https://stills.co.uk/privacy-policy/), the BRAID privacy notice (https://braiduk.org/privacy) and the Photoworks privacy policy (https://photoworks.org.uk/privacy-policy/).

Opt out: If you do not wish to share your information, or would like to modify your consent to collection and processing of personal information, please email us at: designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Supported by

Inspace Brand Refresh

We are excited to share our newly refreshed logo and branding which has been reimagined and redesigned in collaboration with graphic designer and DI PhD candidate Billy Franks.

As the starting point for this refreshed design our approach was to lean into the unique and progressive architecture of Inspace and the digital, technology and data driven works that we platform, as the inspiration. The design process included experimentation with organic shapes, angles and curves to reflect the many screens, surfaces, and levels that characterise Inspace.

Inclusion and accessibility are central to Inspace and Design Informatics’ values and vision. To ensure this translated to this logo refresh, we incorporated into design process a review of Inspace typography, to improve visibility and readability of not only our logo but to also how our typography is applied across communications.

Inspace now plays a central role in Design Informatics public engagement and collaborative work with creative practitioners and artists, and you can check out the Inspace updated vision statement to find out more about the space, our approach and the work it enables. The resulting logo seeks to represent this vision and the journey of Inspace, and its role, past, present and future, as a unique collaborative hub and venue for engaging communities with technology and data in new and evolving ways.

Design Informatics

Website: designinformatics.org

Instagram: designinformatics

Twitter: @DesignInf

Facebook: designingwithdata

Vimeo: Design Informatics

Flickr: design_informatics

Inspace

Website: inspace.ed.ac.uk

Instagram: inspacegallery

Twitter: @InspaceG

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE event programme which will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, will host this experimental and playful event, marking the imagined end of Artificial Intelligence through a funeral procession and an early-evening wake. Join us as we reflect on all that we have gained and all that we have lost through the passing of AI, with opportunities to create and share your own eulogies.

The event marks both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence and the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository – the final iteration of the artist’s Variations series, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship.

Felicity Hammond: END OF LIVE SERVICE, is a two-part event beginning with a procession, led by Edinburgh based visual artist Ot Pascoe and Felicity Hammond, with live music accompaniment from musicians including members of Golden Grooves Street Collective, from at Stills (23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP), inviting participants to convene in the gallery to join this procession and concluding at Inspace for the wake portion of the evening (1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB).

Upon arrival at Inspace, the procession will move through the venue, Felicity Hammond’s full updated service report will be read aloud, whilst the objects are brought in to be placed and displayed in the exhibition space.

This will be accompanied by a SAIéance, a performance by Jules Rawlinson, exploring machine learning as media and spiritualist medium, where uncanny voices are summoned from the ghosts in the machine through an improvisation with feedback networks of neural style transfer audio processing using freely available vocal models. Ushers will hand out an order of service to all in attendance, outlining the evening.

On conclusion of the service report reading and laying down of physical tributes, the celebrant, Nicola Osborne, will invite all attendees to take refreshments and to meet and connect with each other ahead of sharing memories of AI, in all its rich complexity.

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Experimental and playful event marking the imagined end of Artificial Intelligence

The wake will begin with Alex Taylor and Felicity Hammond, with shared reflections on that which is lost with AI, and perhaps how AI might be reborn in more limited and humanely grounded form. The celebrant will then encourage all participants to take time to reflect on their own memories and experiences of AI, and to write their own eulogies with provided paper and pens. Participants’ eulogies may then be shared with the group through spoken word, through a wall of remembrances, or they may be held personally and taken away with the participants as they reflect on their own relationship to AI.

The event will close with the sharing of participant eulogies, including invited reflections and from those who wish to step up on the day. The event will be closed by the celebrant and Felicity Hammond, with thanks given to all. A book of remembrances will also be available at the door as mourners leave, in case they wish to leave further comments.

Music accompaniment will take place throughout the event, drawing on the works co-created with AI to mark its own passing. Visual memories of the deceased, from Felicity Hammond’s Variations, will be presented throughout. No flowers are to be sent.

Tickets are free and available for the procession or the wake or both (see ticketing below).

Event Details

Procession

Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 16:30-17:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location: Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP (please gather in the gallery)
Duration: Approx. 30mins
Event organiser/contact: Stills

Wake

Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 17:00-20:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Duration: Approx. 120mins
Event organiser/contact: Inspace

Speakers/Facilitators:

Felicity Hammond– Artist, educator and senior lecturer at Kingston University
Ot Pascoe – Visual artist based in Edinburgh
Alex Taylor – Sociologist at the Institute of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Nicola Osborne – BRAID Creative Industries Lead, University of Edinburgh

Venue access info

This event has limited capacity and so registration is preferred. Participants with tickets are guaranteed entry. If you have any enquiries about the events and venues, please contact event organisers at info@stills.org or designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible
Audience: This event welcomes creatives from any disciplinary background and members of the public interested in topics around AI and responsibility.
Trigger Warning: The structure for this event is inspired by the format of a procession followed by a wake. This event seeks to be playful in its response, however, the event experience might bring up unexpected emotions relating to death or loss and attendees are advised to be aware of this and if they start to feel overwhelmed at any point, to feel free to move away or take space – part of the event space will be set-up as a quiet reflective space.

Running Order

16:30 – 17:00 The Procession begins at Stills, attendees are invited to join the performed procession through Edinburgh’s Old Town, ending at Inspace.
16:45 – 17:00 Inspace Doors Open for those joining the wake only
17:00 – 17:10 Arrival at Inspace by procession
17:10 – 17:35 Laying down of artefacts, reading of Service Report
17:35 – 17:45 Formal welcome by celebrant
17:45 – 18:00 Refreshments and comfort break
18:00 – 18:20 Celebrant and invited speakers share their reflections
18:20 – 18:40 Opportunity to write your own short eulogies to AI
18:40 – 19:15 Sharing of memories, led by invited eulogies.
19:15 – 19:30 Formal closing of event by celebrant and Felicity

More about Speakers and Performers

Nicola Osborne (they/them) is Creative Industries Lead for BRAID (phase 2), Manager of the Institute for Design Informatics and they work on large-scale creative industries innovation, technology and policy projects. Their work particularly focuses on ethical and inclusive practices, leading on equality, diversity and inclusion for CoSTAR Realtime Lab and the Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing Centre for Doctoral Training. Nicola managed Creative Informatics (2018-24) and the connected Creative AI project (2022-4), supporting creatives to do innovative work with data, including supporting SMEs with their own R&D ethics. Nicola is co-editor of Data Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries (Routledge 2024) and an experienced speaker who has also been sharing their research at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of The Provocateurs/the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas, since 2012.

Jules Rawlinson is a composer and improviser that works with electronic sounds and digital visuals in solo and collaborative settings to explore performance practices with live electronics across a range of different themes, materials and processes. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Reid School of Music at Edinburgh University. For more information visit

pixelmechanics.com

Alex Taylor is a sociologist by training, with longstanding commitments to critically investigating and intervening in the proliferation of technology and machine intelligence. His work has been shaped most heavily by a critical yet hopeful scholarship in feminist technoscience, including works from Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. He’s currently a Reader in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and an AHRC BRAID Fellow, and co-runs the Critical Data Studies Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. He is also a Fellow of the RSA and holds visiting roles at the University of Sweden and City, University of London.

Gallery

Data Protection Statement

Data retention period: We will hold this information for a maximum period of 5 years from the date of the event, after which it will be disposed of.

Opt out: If you do not wish to share your information, or would like to modify your consent to collection and processing of personal information, please email us at: designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Supported by

Announcing Inspace 2026 Creative Programme

We are delighted to share the upcoming series of exhibitions, events and performances taking place in Inspace to kick off 2026, promising to bring you an exciting fusion of art, design, research and technology.

For our first event of 2026, we are deligthed to announce Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE, a collaborative event programme by Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, to host an experimental and playful event in the form of a funeral procession and an early evening wake where you are encouraged to explore the challenges of AI, and to create and share your eulogies to it.

Our first City Screens showcase of the year Right to Roam, created by Sarah Calmus, invites you to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally, through reflection on natural methods of connection, communication and movement.

Ecstatic Visions a live album concert performance by soprano Stephanie Lamprea and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald, presents a curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths, featuring video art by Oana Stanciu, and creative captions by Stephanie Lamprea.

To wrap up our forthcoming spring programming, we are excited to again be part of the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, check back in February for programme details and announcements.

Programme overview

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Procession and Wake

16:30 – 20:00 | 29 Jan 2026

END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE event programme will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository. The event marks both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence, a two-part event beginning with a procession commencing at Stills and concluding at Inspace for a performed service inviting shared reflections on what is lost with AI, and perhaps how AI might be reborn in more limited and humanely grounded form.

Right to Roam

City Screens showcase

17:00 – 1:00 | Daily | 9-22 Feb 2026

Right to Roam is an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement from artist Sarah Calmus through immersive and reactive installation, moving image and print. Reflecting on natural methods of connection, communication and movement, part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.

Ecstatic Visions

18:00-20:00 | Fri | 27 Feb 2026

Ecstatic Visions is a live album concert performance, a curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths, by soprano Stephanie Lamprea and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald. The performance, celebrating the launch of a new album recording released on Neuma Records, will feature live music for voice and electronics, video art by Oana Stanciu, and creative captions by Stephanie Lamprea.

2026 Science Festival Programme

Sat-Sun, 4-19 Apr 2026

We are back again this year partnering with the Edinburgh Science Festival to bring you two featured exhibitions. The details are all under wraps until the programme launch in February 2026, so watch this space.

Full programme to be announced in February 2026

About the Institute for Design Informatics

Resonant Connections through Design and Data

We are delighted to share this snippet from last month (November), during this year’s Fraunhofer MEVIS residency in Bremen, Germany, which featured work in progress by Edinburgh College of Art PhD student Gregory Alliss, this year’s STEAM Imaging Creator in Residence. The residency took place across two weeks and we are looking forward to hosting Gregory, glass artist and engineer, in Inspace during the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, when he will present the outcome of this residency.

This November, The International Fraunhofer Talent School in Bremen brought together Fraunhofer MEVIS researchers, Edinburgh College of Art PhD student Gregory Alliss, and upper secondary school students to dive into the world of MRI imaging and MR sequence development. The STEAM workshop aimed to make MRI principles accessible not only on a scientific level but also through hands-on and artistic exploration, encouraging participants to engage creatively with the technology.

In a “mini-MR Lab,” a multisensory simulation environment designed for MR sequence creation, participants tackled the challenge of imaging glass, a material that is difficult to measure with conventional MRI parameters, and explored how design strategies can support scientific reasoning with complex materials. The workshop segment demonstrated how artistic thinking opens up new metaphors in technical fields, introduces alternative approaches to problems, and provides unexpected access to complex systems.

Images courtesy of Fraunhofer MEVIS and Gregory Alliss

On the second day, the students, together with artist and MR physicist Gregory Allis and researchers from MEVIS, moved from the virtual simulation environment to real scanners. Working on both low-field and large research MR scanners, they tested sequences they had modified themselves and scanned various objects—glass, plants, and even a human—experiencing first-hand how subtle technical decisions shape what becomes “visible”. This shift from conceptual planning to empirical experimentation, blending STEM and artistic approaches, lies at the heart of STEAM Imaging: understanding developments in digital medicine not only as systematic, objective and traceable procedures, but also as creative, subjective and context-dependent processes that sometimes even rely on non-standardized methods.

This programme seeks explore how creative approaches can help demystify and increase diverse access to and engagement with Resonance Imaging technology.

Check back next February for more details about the outcome of this residency which will be presented in Inspace in April 2026.

This Residency & Science Engagement Program is a partnership between Fraunhofer MEVIS in Bremen, Germany, and the Institute for Design Informatics in Edinburgh to create this unique opportunity to explore the potential for application of creative multi and transdisciplinary approaches in digital medicine. This collaboration involves the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen, Oberschule am Waller Ring in Bremen, and is supported by Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Digital Ghosts: The Hauntings of Data

By Andrea Kocsis and Dorsey Kaufmann

In the physical world, traces of people are everywhere: footprints in the sand, faded chalk marks on the sidewalk, or broken twigs marking a new path through the forest. Whether intentional or not, our interactions with the environment become part of it. Digital traces, however, are a different story. Despite their ubiquity, they remain difficult to detect.

When we first talked about Digital Ghosts a year ago at the Bayes café, we immediately shared a vision. We both wanted to treat digital web traces as design material and were wrestling with the same challenge from different directions: how to communicate fragmented web archive metadata in a way that felt accessible and meaningful.

Unlike linear historical records, websites emerge, evolve and vanish, leaving only shadows of their existence. Web archives capture snapshots of these moments, yet the internet’s constantly shifting nature means that substantial gaps remain.

Digital Ghosts: Visualising Scotland’s web archives turned online memory into something you can see and experience in time. In the exhibition, visitors interacted with visualizations that reveal both the traces of Scotland’s online activity and the spaces where web content disappeared or was never captured. Our aim was to make the invisible infrastructure of digital preservation something people could notice, explore and even feel. Rather than treating missingness as an error, we approached it as a meaningful part of the data story, one that called for visual and interactive strategies that highlight digital loss.

The Haunting

From November 5–16, 2025, at Inspace, we invited visitors to an exhibition built entirely from web archive metadata. It ran as part of the Being Human Festival and the ESRC Festival of Social Science, opening the work to both academic and public audiences. Our opening panel on Scotland’s digital footprints brought together the archivists, researchers, and artists to celebrate World Digital Preservation Day in good company and with a glass of fizz. Our workshop on visualising absence promised hands-on experience in data physicalisation.

Photos taken by Chris Scott at the *Digital Ghosts* opening.

What followed exceeded anything we had hoped for. About 300 visitors walked through the gallery during this short run. Visitors described the exhibition as ‘the most interesting I’ve seen this year,’ ‘impressive, engaging and poetic,’ and simply but more generously: ‘It’s perfect.’ Others mentioned that it ‘changed the way I see data.’ Colleagues across the GLAM sector also made it clear that the approach was welcome, with several encouraging us to take the exhibition on tour. More importantly, our visitor research showed measurable change: people left with a deeper awareness of how fragile the web really is and how much curatorial labour goes into preserving even fragments of it.

From the Ashes

This project was shaped by two parallel journeys.

Andrea came to Digital Ghosts through archival data research as a National Librarian’s Fellow in Digital Scholarship at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Parts of her fellowship focused on Scotland on the Internet, a hand-curated national web archive collection that became the basis of our project. Again and again, the same question surfaced: how do you promote use while communicating absence, uncertainty and selection when most interfaces only visualise what exists? To explore this tension further, she obtained funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to investigate creative approaches to accessing and interpreting web archive data.

Dorsey led the project from the data-visualisation and artistic-practice side, drawing on her background in information design, data storytelling and data physicalisation. She treated missing values not as defects but as design material, working from the belief that gaps and inconsistencies carry their own forms of epistemological meaning. Her lens as the artist centred on how data can be felt rather than simply displayed. For her, the exhibition was an opportunity to use novel visual and interaction methods to surface the complexities of missing, incomplete and non-linear data, inviting visitors to consider the stories embedded in what is preserved in the archive and what has quietly disappeared.

The installations didn’t try to explain web archiving in a traditional sense. Instead, each piece translated metadata into physical and visual experiences — falling particles, fading light, layered depths, motion tracking — that allowed visitors to intuitively grasp the rhythm of digital decay and selective preservation.

Metaphor in Materiality

At the heart of the exhibition is a commissioned centrepiece: a durational cyanotype installation that transforms the ebb and flow of digital traces into a slow photographic exposure. Using an early UV-based printing technique, Dorsey translated decades of web archive records into paths of light that animate the life and death of websites. As the projection played across a grid of cyanotype prints, long-lived sites imprinted more vividly while short-lived ones left only faint ghost-like traces.

Over the five day exposure, the light develops each canvas into a unique artifact shaped by chance, environment and entropy, revealing cycles of presence and erasure. The cyanotypes act as both archive and the act of capture, showing how some sites become preserved while others may never be recorded. Each print becomes an imperfect, time-based record of what the internet remembers and forgets, offering a physical metaphor for the archive itself. Through this process, the work reflects on what it means to capture fleeting digital content in tangible form, and on the tension between preservation and loss.

The video shows each step of the process – coating the canvases, hanging them, building the visualization, projection mapping, exposing the prints, and finally curing and rehanging them in Inspace Gallery.

Collaboration as a method

This exhibition was only possible through clear communication, mutual respect for each other’s expertise, and a shared conceptual direction. Alongside Andrea and Dorsey, the core team included Parker Kaufmann (lead developer), Trevor Thomson (collection curator), Eilidh MacGlone (web archivist), and Graeme Hawley and Sarah Ames from the National Library of Scotland. A common language formed early, allowing preservation, research, design and development to move smoothly together. Our collaboration with Miriam and the Inspace gallery team made the vision physically achievable; we could rely on them for everything from running a 15-meter Frankenstein USB cable under the floor to navigating catering logistics. This kind of infrastructure, that is quiet, competent, and generous, is invisible when it works well.

Students were involved at every stage of the project: working with raw data, designing and building visualisations, contributing to dissemination, and helping interpret visitor feedback. Three exhibited works began as Master’s projects by Mansi Manoj, Qianhui Meng and Shuyu Zhang, supervised by Dorsey. We also wove the work into teaching across EFI, the School of History and Design Informatics.

Dorsey and Parker recently launched their studio, Feeling Data. They adapted and expanded the students’ projects for public interaction. Explore the student-adapted work below:

Sites: Surfaced or Submerged – Qianhui Meng

In the afterlife

The exhibition has concluded, but the conversation isn’t. It has moved on into conferences, manuscripts, and future exhibitions on web archive access and designing for uncertainty and messy humanities data in the wild. As with all ghosts, this was never meant to be an ending, only a beginning.

For more images, visit https://www.dorseykaufmann.com/digital-ghosts

This project was funded by the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the National Library of Scotland, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, with support from the Institute for Design Informatics, Inspace and Edinburgh Futures Institute.

This programme was part of the Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 6 – 15 November 2025. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.

Right to Roam: Uisge

An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the lens of the river Forth in a seven screen projected moving image work.

Right to Roam is an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the exploration of water, with focus on the river Forth, by artist Sarah Calmus. A seven screen projected moving image work, Uisge, will launch on Inspace City Screens this February, viewable along Potterrow in the City of Edinburgh, followed by an extended immersive installation in May 2026.

Right to Roam: Uisge

An exploration of the voice of the river Forth

A key driver for Uisge, is giving space to reflect on ideas of water as a living body by exploring the voice of the river Forth, where changes relating to the climate crisis incrementally affect interconnected ecosystems, both environmental and human.

Gathering water samples from the Forth, Calmus uses microscopic imagery to reveal the inner worlds of the river, alongside foraged moving image, and text. Here, creative exploration of environmental data and technology asks us to consider what we can learn through deep listening. What does water teach us as it moves beyond borders, and what does it mean to consider the Right to Roam as more than a human policy, but as a natural state?

This is part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.

Exhibition details

Inspace City Screens

Dates: 9-22 Feb, 2026
Times: 17:00 – 1:00 Daily | Free/Street viewing daily
Location: Inspace City Screens Exhibition, Potterrow, Edinburgh

Artist Talk and Reception

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch, of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus.

Date: 12 Feb 2026
Times: 18:00-20:00 (2hrs) | Free/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Audience: General public
Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible

Venue Access Info

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Project Support

Ray Interactive is a specialist design studio, leveraging a passion for creative tech to help artists and organisations deliver engaging experiences for their audiences. Brendan McCarthy and Sam Healy are the core duo behind Ray Interactive. Working at the increasingly complex intersection of computation and creation, they assist artists and organisations to bridge gaps between art, design and technology. Through installations, innovative data visualisation and bespoke software, they push on the ever-blurrier boundary between art and science, while questioning the role of tech in society.

ASCUS Art & Science is a non-profit organisation bringing together art, science and beyond. They host Scotland’s first publicly accessible art-science lab providing training to help artists work on their independent creative art-science projects and exhibitions through providing affordable lab access. ASCUS has facilitated projects at the intersection of art and science by both UK and international artists.

Right to Roam is a project by led by Sarah Calmus, funded by Creative Scotland and supported by Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics.

Supported by

Design Informatics

Website: designinformatics.org

Instagram: designinformatics

Twitter: @DesignInf

TEXT

Facebook: designingwithdata

Vimeo: Design Informatics

Flickr: design_informatics

Inspace

Website: inspace.ed.ac.uk

Instagram: inspacegallery

Twitter: @InspaceG

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus.

Right to Roam

Artist Talk and Reception

Data Protection Statement

Speaker

Uisge

Right to Roam City Screens showcase

Inspace City Screens

Supported by

Design Informatics

TEXT

Inspace

Sat-Sun, 4-19 Apr

Programme highlights

Designing Global Data Interactions

Sat-Mon, 4 – 6 Apr, 20256

Between Glass and Magnetic Fields

Thurs, 16 Apr, 2026

Design Informatics

TEXT

Inspace

We are delighted to announce Design Informatics upcoming research seminars, open to anyone, taking place at Inspace and kicking off this Winter/Spring.

Seminar Speakers

Michelle Westerlaken

[remote speaker]

Impact Fellow at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

Stephanie Lamprea and Robert Laidlow

[in-person and remote speakers]

Colombian-American sopranoAI+ Academic Senior Fellow in Music, Kings College London

Iryna Kuksa

[in-person]

Senior Research Fellow and a Lead of Design Research in Nottingham School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University

Lise Autogena

[in-person]

Danish-born artist and professor of Cross Disciplinary Art at Sheffield Hallam University

Barbara Sellers-Young

[remote speaker]

Senior scholar and Professor Emerita at York University

About the Institute for Design Informatics

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE Student Workshop across the afternoon of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Event Details

Workshop & Procession

Running order

More about Facilitators

Data Protection Statement

Supported by

Design Informatics

Inspace

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE event programme which will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Event Details

Procession

Wake

Speakers/Facilitators:

Running Order

More about Speakers and Performers

Gallery

Data Protection Statement

Supported by

We are delighted to share the upcoming series of exhibitions, events and performances taking place in Inspace to kick off 2026, promising to bring you an exciting fusion of art, design, research and technology.

Programme overview

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Procession and Wake

16:30 – 20:00 | 29 Jan 2026

Right to Roam

City Screens showcase

17:00 – 1:00 | Daily | 9-22 Feb 2026

Ecstatic Visions

18:00-20:00 | Fri | 27 Feb 2026

2026 Science Festival Programme

Sat-Sun, 4-19 Apr 2026

About the Institute for Design Informatics

By Andrea Kocsis and Dorsey Kaufmann

The Haunting

From the Ashes

Metaphor in Materiality

Collaboration as a method

In the afterlife

An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the lens of the river Forth in a seven screen projected moving image work.

Right to Roam: Uisge

Colombian-American soprano
AI+ Academic Senior Fellow in Music, Kings College London