Presenting an exhibition of current research, in Inspace at the Institute of Design Informatics, a progressive exhibition facility, designed by Reiach and Hall architects in 2009, and serving as a collaborative hub, commissioning and producing creative activity through an ambitious events and exhibitions programme bringing together art, design, technology and research.
Join us at Inspace to experience technology driven research projects that explore patient experience in medical contexts and how AI-generated images can uncover biases and misconceptions about care in our society. Write your own AI stories and chat to researchers about current projects Picture Your Poisons, Can AI Represent Care? and LLooM: Weaving Stories of AI, and the topics they are exploring.
Exhibition details
Date: Sunday 28th September 2024
Time: 10:00 – 14:00
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Booking is open from 8th September 24
Scroll down to read more about featured projects
Picture Your Poisons
Picture Your Poisons is an intimate portrait of a cancer treatment journey by Caitlin McDonald and Inge Panneels, who worked together in 2023, to create six glass casts representing visual references to the substances and processes forming Caitlin’s cancer treatments.
The glass casts in Picture Your Poisons ground viewers in the real-world material origins of systemic anti-cancer treatments through the specific lens of one patient’s course of treatment.
For Edinburgh Doors Open Day, we are delighted to welcome McDonald and Panneels, who will display one original glass cast, films featuring reflectance transformation imaging of all the casts, and informational leaflets for audiences to take away with them.
A full artists’ statement is available here:
Can AI Represent Care?
As our reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) grows, we invite you to reflect on what it reveals about our understanding of care and later life, and how to use AI tools responsibly.
Can AI Represent Care? project featured as part of Doors Open Day 2025 explores how AI-generated images can uncover biases and misconceptions about care in our society, and the role of technology in shaping these perceptions. What does care mean in our daily lives, and can AI ever understand care?
Can AI Represent Care? project is led by Melody Wang, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, with a research focus on participatory design, older adults, and care technology as part of Images of Care project led by Dr. Nichole Fernandez, research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, visual sociologist and media studies.
For more information of the underpinning research, please visit the Images of Care research website below
LLooM: Weaving Stories of AI
LLooM is an interactive textile installation that invites people to share their own encounters with AI, by Kimberley Paradis, PhD student at the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) for Responsible and Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (NLP).
For Doors Open Day 2025, Paradis invites you to write your own AI story on strips of fabric and weave together into a collective loom to create a physical tapestry. The weaving process turns individual contributions into a larger picture, showing how experiences of AI connect and diverge across everyday life.
The installation is designed to encourage open discussion about what it truly means for AI to succeed or fail, and how those ideas shift depending on context. It invites people to think about the role of AI in everyday life and as something that can shape emotions, choices, and relationships. By combining storytelling with textile craft, LLooM offers a way to slow down, share perspectives, and collectively reflect on the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.
Kimberley is a PhD student in the CDT for Responsible and Trustworthy NLP, researching community-based approaches to NLP and exploring how participatory methods can make generative AI safer for Queer people by challenging technocratic structures and centering grassroots knowledge in AI and data governance.
Exploring Creative Flow with NeuroCreate
Would you like to consistently get into the zone and enter Flow states? Dr Shama Rahman’s research in the neuroscience & complex systems of creative cognition, has identified a signature brain pattern underlying ‘Flow’ mental states.
We know Flow states enable us to reach our creative potential and overall peak performance. Flow states also improve cognitive flexibility, are intrinsically motivating and increase engagement & attention, and importantly, being in Flow improves mood & stress resilience. Research has shown that training Flow can improve one’s cognitive abilities. Yet Flow remains an elusive state. In order to train it, we should know when we are in Flow in the first place!
Through her startup NeuroCreate, Dr Rahman has developed a participatory artwork and interface, Zeitgeist, that analyses whether participants are in a Flow state and represents their Flow visually.
For Doors Open Day 2025, Shama will share a working prototype that allows participants to choose their favourite colour, and the more in Flow they are, the more this colour will glow brighter as participants learn to associate this visualisation to how they feel internally. Two participants can do this together whilst they are engaged in collaborative activities together! Participants’ brain activity is measured through consumer wearables, and this is classified through deep-learning AI models developed by NeuroCreate.
This event is part of both Doors Open Day 2025 and Explorathon 2025.
This project has received funding through the UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee Fund under Grant Ref: EP/Z001099/1
