Morse Things

Morse Things centres on the design of a series of ceramic cups and bowls. The cups and bowls have the ability to digitally communicate with each other over the internet using morse code. The goal was to explore what it means to make machine-to-machine communication visible to humans. The project explores how we can understand and theorise about our relationships with digital artefacts.

This work is likely to mainly be of relevance to academic researchers, however there may be interest across disciplines including Human-Computer Interaction, Design, and the Philosophy of Technology.

The project uses an approach called Material Speculation. Material speculation is designing things and then people live with them and use them over time. The idea is that doing this can help ask better questions about our complicated relationships with technology by exploring the space between the actual world and possible alternatives.

Because the morse things project has continued over a number of years there are many contributions. The original research project discussed the increasingly complicated relationships we have with our internet-connected devices, and a core takeaway from this work was the need for a new research agenda and new methods that could properly respond to this. The work contributes to a widespread shift in design that is often referred to as the more-than-human turn.

A unique feature of Design Research is how individual projects come together to make research programmes. These programmes of research–where new understandings and knowledge build up over many related projects–are rather different to how scientific research studies work. Morse Things is an example of a project that both stands alone, but is also part of a broader and long-term research programme. In this case that programme is the more-than-human centred design.