Yuning Chen
Programme:
Design - MPhil/PhD
Start date:
Sep-22
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
Labour and resistance as methods to explore more-than-human politics in biodesign
Biography
Yuning Chen is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of HCI/design, STS and engineering biology at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research uses the lens of labour and resistance to expand discussions of more-than-human politics in biodesign through methods of research through design and critical biodesign. Inspired by recontextualisation of Marxist labour analysis in animal studies, she extends animal labour theory to the realm of microbes, plants and the broader labour ecologies implicated in biodesign.
Research interests
- Biodesign
- More-than-human design
- STS
- Engineering Biology
Guest lecturer and Tutor at Revolutionising Design For Climate Emergency 2024, Guest lecturer at Social Dimensions of Systems and Synthetic Biology 2023 - 2025.
Research
Research
(Best Paper Honorary Mention) Chen. Y., Cachat. E., and Pschetz, L., 2025. Labour provenance as a lens to reveal more-than-human ecologies in biological design and HCI. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI‘25), April 26-May 1, 2025,
Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713272
Oktay, G., Ikeya, Y., Lee, M., Barati, B., Lee, Y., Chen, Y., Pschetz, L. and Ramirez-Figueroa, C., 2023, July. Designing with the more-than human: Temporalities of thinking with care. In Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 104-106).
Välk S, Chen Y, Dieckmann E, et al., 2022, Supporting collaborative biodesign ideation with contextualised knowledge from bioscience, Codesign, ISSN:1571-0882
Välk S, Chen Y, Nguyen M, et al., Ideation and Consequence Scanning Beyond Human Perspectives in Biodesign, Design Research Society 2022
Välk, S., Chen, Y., Kalossaka, L., Kim, R., Mougenot, C., Pschetz, L., Ramirez-Figueroa, C., Sayuti, N.A.A., & Sommer, B. (2022). Narratives in Biodesign☆Bridging Methods, Processes and Tools. In Congress of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (pp. 3623-3623). Springer, Singapore.
Välk, S., Chen, Y., Mougenot, C. (2022). Towards a Designerly Way of Thinking for Bioengineers with ‘Design and Science’ Cards. In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (eds) [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore.