Closing Keynote: Lucy Kimbell

Reassembling the Visual

In her presentation to EPIC, Kimbell will reflect on how data is visualized and how it is experienced. Drawing on work in the visual arts and design, she will consider what practices that seem to be gathering and visualising data are actually doing, from installations such as her project ‘Physical Bar Charts’ (2005-8) to methods such as cultural probes. These examples will be combined with ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS), which foregrounds the empirical and the mundane, and questions how accounts of the social are constructed. Writers in this tradition have emphasized the ways that public experiments are used to assemble data and paid attention how data are visualized. The discussion will include work from a recent public experiment in which Kimbell was involved, as organiser of an exhibition of work by artists and designers as part of an academic workshop in Oxford entitled ‘Imagining Business’. Together, these different ways of thinking about visualising and experiencing data will raise questions for ethnographers and designers working in organisations where their role includes assembling data into accounts for others.

Biography

Lucy works as an artist, interaction design and researcher. She joined the faculty of the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in 2005 as Clark Fellow in Design Leadership where she teaches design thinking and design-led innovation to MBA students and researches service design. Previously, Lucy was an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative and Performing Arts Research fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and tutor on the MA Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London. Originally educated in Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology at the University of Warwick, Lucy later took an MA in Computing in Art and Design in the Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University.

As a practitioner Lucy’s outputs often span disciplinary boundaries including live art, installation and interaction design. She exhibits regularly including Making Things Public, an exhibition curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2005), in a collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry (University of Oxford). Her project World Power League assembling visualizations of power created with Barby Asante, Rachel Collinson and George Grinsted was a runner-up in the New Statesman New Media Awards 2008. More about these and other projects.

As an academic Lucy is completing a multidisciplinary research project funded by the AHRC into service design which brought together service design consultants with science and technology-based enterprises offering services, alongside academics from innovation studies, strategy, operations management and design. Lucy’s research is informed by work within Science and Technology Studies, in particular questions about what counts as data, public experiments, and the ways that artists and designers assemble and visualise social relations.

Born in the UK, Lucy has lived and worked in Sudan, Spain and Poland. She lives in London with her partner and new daughter.

Links

• Blog: Design leads us where exactly?
• Faculty webpage
• Personal website