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This work consists of three wifi networks, each embedded in a different object. Each network, interface and object come together to ask us to perform with them a different type of physical and digital interaction. These interactions bring together familiar aspects of network cultures in unfamiliar ways and ask us to consider how network technologies shape our everyday social, emotional, physical and political performativities. This exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on and diffract through networked performativities to explore how they might be enacted differently.

In this paper I conduct a hauntological analysis of participatory speculation, within the context of a study into understanding the potential for increasing recognition of LGBT+ young people’s experiences of hate crime and hate incidents. Hauntology provides a means to further situate accounts of speculation in Participatory Design by sensitising us to the interplay of the virtual and the actual that enables us to expand our sense of the possible. Through understanding how participatory speculation is shaped by absent presences, this paper contributes to the discussion of post-solutionist practices in PD that foster care and responsibility across multiple sites and forms of participation in the face of issues that resist resolution. I conclude by considering by translating speculation into shared spaces of wonder, Participatory Design can foster ethical commitments that stay with the trouble.

The use of ‘design’ within qualitative research on crime and victimisation, and within the social disciplines more generally, has seen very little commentary or discussion. ‘Design’ is referred to throughout as the professional and scholarly practice rather than the ‘research design’, that is, the practical plan for the methods used to generate data. Design in this former sense has historically drawn on both arts and engineering to give form to garments, products and visual communication. This article presents a case study, followed by a reflective discussion, of a research project in which research through design methods were used to construct two focus groups involving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people and police liaison officers as part of a hate crime project. Participants were asked to design reporting devices that would respond to hateful behaviour. Through the design process, participants materialised their own experiences of hate and embodied emotional responses to those experiences. The authors argue that there are methodological, ideological and practical benefits for incorporating research through design methods within qualitative research on crime and victimisation. Design offers a way of critically and creatively reimagining how research methods are understood and utilised, challenging how criminological methodologies traditionally operate.

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As cities are transformed into networked publics though the installation of digital communication technologies, will they be able to accommodate and support the plurality of needs and desires of the people who live there? This project looks at urban screens through a critical lens by applying queer theory through an autoethnographic design process: A metaphor of "going feral" is used to design and build ambiguous devices that are then documented in public spaces. The resulting "Feral Screens" are used as a prompt to imagine alternative communication devices and networks.

Digital screens, touch sensors, wireless networks, and other interfaces are bringing a new layer of communication to urban environments around the world. But as these technologies become an integral part of the fabric of the city, it is important to look at them through a critical lens. What kind of discourse will be promoted by these cities built of networked bits and atoms? Whose voices will be lost? What social interactions will be discouraged? Whose worlds will be pushed to the margins? My practice based PhD addresses these questions through critical design practice: I use the tools, processes and strategies of communication design as a method of inquiry. My practice is focused on building experimental "micro-publics" as a way to explore and reflect upon the current state of networked public spheres but also as a means to imagine and build alternatives.