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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.

Research through design (RTD) is commonly conceived as a material and discursive practice of articulating knowledge. This paper contributes to the understanding of RTD as a form of critical inquiry by considering how inarticulacy can also be a productive element of this process. We present two reflective accounts of critically-engaged RTD practices in which our attempts to articulate concerns or questions were met with resistance from technology that was both the subject and medium of our investigation. We argue that encountering inarticulacy is not a failure of RTD but instead points to how material exploration can sensitise us to how network technology resists articulating certain values or concerns. Encountering inarticulacy led us to formulate new problems and new lines of inquiry. We conclude by suggesting that the central role given to ambiguity in RTD prepares us to witness and respond to inarticulacy in our practices, design outcomes and critical understandings.

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.

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.