Dr Haider Akmal

Haider Ali Akmal is a speculative design researcher, future-focused service designer, and practicing printmaker at UNSW Art, Design, & Architecture. Specialising in playful speculative approaches towards design solutions imagined through innovative and unconventional applications of technology. His research in design discusses the need for playfulness in design practice through post-anthropocentric visions of human computer interaction. Often indulging with current and future pervasive technologies such as the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, a large part of Haider's work explores playful approaches towards understanding and solving design problems in a More-than Human Centred view of design and technology. Overlapping with practices of philosophy, ludic design, and speculative design he is interested in the use of ambiguity and play within design. As a visual artist his works focus on the relationship one has with their past(s), working primarily in the graphic medium where his visuals act as trinkets of collected moments gathered for their powers of attraction. In their own way as both a designer and artist his work observes human interaction through lenses of fermented experiences.