Name: Designing mutualistic interfaces - Frederick Van Amstel [LECTURE]
Start: 2026-04-23T20:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-04-23T22:00:00+02:00
Location: Kogelstraat 34, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Designing mutualistic interfaces - Frederick Van Amstel [LECTURE]

Interfaces are not only screens. They are also doors, counters, classrooms, streets, waiting rooms, and public squares.
They organise how we enter, how we are seen, how we respond to one another, and whether mutual recognition can take place at all.
Join Frederick van Amstel for a lecture on mutualistic interfaces: digital, analogue, and spatial forms of design that create room for presence, accountability, and more inclusive ways of relating.
Digital interfaces have replaced so many face-to-face interactions that we almost forget what we are missing. As users, we take action, send orders, and sometimes hurt other people without even knowing whose faces are on the other side of the "inter-face". This habit is extending to analogue interfaces as offline actions increasingly follow online patterns. People are losing their ability to make eye contact, share full presence, and mutually recognize each other.
Most contemporary interfaces have a specific design that habituates users to adopt dress codes, roles, avatars, algorithms, and other kinds of social masks. In that way, systemic user oppression, or users oppressing other users, effectively hides or distracts from the injustices that sustain large-scale inequality systems.
Within these systems, it is still possible to design otherwise. In this lecture, Dr. Frederick van Amstel shares his research on designing mutualistic interfaces, interfaces that enable mutual recognition among users. Reflecting on participatory design projects involving analogue and digital interfaces he worked on in the Netherlands, the US, and Brazil, Frederick evaluates what worked and what didn't in practice. Also, he provides a glimpse of the interface design theory he is developing with his peers at the Design & Oppression Network.
More info: https://timelab.org/events/1923