Seminar from Petra Jääskeläinen on ‘Designing for More-than-Human Creative AI: Ontological and Aesthetic Re-Designings’
Seminar Date: Wednesday 22nd April 2026, 2pm
Seminar Location: Jack Cole Room 1.33b (Hybrid on Teams and in person. Petra will be joining us virtually)
Abstract
Creative AI technologies (AI technologies used in creative practices, such as art, design, and media), and AI technology more widely, are generally designed with human-centered commitments. This risks maintaining extractivist design practices that configure humans at the forefront of ethical consideration, while overlooking nonhuman actors and disregarding that we are part of relational more-than-human ecologies. These kinds of design practices have, for example, established AI data centers that have disrupted local ecologies, and produced AI tools that output stereotypical AI imagery and visual culture of ecologies and nonhuman actors. My research work examines how we could design for Creative AI technologies instead with more-than-human commitments of acknowledging relational ecologies and prioritizing nonhuman actors’ subjectivities. This research inquiry has led into several meaningful outputs, which I will discuss in this talk, such as designing for multispecies co-creativity in situated contexts, as well as approaches for examining ethics of more-than-human data practices and aesthetics in the context of Creative AI.
Biography
Petra Jääskeläinen is a critical design researcher and doctoral candidate (2021-2026) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, working on more-than-human design and critical Creative AI