STILL NOT QUITE — Dominika Swierad Portfolio Site

About me

I bring research, innovation and experience design together, helping teams build products that are useful, thoughtful and fun. Right now I'm part of the AI Labs team at On, where we're working to bring people more joy through movement. I've worked across sectors, with a particular passion for media and storytelling, my time at the Financial Times and building the Guardian's Feast being the highlights.

After hours I write a newsletter about metropolitan life and culture.

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STILL NOT QUITECOMMUNITY RESEARCH, ARTEFACTS, PARTICIPATION

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I WORKED ASCO-FOUNDER

I co-founded Still Not Quite - a practice using speculative design and tangible storytelling techniques to explore possible future scenarios. We developed participatory research methods allowing to explore and contextualise ambiguous situations with diverse stakeholders.

One of our workshops enables participants to design objects and services from hypothetical scenarios. Then, we put them in a “futures marketplace” and ask users to review them, as if they would a purchase. Through exploration of these products and reviwes we collaboratively explore possible futures that may affect the participant groups, allowing for finding tangible issues and opportunities in an ambiguous space.

With Still Not Quite we surface the concerns and ideas of people not usually involved in high-level decision making, and help to make them a valid point of consideration.

Design expertise is being standardised and “automated” to be used by a wide range of individuals. What if in the future, designer’s know-how and sensibility won’t be needed anymore in the creative/innovation sector? Where else would they put their abilities to use?

What’s next for designers in a world where everybody designs? We asked this question to the students of the final year of Material Futures at CSM. As they were approaching the job market, we asked how they would contribute to the rapidly changing role of the designer.

Workshop with the Central Saint Martins MA Material Future students, exploring the future when Brain Computer Interfaces will be omnipresent.

Speaking on the “future of work” during a pecha-kucha event in Glasgow in 2018.

Workshop from 2019 with citizens of the city of Wroclaw.

One of the early workshops, it was conducted in Poland and focused on the increasing and persistent air pollution in the city. Workshop was run with local citizens, and this is an example of a product designed by a 14 year old Joanne, reflecting on how smog can be detrimental not only to one’s health, but also to their social media image.