My research interests centre on investigating human-algorithm interaction design: how can design shape the ways that interact with computational systems at scales from small and personal to societal and global. I’m most interested in where we need to develop new ways of thinking to account for human experience within digital architectures, in order to build systems that are humane and supportive. Currently, this involves looking at the interactions between humans and AI/complex information processing systems..

(Full List of Publications)

Current projects:

  • I am director of the AI Futures Lab: Rights and Justice, with Ben Wagner. The AI Futures Lab on Rights and Justice uses relational prototyping to radically re-imagine the regulation of digital technologies. We carry out impact-oriented research to support rights and justice around AI and related technologies through imagining possible futures. Our research aims to center and support those with less power in their interactions and relations with technology, working towards more just futures for all.
  • I co-lead the Design and AI Symposium with Phil van Allen, Mathias Funk and Stephan Wensveen. The Symposium brings together academics, industry and publics to explore the connections between design and AI, balancing criticality and optimism.

Relational Prototyping

In order to better understand the relationships formed through and around technology, relational prototyping looks at how to understand current relations, imagine future relations, and manifest those future possibilities.

Speculative relations

    Towards Just Futures: A Feminist Approach To Speculative Design For Policy Making Dideriksen, Sofie Amalie Torp and Verma, Himanshu and Cila, Nazli and Murray-Rust, Dave (2024) DRS2024
    Spatial Robotic Experiences as a Ground for Future HRI Speculations Murray-Rust, Dave and Lupetti, Maria Luce and Ianniello, Alessandro and Gorbet, Matt and Van Der Helm, Aadjan and Filthaut, Liliane and Chiu, Adrian and Beesley, Philip (2024) Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    Computationally Mediated Pro-Social Deception van Kleek, Max and Murray-Rust, Dave and Guy, Amy and O’Hara, Kieron and Shadbolt, Nigel (2016) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction 2016

Understanding AI Relations

    Acts of Interfacing in an Entangled Life Liu, Yuxi and Giaccardi, Elisa and Redström, Johan and Murray-Rust, Dave (2024) DRS Biennial Conference Series
    (Un)Making AI Magic: A Design Taxonomy Lupetti, Maria Luce and Murray-Rust, Dave (2024) Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    Metaphors for Designers Working with AI Murray-Rust, Dave and Nicenboim, Iohanna and Lockton, Dan (2022) DRS Biennial Conference Series
    Metaphor Gardening: Experiential Engagements for Designing AI Interactions Murray-Rust, Dave and Lupetti, Maria Luce and Nicenboim, Iohanna (2024) DRS2024
    Respect as a Lens for the Design of AI Systems Seymour, William and Van Kleek, Max and Binns, Reuben and Murray-Rust, Dave (2022) Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

Robot Relationality

    1. Cosmic Troubleshooting: Exploring Third-Person View for Error Handling in Telerobotic Planetary Infrastructure Maintenance Filthaut, Liliane and Murray-Rust, Dave and Lupetti, Maria Luce and Lii, Neal Y. and Schmaus, Peter and Leidner, Daniel (2024) 2024 International Conference on Space Robotics (iSpaRo)
      Actor-Flower-Mesh-Work: Making Environments Together von Jungenfeld, Rocio and Murray-Rust, Dave (2023) Creating Digitally: Shifting Boundaries: Arts and Technologies—Contemporary Applications and Concepts
      First International Workshop on Workers-Robot Relationships Zaga, Cristina and Lupetti, Maria Luce and Forster, Deborah and Murray-Rust, Dave and Prendergast, Micah and Abbink, David (2024) HRI2024

    Designing AI Systems

      Grasping AI: Experiential Exercises for Designers Murray-Rust, Dave and Lupetti, Maria Luce and Nicenboim, Iohanna and van der Hoog, Wouter (2023) AI & Society
      Unpacking Human-AI Interactions: From Interaction Primitives to a Design Space Tsiakas, Konstantinos and Murray-Rust, Dave (2024) ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
      Towards a Multi-Stakeholder Value-Based Assessment Framework for Algorithmic Systems Yurrita, Mireia and Murray-Rust, Dave and Balayn, Agathe and Bozzon, Alessandro (2022) 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

    Data Relations

    (also data KEM)

      Exploring The Future of Data-Driven Product Design Gorkovenko, Katerina and Burnett, Daniel J. and Thorp, James K. and Richards, Daniel and Murray-Rust, Dave (2020) Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      Data-Enhanced Design: Engaging Designers in Exploratory Sensemaking with Multimodal Data Gorkovenko, Katerina and Jenkins, Adam and Vaniea, Kami and Murray-Rust, Dave (2023) International Journal of Design
      Entangled Ethnography: Towards a Collective Future Understanding Murray-Rust, Dave and Gorkovenko, Katerina and Burnett, Dan and Richards, Daniel (2019) Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019

    Infrastructural Relations

      Token Gesture: Non-Transferable NFTs, Digital Possessions and Ownership Design Elsden, Chris and Morgan, Evan and Black, Suzanne R. and Disley, Martin and Schafer, Burkhard and Murray-Rust, Dave and Speed, Chris (2024) CSCW
      Blockchain and Beyond: Understanding Blockchains through Prototypes and Public Engagement Murray-Rust, Dave and Elsden, Chris and Nissen, Bettina and Tallyn, Ella and Pschetz, Larissa and Speed, Chris (2022) Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
      GeoPact: Engaging Publics in Location-Aware Smart Contracts through Technological Assemblies Tallyn, Ella and Revans, Joe and Morgan, Evan and Murray-Rust, Dave (2020) Designing Interactive Systems 2020 Conference
      Enacting the Last Mile: Experiences of Smart Contracts in Courier Deliveries Tallyn, Ella and Revans, Joe and Morgan, Evan and Fisken, Keith and Murray-Rust, Dave (2021) Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

    AI Art Relations

      Agency and Legibility for Artists through Experiential AI Hemment, Drew and Vidmar, Matjaz and Panas, Daga and Murray-Rust, Dave and Belle, Vaishak and Ruth, Aylett (2023) XAIxArts at Creativity and Cognition
      2. Experiential AI: Between Arts and Explainable AI Hemment, Drew and Murray-Rust, Dave and Belle, Vaishak and Aylett, Ruth and Vidmar, Matjaz and Broz, Frank (2024) Leonardo

      Other

      Creative Industries

        Decentralised Creative Economies and Transactional Creative Communities: New Value Discovery in the Performing Arts Elsden, Chris and Speed, Chris and Murray-Rust, Dave (2024) Data-Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries: Creative Data Catalysts
        Designing New Socio-Economic Imaginaries Speed, Christopher and Nissen, Bettina and Pschetz, Larissa and Murray-Rust, Dave and Mehrpouya, Hadi and Oosthuizen, Shaune (2019) The Design Journal
        GeoPact: Engaging Publics in Location-Aware Smart Contracts through Technological Assemblies Tallyn, Ella and Revans, Joe and Morgan, Evan and Murray-Rust, Dave (2020) Designing Interactive Systems 2020 Conference
        Enacting the Last Mile: Experiences of Smart Contracts in Courier Deliveries Tallyn, Ella and Revans, Joe and Morgan, Evan and Fisken, Keith and Murray-Rust, Dave (2021) Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

      Active Grants

      • Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE) (UKRI/EPSRC, £4M, 2020 - 2025) , Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy - creativity around distributed ledgers (with Surrey, Digital Catapult)
      • DCODE (Horizon 2020 ITN, Jan 2020 - Jan 2025) , Designing human-machine relations, trusted interactions, socio-economic models for democratic futures (with Delft, Edinburgh, Umea, Copenhagen, Aarhus, TTI, Philips, AAS )
      • AI Futures Lab: Rights and Justice in Remote Work (Delft AI Initiative , 2022 - 2027) , AI Futures Lab: Rights and Justice in Remote Work - part of the Delft AI labs initiative, exploring the impact of AI on remote work, and how we can use design to support new systems that preserve rights and justice

      Current PhD Students

      • Yuxi Liu (through DCODE, with Elisa Giaccardi and Johann Redstrom) is investigating the challenges of decentralized interaction with data-driven systems, and the development of novel design principles for multi-intentional interaction.
      • Mahan Mehrvarz (through AI Futures Lab, with Elisa Giaccardi) is investigating designing justice oriented AI artefacts.
      • Sofie-Amalie Torp Dideriksen (through AI Futures Lab, with Elisa Giaccardi) is investigating critical feminist approaches to designing with AI (all PhDs)

      Research Themes

      AI Futures

      I am director of the AI Futures Lab: Rights and Justice in Remote Work, with Ben Wagner and Filippo Santoni de Sio. The AI Futures Lab will address the current knowledge gap by combining IDE post-industrial design research and methodologies. These will be applied to machine ethnography, to experiential AI and to in-the-wild AI prototyping using TPM methodologies of comprehensive engineering and design for values. We will explore configurations of people and AI around remote collaboration and distributed work, aiming to expand both scientific knowledge and public understanding of AI capabilities. Our goal is a tangible and vibrant set of prototypes, experiences and theories that map out ways in which design can be engaged to deploy AI and machine learning in support of new ways of working.

      This is closely related to the work of the DCODE project, where I am co-supervising:

      • Yuxi Liu (with Elisa Giaccardi and Johann Redstrom) who is investigating the challenges of decentralized interaction with data-driven systems, and the development of novel design principles for multi-intentional interaction.

      Continuous digital ethnography and use driven design

      Entangled ethnography develops ways to use continuous, realtime data to develop understanding of use and behaviour. In order to make sure inferences are valid, it includes contextual enquiry techniques to ground truth data against lived experience. We are also creating tools for exploring and annotating the data, in collaboration with machine learning, and supporting designers in asking questions of existing and yet to be collected data.

      This started through the Chatty Factories, but continues within TU Delft’s design department.

      • Murray-Rust, D., Gorkovenko, K., Burnett, D., & Richards, D. (2019). Entangled Ethnography: Towards a Collective Future Understanding. Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019, 1–10. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.
      • Gorkovenko, K., Burnett, D. J., Thorp, J. K., Richards, D., & Murray-Rust, D. (2020). Exploring The Future of Data-Driven Product Design. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.
      • Gorkovenko, K., Burnett, D., Thorp, J., Richards, D., & Murray-Rust, D. (2019). Supporting Real-Time Contextual Inquiry Through Sensor Data. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC2019). https://doi.org/10.1111/1559-8918.2019.01307

      Prototyping with Emerging infrastructures

      New computational systems are springing up around us, shaping society as they go. This includes artificial intelligence ecosystems, smart contracts and decentralised ledgers, IoT and more. I’m interested in how we can bring design to bear in this space, offering open experiences that foster critical engagement based on a developed understanding of these technologies. This started with work on GeoCoin, prototyping interactions around geolocated currencies and continued with GeoPact - a system of intelligent objects that interact with location based smart contracts (Funded through B-IoT, IoT-Tram and BLING - BLockchain IN Government). A large part of this work spanning 5 years is captured in an annotated portfolio, that covers work from the Institute for Design Informatics.

      • Annotated portfolio: Murray-Rust, D., Elsden, C., Nissen, B., Tallyn, E., Pschetz, L., & Speed, C. (2022). Blockchain and Beyond: Understanding Blockchains through Prototypes and Public Engagement. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. https://doi.org/https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503462
      • Tallyn, E., Revans, J., Morgan, E., Fisken, K., & Murray-Rust, D. (2021). Enacting the Last Mile: Experiences of Smart Contracts in Courier Deliveries. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. Yokohama Japan: ACM.

      • Tallyn, E., Revans, J., Morgan, E., & Murray-Rust, D. (2020). GeoPact: Engaging Publics in Location-Aware Smart Contracts through Technological Assemblies. Designing Interactive Systems 2020 Conference, 799–811. ACM.

      • Nissen, B., Pschetz, L., Murray-Rust, D., Mehrpouya, H., Oosthuizen, S., & Speed, C. (2018). GeoCoin: Supporting Ideation and Collaborative Design with Location-Based Smart Contracts. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.

      Experiential AI, art-science and embodied algorithms

      A cruicial societal ability is the ability to debate and engage with emerging technology. Part of my work is to support this, by bringing art-science thinking to bear on AI and robotics. This is different from approaches such as Explainable AI - here I’m interested in creating experiences that help to understand and engage viscerally and critically with technologies. In the emerging Experiential AI research them, we are exploring how creative practice can shape the way publics and computer scientists understand artificial intelligence.

      • Hemment, D., Aylett, R., Belle, V., Murray-Rust, D., Luger, E., Hillston, J., … Broz, F. (2019). Experiential AI. AI Matters, 5, 25–31.
      • Hemment, D., Belle, V., Aylett, R., Murray-Rust, D., Pschetz, L., & Broz, F. (2019). Toward Fairness, Morality and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence through Experiential AI. Leonardo, 52. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01795
      • Murray-Rust, D., & von Jungenfeld, R. (2017). Thinking through Robotic Imaginaries. RTD2017. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4746973
      • Perelló, J., Murray-Rust, D., Nowak, A., & Bishop, S. R. (2012). Linking Science and Arts: Intimate Science, Shared Spaces and Living Experiments. European Physical Journal - Special Topics, 214, 597–634.

      Humane Data Interaction

      Driven in part by understanding the social within social machines, I have been concerned with aspects of the ways in which people interact with data that have to do with privacy, identity and autonomy. This means opening up areas around humane data interaction – how we can live as humans within an increasingly algorithmically mediated society. Key themes are pro social deception, identity, wayfaring, personal data and developing acceptability as a lens for technical systems.

      • Rooksby, J., Morrison, A., & Murray-Rust, D. (2019). Student Perspectives on Digital Phenotyping: The Acceptability of Using Smartphone Data to Assess Mental Health. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.
      • Gorkovenko, K., & Murray-Rust, D. (2021). User Perspectives on the Acceptability of Realtime Data Capture for Design Research by Connected Products. In G. Bruyns & H. Wei (Eds.), [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes (pp. 2201–2221). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
      • van Kleek, M., Murray-Rust, D., Guy, A., O’Hara, K., & Shadbolt, N. (2016). Computationally Mediated Pro-Social Deception. Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction 2016, 552–563. ACM.
      • Murray-Rust, D., Tarte, S., Hartswood, M., & Green, O. (2015). On Wayfaring in Social Machines. WWW ’15 Companion Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, 1143–1148. ACM.
      • Kleek, M. V., Smith, D. A., Shadbolt, N. R., Murray-Rust, D., & Guy, A. (2015). Self Curation, Social Partitioning, Escaping from Prejudice and Harassment: The Many Dimensions of Lying Online. WWW 2015 Companion, 371–372.

      Data Manifestation

      ‘How does data give rise to experiences? How does data science become the basis for communicative work?’. I’m investigating these questions through a combination of reasearch and teaching. I’m collaborating with Benjamin Bach to understand how to make and use Data Comics to communicate about data. I’m collaborating with Bettina Nissen on WallVis to explore the possibilities of a dynamic, modular data physicalisation system.

      • Wang, Z., Romat, H., Chevalier, F., Riche, N., Murray-Rust, D., & Bach, B. (2022). Interactive Data Comics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114849
      • Bach, B., Wang, Z., Farinella, M., Murray-Rust, D., & Henry Riche, N. (2018). Design Patterns for Data Comics. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM.

      Algorithms and Music

      My PhD was in artificial intelligence and music - creating a system of musical agents that could be improvisational partners.

      • Murray-Rust, D., & Smaill, A. (2011). Towards a Model of Musical Interaction and Communication. Artificial Intelligence, 175, 1697–1721.
      • Murray-Rust, D., Smaill, A., & Edwards, M. (2006). MAMA: An Architecture for Interactive Musical Agents. In G. Brewka, S. Coraeschi, A. Perini, & P. Traverso (Eds.), ECAI 2006, PROCEEDINGS (pp. 36–40). I O S PRESS.
      • Murray-Rust, D., Smaill, A., & Maya, M. C. (2005). VirtuaLatin - Towards a Musical Multi-Agent System. In H. Selvaraj, B. Verma, & A. DeCarvalho (Eds.), ICCIMA 2005: Sixth International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Multimedia Applications, Proceedings (pp. 17–22). United States: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

      Engineering Social Machines

      From Wikipedia to Facebook, social machines have become integral to our daily lives. Digital networked technology now routinely enables coordination of collective action, releasing the power of decentralised hybrid human-machine problem-solving at scale. Supported through the SociaM Project, summed up in The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. Within this, I’ve been working on using Process Calculus to create open interactions on the web.

      • Murray-Rust, D., Papapanagiotou, P., & Robertson, D. (2016). Softening Electronic Institutions to Support Natural Interaction. Human Computation, 2. https://doi.org/10.15346/hc.v2i2.3
      • Papapanagiotou, P., Davoust, A., Murray-Rust, D., Manataki, A., van Kleek, M., Shadbolt, N., & Robertson, D. (2018). Social Machines for All. 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1208–1212.
      • Murray-Rust, D., & Robertson, D. (2014). LSCitter: Building Social Machines by Augmenting Existing Social Networks with Interaction Models. Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 875–880. ACM.

      Understanding Mathematical practice

      I have a longstanding interest in the ways that digital tools can support mathematical practice, starting with developing a declarative, semantic model of mathematics that can be used both for display and calculation. Through the SociaM project, I became interested in the Social Machines of Mathematics, developing formal structures for modelling online collaboration.

      • Corneli, J., Martin, U., Murray-Rust, D., Nesin, G. R., & Pease, A. (2019). Argumentation Theory for Mathematical Argument. Argumentation, 1–42.
      • Lane, L., Martin, U., Murray-Rust, D., Pease, A., & Tanswell, F. (2018). Journeys in Mathematical Landscapes: Genius or Craft? In Mathematics Education in the Digital Era. Proof Technology in Mathematics Research and Teaching. Springer.

      Completed Grants