“Posthuman design opens new opportunities to look at sustainability beyond anthropocentric functionalism. Decentering the human allows approaching design and engineering from the perspective of multi-species collaborations”

Oscar Tomico is associate professor at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology on Design Research Methodologies for Posthuman Sustainability. His research expands the context of human-centered design and positions designers as part of complex ecological systems. Building on his research on 1st person research methodologies, he explores ecologies of design, production and use focusing on the impact they have on the co-existence and co-habitation with other-than-human actors, such as plants. He is currently involved in projects ranging from exploring more-than-human cohabitation in the greening of interior spaces through multi-species design, situating design practice as part of existing ecosystems, and analysing the impact of local regenerative social-ecological-technical systems of production.

Oscar Tomico holds an MSc degree in Industrial Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain). His PhD is from the same institution, awarded cum laude in 2007 on subjective experience-gathering techniques based on constructivist psychology. Tomico briefly worked as a consultant for Telefonica R&D (Spain) and joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as Assistant Professor in 2007. In 2023, he became associate professor on Design Research Methodologies for Posthuman Sustainability. He has held guest positions at AUT Creative technologies (New Zealand), TaiwanTech (Taiwan), the Swedish School of Textiles (Sweden), the Institute of Advanced Architecture (Spain), University of Tsukuba (Japan) and others. In 2015, he consulted for the functional textiles department at EURECAT (Spain). From 2017 to 2023, Tomico was head of the Industrial Design Bachelor’s degree program at ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering (Spain), co-director of the Design for Emerging Futures Master Program in collaboration between IAAC and ELISAVA (Spain), and co-editor-in-chief of the Temes de Disseny Journal.

Expertise area(‘s): CA, US. (Also: DRP)

Squad: Crafting wearable senses (in the fabric of everyday life)

Exemplary graduation projects of students I coached:
FMP: Leonie Tenthof van Noorden: This fits me
FBP: Tamara Hogeweegen: Posterus Textilus

Project topics I’d like to coach

“My research revolves around 1st Person Perspectives to Research through Design at different scales (bodies, communities and socio-technical systems). I develop embodied ideation techniques for close or on the body applications (e.g. soft wearables), contextualized design interventions to situate design practice in everyday life, exploring the impact of future local, distributed, open and circular socio-technical systems of production, or experimenting with cohabitation as a posthuman approach to multi-species design."


Coaching style

“In my coaching I focus a lot on the detailing, the prototyping and the making in general in terms of developing the competency Creativity and Aesthetics. I support taking a 1st Person persective in the User and Society competency area. In Design en Research Processes (DRP) I encourage students to approach design and engineering from the perspective of posthuman design and multi-species collaborations. I normally meet the students weekly to see the progress they make in their design interventions. I do not support just the result, but also the process behind it. I try to provide the students with theory and examples to support their development.”

Network

Oscar was the head of the Industrial Design Engineering Bachelor's Degree at Elisava, and co-directed the Design for Emergent Futures Master’s Program in collaboration with IAAC. Oscar: "If students want to go to Catalunya (Barcelona) I can support them very well. Also, in the fields of interaction design, textiles and wearables I have good contacts.”