Advisors: Professor Kristina Höök and Dr Airi Lampinen
Associated with: Ethics as Enacted through Movement

Funding: The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS)

Expected Defence: August 2026

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Project Description

My PhD focuses on engaging with autonomous technologies through creative design work and somatic practices, such as appropriating industrial robots through dance practice, crafting machine-like systems that foster aesthetic exploration, or orchestrating interactions that investigate collective human-technology relations.

My work focuses on the felt and embodied practice of ethics within soma design, research through design and performance-led research approaches to understand physical or proximate interactions with autonomous technologies such as machines, robots and aerial drones. My approach deconstructs interactions somatically, analytically, and critically, thereby revealing the ethics implicit in their design. By doing so, it is possible to reimagine the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of such technologies as a collective project entailing somatic freedoms: a processual cultivation of human-technology relations.

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included Publications

[Download Felt Ethics] Rachael Garrett, Kristina Popova, Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, Thorhildur Asgeirsdottir, Airi Lampinen, and Kristina Höök. 2023. Felt Ethics: Cultivating Ethical Sensibility in Design Practice. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 1–15.

[Download Misalignments] Rachael Garrett & Kat Hawkins, Patrick Brundell, Simon Castle-Green, Paul Tennent, Feng Zhou, Airi Lampinen, Kristina Höök, and Steve Benford. 2025. In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages.

[Download Friction] Rachael Garrett, Patrick Brundell, Simon Castle-Green, Kat Hawkins, Paul Tennent, Feng Zhou, Airi Lampinen, Kristina Höök, and Steve Benford. 2025. Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages.

[Download Transformations] Joseph La Delfa & Rachael Garrett, Airi Lampinen, and Kristina Höök. 2024. Articulating Mechanical Sympathy for Somaesthetic Human-Machine Relations. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3336–3353.