Award winning project: First Place for Novel Images of the Future and Honourable Mention for Experiential Futures in the Association of Professional Futurists IF Awards, 2025. Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize, 2025. At Hyphae we have been thinking about plagues: plagues past, plagues future, and what we can learn from these real and speculative plagues to prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally in times of crisis. Read my speculative fiction short story, experience futuristic soundscapes, explore futures-focused plague scenarios, and try out our facilitator’s activity guide at plagueseason.com.
Individual creative practitioners make up the majority of the creative industries workforce – but often have no idea about how to get involved with creating the public policies that directly affect their opportunities to apply for funding, professional development, and creative skills education strategies. Fortunately we’ve produced a full guide to responding to policy consultations as part of ekip, Europe’s policy innovation engine for the creative industries.
How can the video games industry become more inclusive? By using this critical reflection toolkit produced as part of ekip, Europe’s policy innovation engine for the creative industries.
Data ethics is a minefield, especially for small and micro-businesses, as most creative industries businesses are. This essential ethics statement is a practical hands-on series of reflective questions across a range of business domains to help prepare businesses working in the creative industries to ensure their businesses are sustainable and ethical for everyone they employ and serve.
How can we make data collection, processing & analysis more useful for data consumers (like policymakers and funders) and for data producers (like businesses and individual creatives)? Through our research we found that though there are a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative data sources on the creative industries available, policymakers and creative practitioners alike still struggle to use data effectively as a decision support tool in their strategic thinking and planning.
The field of digital ethics has evolved considerably over the past few years. Get an overview from some of the leading lights in the industry on how to get digital ethics off the page and put it into practice.
How do you set teams up with the right context for success, physically, virtually, and mentally? How do you create the right space?
Fun Stuff
Picture Your Poisons is an intimate portrait of my cancer treatment journey throughout 2023, created in collaboration with glassmaker Inge Panneels while I was receiving active treatment. Six glass casts, and one wax form, represent different treatments I received. Glass is forged in a transformative process of great stresses on the raw materials, and similarly, cancer survivors endure treatments which radically transform their bodies in order to survive. Exhibited at the Visual Arts Scotland Centenary Show (March 2024) and the Edinburgh Science Festival (April 2024.) Read more in our research paper about the process of making the casts: Caitlin McDonald, Inge Panneels; Picture Your Poisons: An Intimate Portrait of Cancer Treatment. Leonardo 2025; 58 (4): 344–351. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02681
Meet Duologue, an open source chatbot that rescues you from uncomfortable silences. No longer operational, but the open-source software code is available on github for those who would like to repeat the experiment.
Khamseen: a desert wind. Also, a dance performance for Dance Hack Day 2017 exploring the idea of cultural flows and the mixing of cultures that occurs in an increasingly globalised world. Featuring a motion-responsive colour changing costume I designed using an Arduino sewable microchip and conductive thread.
What happens when you train a neural net with the complete works of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas? A lot of pleasant fol-de-rol.
Bellydancebot used to tweet simple autogenerated dance instructions from the Cheap Bots, Done Quick platform.
