SWISP Lab launches a living lab residency at Science Gallery Melbourne
Hacking DISTRACTION for just climate and digital futures: What kinds of futures do we want to see, know and live in?
Assistant Professor Kathryn Coleman and SWISP Lab doctoral candidates Stephen Nicholls and Cassandra Truong welcome Vice-Chancellor, Professor Emma Johnston AO and Dean, Faculty of Education, Professor Marek Tesar to SWISP Lab’s DISTRACTION residency.
Science Gallery at the University of Melbourne becomes a site of speculative imagination and participatory research as SWISP Lab from the Faculty of Education launches its ‘living lab’ research residency as part of the new exhibition DISTRACTION. Running from July 2025 to May 2026, the Hacking Distraction residency explores the themes of attention, digital overwhelm, and planetary care, and will connect with the STEM Centre of Excellence High Schools Program, as part of the Victorian Government’s Tech School Initiative. The gallery’s residency lab will be transformed into a dynamic site for applied research, experimentation, and critical-creative engagement with young people, educators, artists, and community. We speculate and wonder with sonic and visual interventions, the (im)material and (in)visible distractions.
Director, Science Gallery Melbourne, Dr Ryan Jefferies and Assistant Professor Kathryn Coleman launch the SWISP Lab residency at the DISTRACTION exhibition opening.
Responding to themes of DISTRACTION, SWISP Lab reclaims scattered attention as a strategy for attuning to planetary urgencies. Through playful interventions, data storytelling, and speculative design, participants will explore possible, preferable, plausible, and impossible futures grounded in Land–technology–Anthropocene relations.
SWISP lab is
Assistant Professor Kathryn Coleman and Dr Sarah Healy (co-leads)
Dr Angela Molloy Murphy (SWISP Scholar-in-residence)
Anna Farago, Cassandra Truong, Katerina Undo, and Yvette Walker (SWISP lab doctoral candidates)
SWISP lab visiting scholar: Filippa Kier Droob Ph.D. Fellow Aarhus University (September to December)
This interdisciplinary residency features a HAK.io mega game and evolving data exhibition, hackathons, wondering walks, public workshops, and school-university collaborations. Distraction is reframed not as a deficit, but as a creative force for climate action, multimodal inquiry, and youth-led knowledge-making.
The residency culminates in a public Resonation Salon, a Distraction Response Archive, and a HAK.io Reverberation Wall, with reverberations to be exhibited at COP30 in Brazil.
For more information, contact:
SWISP Lab website
SWISP Lab email
