Sarah Pennington

Staff details

Position

Lecturer in Design

Sarah's research explores the implications care and feminist technoscience for speculative design research.

Sarah is a design researcher with over two decades of experience. She specialises in practice-based design research and feminist design practices, and at the convergence of design and the social sciences. From 2000 to 2015, she was a Research Fellow at the Interaction Research Studio, first at the Royal College of Art and later at Goldsmiths, working on projects funded by the EPSRC and EU. This studio is renowned for its inventive research approaches, such as Cultural Probes, and its collaboration with participants in deploying working speculative prototypes. The design outcomes from these projects have been widely exhibited, including at FACT, Liverpool, the V&A, and Tate Britain.

In 2022, Sarah completed her AHRC Design Star doctorate. Her PhD explores the question of care in design, with empirical case studies that examine a shift from a focus on 'concern' to 'care' in speculative practice. She can supervise PhD students whose research aligns with her interests.

Academic qualifications

PhD in Design (Goldsmiths) 2022
MA Curating Contemporary Design (Kingston University) 2014
BA Fine Art Photography (Glasgow School of Art) 1995

Publications and research outputs

Design

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Jarvis, Nadine; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Pennington, Sarah; Bowers, John; Pike, James; Beitra, Robin and Ovalle, Liliana. 2017. Design: Datacatcher.

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Jarvis, Nadine; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Bowers, John; Pennington, Sarah and Boehner, Kirsten. 2011. The Light Collector.

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Jarvis, Nadine; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Bowers, John; Pennington, Sarah and Boehner, Kirsten. 2011. The Wind Tunnel.

Show/Exhibition

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Jarvis, Nadine; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Pennington, Sarah; Bowers, John; Pike, James; Beitra, Robin and Ovalle, Liliana. 2017. Datacatcher: At The New Observatory Exhibition, FACT. In: "The New Observatory", Foundation for Art and Creative, Technology (FACT), United Kingdom, 19 June - 1 October 2017.

Boucher, Andy; Cameron, David; Gaver, William; Hauenstein, Mark; Jarvis, Nadine; Kerridge, Tobie; Michael, Mike; Ovalle, Liliana; Pennington, Sarah and Wilkie, Alex. 2015. Web Science 2015. In: "Web Science 2015 Conference Exhibition", Web Sci '15, United Kingdom, 28 June – 1 July 2015.

Boucher, Andy; Cameron, David; Gaver, William; Hauenstein, Mark; Jarvis, Nadine; Ovalle, Liliana and Pennington, Sarah. 2015. Datacatcher: Digital Design Weekend, V&A Museum. In: "Digital Design Weekend", V&A Museum, London, United Kingdom, 26 - 27 Sept 2015.

Book

Beaver, Jacob; Boucher, Andy and Pennington, Sarah. 2007. The Curious Home. London: Goldmiths University of London. ISBN 1904158811

Conference or Workshop Item

Wilkie, Alex and Pennington, Sarah. 2023. 'Poster for Design for more-than-human futures: Towards post-anthropocentric worlding'. In: Design for more-than-human futures: Towards post-anthropocentric worlding. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom 18 October 2023.

Pennington, Sarah. 2023. 'Inventive care-politics in Design'. In: More-than human aesthetics & Inventive care politics in design. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain 6 July 2023.

Pennington, Sarah. 2019. 'Which Worlds Are Held Together With Care?'. In: Who Cares? 8th Biannual Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) Conference. Aalto University, Finland 2–4 June 2019.

Article

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Jarvis, Nadine; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Pennington, Sarah; Bowers, John; Pike, James; Beitra, Robin and Ovalle, Liliana. 2016. The Datacatcher: Batch Deployment and Documentation of 130 Location-Aware, Mobile Devices That Put Sociopolitically-Relevant Big Data in People's Hands: Polyphonic Interpretation at Scale. pp. 1597-1607.

Gaver, William; Bowers, John; Boucher, Andy; Cameron, David; Hauenstein, Mark; Jarvis, Nadine and Pennington, Sarah. 2013. Indoor Weather Stations: Investigating a Ludic Approach to Environmental HCI Through Batch Prototyping. CHI 2013 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3451-3460.

Gaver, William; Boucher, Andy; Pennington, Sarah and Walker, Brendan. 2004. Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty. Interactions - Funology, 11(5), pp. 53-56. ISSN 1072-5520

Book Section

Pennington, Sarah and Margolies, Eleanor. 2019. Antarctica SE3: A Conversation on Designing with Care. In: Kate Fletcher; Louise St. Pierre and Mathilda Tham, eds. Design and Nature: A Partnership. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 186-193. ISBN 9780815362739