A value holds the centre. Concepts orbit it, subconcepts orbit them, and relations run between. Nothing here is fixed. Arrange the constellation, shift your position, and see which ideas fall into alignment.
This page is a springboard to three outcomes that grew from methodological curiosities running through my PhD, my teaching and my creative practice at Liminal Studios. Each asks how technologies invite new ways of listening, knowing, relating and acting, and how they co‑shape representation, agency and power among communities living with stigma, including people with care- or justice‑experienced backgrounds.
My PhD was situated across Design Informatics and Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. Collaborating with care‑experienced communities, I developed a trauma‑sensitive Research through Design methodology that drew on co‑performative methods and interactive artefacts. Through them, we explored how meaning and knowledge emerge in intra‑action among people, technologies and environments.
The research informed inclusive practice in higher education for care‑experienced learners, through my involvement with the Love group of Scotland's Independent Care Review. It also contributed to policy dialogue with the UK Department for Education and the Scottish Parliament.
The model reimagines the praxis of the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch as a playful way of engaging with the world. It foregrounds generativity, serendipity and the shared participation of researcher, participants and lens-based technologies at each stage of meaning‑making. Treat it as a practical philosophy: a compass that supports listening and the co‑creation of values, which become bearings for navigating new terrain and uncertainty.
It began as a paper prototype, made when nested Venn diagrams could no longer hold the relations. It became a 3D and virtual reality prototype in which concepts orbit like planetary bodies, and then this browser version. Viewing the concepts from a changing position evokes Barad's agential cuts: where you stand decides which relations become visible. The model now plays three roles. It holds collaboratively developed values, supports data analysis, and communicates research insights as an interactive artefact.
The seed set gathers foundational concepts from Rouch's films and writing around an aesthetic of care: attentive listening, playfulness, active participation, a posthumanist view of the camera apparatus and speculative enactment. Replace them with your own. In the spirit of Pourquoi pas? and wabi‑sabi, the model welcomes imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness.
This model lives at www.ethnofiction.xyz, the address cited in the thesis. If something misbehaves, or you would like to use the model in your own research, write to liminalstudios.xyz/contact-us. Tell me what you were doing, what you expected and what happened.