Oscar Tomico Plasencia
Department / Institute
Group
RESEARCH PROFILE
Oscar Tomico is associate professor at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology on Design Research Methodologies for Posthuman Sustainability. His research expands the context of human-centered design and positions designers as part of complex ecological systems. Building on his research on 1st person research methodologies, he explores ecologies of design, production and use focusing on the impact they have on the co-existence and co-habitation with other-than-human actors, such as plants. He is currently involved in projects ranging from exploring more-than-human cohabitation in the greening of interior spaces through multi-species design, situating design practice as part of existing ecosystems, and analysing the impact of local regenerative social-ecological-technical systems of production.
Posthuman design opens new opportunities to look at sustainability beyond anthropocentric functionalism. Decentering the human allows approaching design and engineering from the perspective of multi-species collaborations”
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Oscar Tomico holds an MSc degree in Industrial Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain). His PhD is from the same institution, awarded cum laude in 2007 on subjective experience-gathering techniques based on constructivist psychology. Tomico briefly worked as a consultant for Telefonica R&D (Spain) and joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as Assistant Professor in 2007. In 2023, he became associate professor on Design Research Methodologies for Posthuman Sustainability. He has held guest positions at AUT Creative technologies (New Zealand), TaiwanTech (Taiwan), the Swedish School of Textiles (Sweden), the Institute of Advanced Architecture (Spain), University of Tsukuba (Finland) and others. In 2015, he consulted for the functional textiles department at EURECAT (Spain). From 2017 to 2023, Tomico was head of the Industrial Design Bachelor’s degree program at ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering (Spain), co-director of the Design for Emerging Futures Master Program in collaboration between IAAC and ELISAVA (Spain), and co-editor-in-chief of the Temes de Disseny Journal.
Key Publications
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Oscar Tomico,Ron Wakkary,Kristina Andersen
Living-with and Designing-with Plants
Interactions (2023) -
Audrey Desjardins,Oscar Tomico,Andrés Lucero,Marta E. Cecchinato,Carman Neustaedter
Introduction to the Special Issue on First-Person Methods in HCI
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2021) -
Danielle Wilde,Anna Vallgårda,Oscar Tomico
Embodied design ideation methods
(2017) -
O. Tomico Plasencia,V.O. Winthagen,M.M.G. van Heist
Designing for, with or within
(2012)
Ancillary Activities
No ancillary activities