Robin de Mourat is a designer and researcher. He has been a permanent member of médialab since 2019. He is developing the practices and challenges of investigative design, experimenting with research practices that combine the concerns and methods of design with approaches drawn from the social, ethnographic and participatory sciences.

His current research themes include the evolution of forms of citizen sensibility developed through digital cultures of participation, the mutations of urban project cultures in relation to environmental issues, and the study of digital technology practices at the margins of society.

Prior to his current position at médialab, he received multidisciplinary training in design (product design, history and theory of design) and computer science (CHI), and then worked in several collaborative scientific contexts with researchers in architectural history and media sociology. He had already visited the médialab as part of a doctoral residency in participant observation dedicated to the project An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence in 2014, then in 2016 as an interface designer & developer to develop student publication tools for the FORCCAST programme (fonio/ovide/dicto/tesselle).

His thesis in Design and Aesthetics, Le vacillement des formats. Écriture, matérialité et enquête : le design des publications en sciences humaines et sociales (2020) studied the role of writing and publishing practices in the processes of social and political constitution driven by contemporary humanities and social sciences research. This multimodal research explored the political and epistemological issues involved in writing formats for participatory social science research. More specifically, it looked at how the material and social experiments produced and studied by design research can help to question the positions of researchers and “inquired” persons in their research into social life.

His current research and training activities continue the process begun during his dissertation, bringing design research into dialogue with Science and Technology Studies, media studies and multimodal anthropology, and placing a strong emphasis on material and technical experimentation as an opportunity for individual and collective problematization of everyday experience.