Approach

Research

How we build systems, shape collective participation, and influence creative technology.

Research Methodology

Runtime Publics adopts a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach that combines technical development with research through design, public deployment, and collaborative experimentation. Rather than separating research from making, prototypes function as both technological artefacts and research instruments, through five modes of enquiry:

Research through Design

designing prototypes as research instruments.

Practice-based Research

producing installations and experiences that build knowledge.

Technical Research

developing new software pipelines, interaction techniques, and computational methods.

Field Research

deploying systems within museums, festivals, classrooms, cities, and communities.

Industry R&D

co-developing technologies and projects with industry partners.

Research Agenda

Runtime Publics organises its work around three vectors, moving from technical foundation to public consequence to field-level influence.

Vector 1

Computational Systems & Methods

How do we build new computational systems?

Develops the lab's technical research base: emerging methods in AI, spatial computing, sensing, and real-time systems, tested through prototypes and installations rather than papers alone. New technology is treated not as a given to be applied, but as a design object to be interrogated: what a system affords, what it forecloses, and what publics it presumes.

Active research threads:

  • Infrastructures of Computation and Their Publics: the technical and institutional substrates (networks, platforms, sensing infrastructure) that shape what kinds of public interaction become possible. (i.e. Monsoon Blues, 2025)
  • Tangible Interfaces as Critical Practice: physical computing and embodied interaction as a method of enquiry, not just a delivery format. (i.e. Mystery for You, 2023)

Vector 2

Publics

How do those systems shape participation, culture, and collective experience?

Investigates the social architectures called into being by live systems. Work here is participatory by method: co-design, situated fieldwork, and deep collaboration with communities to develop new frameworks for evaluating collective experience, moving beyond individual usability metrics.

Active research threads:

  • Live Systems and Ephemeral Publics: how real-time, temporary gatherings (a performance, an installation, a multiplayer session) form and dissolve publics, and what that impermanence means for design. (i.e. Moti Chor, 2025 and Meta Lakme Fashion Week, 2026)
  • Situated Archives and Community Epistemologies: archival and documentation practices that keep authority over a narrative with the community it concerns, rather than extracting it into a neutral repository. (Himalayan Folk Collective)

Vector 3

Research Translation

How do these insights influence industry, education, and public institutions?

Moves the lab's findings into commercial, educational, and civic spaces, positioning Runtime Publics as a site of R&D leadership for creative technology in India.

Core Concepts

Runtime Publics

A public is not a fixed audience but something a system calls into being while it runs, and that dissolves when the system stops. This concept treats computation as a temporary, networked, and situated act of assembly: a performance, an installation, or a multiplayer session brings a public into existence for its duration, and the lab's work asks how that process can be designed for deliberately rather than left as a by-product of the technology.

Experience Ecosystems

Interaction rarely happens through a single interface. It is distributed across devices, spaces, people, AI agents, and infrastructures that a project must design across rather than within. This concept reframes the unit of design from the individual screen or object to the ecosystem it sits inside, asking how meaning and participation move between its parts.

Computational Culture

Computation is not a neutral delivery mechanism for content; it is itself a cultural medium. It shapes ritual, institutional practice, public life, and everyday experience in ways that are rarely visible until a system is deployed in a real setting. This concept holds the lab's technical work accountable to its cultural consequences, treating every deployment as an intervention in a specific cultural context.