What if a media lab wasn’t simply a place for experimenting with technology, but a space shaped by the people, ecologies, and communities that surround it?
This question is at the heart of Andrés Fernández Roncancio’s doctoral research. As a virtual Researcher-in-Residence at the Basically Good Media Lab (BGML), Andrés is exploring how university media labs can be collaboratively imagined through relationships among local communities, institutions, technologies, and the more-than-human world, in a dialogue between Latin America and the Global North.
A PhD candidate in Communication at Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia, Andrés works at the intersection of strategic design, participatory research, and media innovation. His research focuses on Sabana Centro, a rapidly growing region north of Bogotá, where he is developing a conceptual model for a university media lab rooted in the territory’s social, cultural, and ecological realities. Rather than importing existing models, the project asks what becomes possible when a media lab is co-designed with the people who will use it.
Drawing on participatory action research, speculative design, Actor-Network Theory, and critical perspectives on technology, Andrés approaches media labs as living infrastructures in which knowledge is created collectively. His research examines how these spaces can support cross-disciplinary collaboration while recognizing that innovation is shaped by relationships, shared values, and local contexts as much as by technology itself.
During his residency, Andrés has been working with BGML Director Dr. Julie Andreyev to investigate how ecological thinking and multispecies perspectives might inform the future of media labs. BGML’s longstanding exploration of art, ecology, and emerging technologies has provided an opportunity to consider how creative research environments can acknowledge more-than-human participants and foster deeper forms of care, reciprocity, and environmental awareness.
These conversations have had a significant influence on Andrés’ project. Inspired by BGML’s biophilic considerations in research, he is expanding his work to explore how future media labs might meaningfully incorporate living systems into their collaborative processes—particularly in biodiverse regions such as Sabana Centro, where questions of environmental stewardship and development are closely intertwined.
The residency is also an opportunity for dialogue between Colombia and Canada. Alongside documentary research, interviews with media lab practitioners across Latin America, North America, Europe, and Oceania, and participatory workshops with communities in Colombia, Andrés is building a framework that connects local knowledge with international perspectives. The project suggests that meaningful innovation emerges through exchange rather than replication, creating space for different cultures, territories, and ways of knowing to inform one another.
Ultimately, this research imagines media labs as places where technology, community, and ecology converge. By bringing together perspectives from the Global South and Global North, Andrés’ research contributes to an ongoing conversation about how collaborative research spaces can become more inclusive, place-based, and responsive to the challenges of the future.
Research website: medialab.lovable.app
Universidad de La Sabana: unisabana.edu.co
About Andrés Fernández Roncancio
Andrés Fernández Roncancio is a PhD candidate in Communication at Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia, where he teaches Strategic Design, Innovation, and Digital Culture. Alongside his academic work, he is a strategic design and innovation consultant who has led design-driven initiatives across Latin America for more than a decade. His research explores participatory design, speculative design, and media studies through community-driven approaches to technology and innovation.
Ken Perlin, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute, and is a participating faculty member in the NYU Media and Games Network (MAGNET). He was also founding director of the Media Research Laboratory and director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation, augmented and mixed reality, user interfaces, science education and multimedia. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television, as well as the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the TrapCode award for achievement in computer graphics research, the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Perlin currently serves on the program committee of the AAAS. He was general chair of the UIST2010 conference, and has been a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
