Peace, World!
I'm CHRIS HARRIS
I design & develop social-ecological-technical-systems, with a major interest in sustainable ecological economics.
I partner with sustainable organisations to produce social innovation; using interdisciplinary experience in social science, environmental policy, design futures, product strategy, and technical engineering.
(Q1 2025) Now: Design research and workshop facilitation on Orca-Ocean-Human wellbeing for Convivial Conservation.
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Chris has partnered with clients to develop platform products in the environmental sustainability economy e.g. i) consulting in technical protocols for endangered habitat conservation with Terrasos, Colombia, and ii) leading product strategy for regenerative land practice financing, with Regen Network, USA.Chris has been awarded for productions in immersive interspecies experiences e.g. i) developing an ecotourism application to teach monkey body language, awarded ‘most innovative hack’ prize by GIT Gibraltar ii) Developing a multiplayer immersive experience application using AI & AR for acoustic-ecology citizen-sensing, commissioned by Sovereign Nature Initiative for a festival at De Ceuvel, Amsterdam and recently iii) hosting social imagination workshops for bio-cultural policy centering the killer whales, supported by the Collective Imagination Practice Community supported by JRF, Emerging Futures.
Graduated in Artificial Intelligence from University of Leeds, UK (2011) Chris is interested in more-than-human, bio-inspired interaction design, for a cooperative ecology in both analogue and digital environments.
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Selected Works
Immersive Interspecies
Convivial Conservation — Participatory Immersive research for bio-cultural future transitions.
Coastal Cultures | Civic Designer | 2024 | Civic Design
Coastal Cultures
(Project in Progress) From Human-Orca conflict to co-existence via local wellbeing and collective world-building. An immersive, participatory research platform for inter-species cooperation.
Participatory Biodiversity Sensing — Animating relationships to place via immersive technology.
Sovereign Nature Initiative | Creative Producer | 2023 | Digital Product
Sovereign Nature Initiative
I gathered and produced a team through the research and design with on-site ecologists, to create and demo the potential of immersive technology for ecological engagement and conservation, at a cultural ecological festival in Amsterdam. An augmented reality mobile app fostered collective listening and site-sepcific 3D generation for participatory biodiversity sensing. I developed a 3D front-end UX in collaboration with AI back-end acoustic classification. Commissioned by Sovereign Nature Initiative. Presented and released this mixed reality app experience to festival audience of over 300 people.
Ecotourism Game — Teaching Interspecies communication for responsible human-monkey interaction.
Helping Hand Trust | Creative Producer | 2019 | Digital Product
Helping Hand Trust
We won hackathon prizes for Best Overall Hack and Most Innovative for the invention of an educational mobile app for inter-species communication. I lead our small team through the requirements, design, development and pitching as we responded to the brief. Playing to the judging panel's interests to seed the best narrative and functional requirements. Combining research, storytelling and technical execution. The ‘Talk Monkey’ was a simple ‘edutainment’ app to teach visiting tourists monkey facial and body language, in a place where fierce interactions are prevalent.
Ecological Economics
Habitat Conservation — Biodiversity credit protocol for financing projects with transparency and integrity.
Terasos | Product Consultant | 2024 | Digital Product
Terasos
As a product strategist and technical researcher for Terrasos, I consulted on producing a pioneering biodiversity credit protocol utilizing distributed ledger technology. I conducted and synthesized insights from customer discovery interviews with diverse stakeholders to create a comprehensive product strategy. My work culminated in authoring a skeleton white paper that detailed the tokenization of biodiversity conservation credits, including technical infrastructure and impact assessments. I conducted a comparative study of web3 land registry platforms, enabling Terrasos to transition their established habitat banking model to the voluntary global market. This project, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, positioned Terrasos at the forefront of innovative, transparent, and technologically advanced conservation finance.
Regenerative Land Projects — Scaling funding through accessible environmental forecasting.
Regen Network | Product Consultant | 2023 | Digital Product
Regen Network
I led a comprehensive systemic product design process to scale regenerative land management practices. Facilitating cross-functional collaboration, synthesized complex opportunities into actionable strategic bets and a clear production roadmap. My contributions increased team alignment and operational efficiency, laying the foundation for accelerating eco-credit onboarding through user-friendly tools and establishing a research agenda for a collaborative platform ecosystem. Streamlining pathways for land stewards to participate in ecosystem service markets influencing global regenerative practices.
Collaborative Research
Computational life science research collective — Platform for decentralised experimentation.
LabDao | Product Coach | 2023 | Digital Product
LabDao
Delivered product strategy, process documentation, customer discovery research, team onboarding, meeting facilitation. I was approached to help them with strategic and technical communication. I helped them move gears from visioning to production; aligning a distributed team towards an actionable mission and developing participatory strategy and culture. • Worked with the CEO and CTO, to distill the platform vision into an interim product strategy. • Lead interviews with stakeholders and scientists to develop a product roadmap and contribute technical specifications. • Worked closely to onboard their new head of product. • Facilitated a culture of effective team meetings and async constructive coordination.
Collective Intelligence — Multiplayer software for organising research.
WorldBrain | Product Engineer | 2022 | Digital Product
WorldBrain
Lead product engineering to discover the multimedia needs of researchers. Refactoring software architecture to be reliable, performant, and adaptable. Contributing technical leadership and user-centered design, driving product innovation while maintaining a focus on sustainability and open-source principles. Navigating complex software ecosystems and delivering value across product management, engineering, and user research roles. I led a iterative product development to improve user experience and adoption.
Collective Media
Hybrid Creative Experience — design and facilitation of productive intimacy.
TBA - Organismo | Experience Designer | 2024 | Arts & Culture
TBA - Organismo
Designed and facilitated a hybrid local-remote experience over the course of a day to bring our remote study group together to encourage productive intimacy. Ran over a telegram group with prompts for discovery and sharing. Our group connected with local land and learned insights into each-other to foster continued collective creativity.
Audio Production — Collective audio collage for insights on Collaboration.
Metalabel x Foster | Creative Producer | 2022 | Arts & Culture, Media Experiment
Metalabel x Foster
Interviewed 10 creative peers about collaboration, directing and editing the insights and improvisations into a audio collage and print publication. Commissioned for the Metalabel Web3 cultural release platform. Publication edition sold out.
Podcast — Pilot show for experimental design practitioners of multi-disciplinary technology.
Project | Creative Producer | 2021 | Arts & Culture, Media Experiment
Project
A pilot podcast interviewing design practitioners of digital, analog, social or spiritual technologies on designing technology and tools for healing, regeneration and transformation.
AI Experiment gone Viral — Neural Net Car Removal
Project | Artist | 2018 | Arts & Culture, Media Experiment
Project
A series of one day experiments in creative machine learning interactions culminated in this well received speculative video. One neural net for vehicle recognition fed into another for context awa
Design-Research — Zine & Walk for World Ocean Day
Project | Artist | 2023 | Arts & Culture, Media Experiment
Project
Created a print zine and interactive web interface as an ‘EP’ Extended Player. An interactive media release includes myth, meditation and movement while walking a coast attentive to science activism and animist for solidarity with our watery relations.
Artistic research — Culturing the Deep Sea: workshops in citizens assembly, direct democracy, culminating in performance.
TBA | Artist | 2023 | Arts & Culture
TBA
Invited to the Porto Design Biannual by TBA - Academy’s ‘Ocean Uni’ I co-created a series of exercises to engage in direct democracy for resource use policy culminating in a participatory performance.
HCI & Software Engineering
Startup with AI/HCI — Conversational Assistant for positive behavioural change.
ProYou | Founder | 2018 | Digital Product
ProYou
ProYou was a startup producing a conversational mobile app for positive behavioral change. I Developed a cross-platform mobile app in Flutter with custom Android Java and iOS Swift plugins. Developed a real-time, cloud back-end, with Firebase including document database schema, storage policies, security, caching. Interfaced with Google's Dialog Flow for online voice recognition, speech generation and natural language understanding. Augmented Dialog Flow with custom script to maintain conversational context (before GPTs). Developed a bespoke graphical conversation designer that compiled to a custom state-machine based dialog engine, for fast, offline, scripted chat. I learned invaluable lessons about the cognitive biases in research & development, the art of storytelling & pitching, the user experience of A.I. and among all the myriad of socio-technical-business insights - a necessity for team and community.
Software Engineering — Providing mesh-network rapid deployment telephony for first-responders in areas without coverage.
Redacted Engineering Lab | Fullstack Software Engineer | 2012 | Digital Product
Redacted Engineering Lab
From 2012 - 2017 I was a full stack web developer at a bespoke telephony engineering lab, later acquired. • Produced specification documents detailing features, APIs, releases and upgrades. • Collaborated in producing project road-maps, managing development feature estimations and customer expectations. • Developed back-end software - designed efficient databases schemas and data storage, integrated with Linux system level interfaces and vendor hardware. • Developed front-end software - translating user requirements and specifications to powerful but easy to use user interfaces.
University — BSc Artificial Intelligence
University of Leeds | Student | 2011 | Study
University of Leeds
Studying A.I. at university included fundamental computer science plus modelling intelligence and other complex bio-inspired adaptations. The polyglot of programming languages, tools, and logical frameworks was formative to my R&D practice in interactive and bio-inspired computation. Since the MRI & BCI time was in too high demand to allow me to explore the computational neuroscience of meditation, I spent my time simulating worm brains, making augmented reality games, developing bots conversing in natural language and modelling inference in computer vision. I left more capable in intelligence engineering but disillusioned about A.I. alignment.