Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar

I am a Doctoral Student based at the Space Enabled Group in the MIT Media Lab and the Future Heritage Lab at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. I studied Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where I worked on articulatory phonetics and signal processing. I did my masters with the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, where I focused on designing interactions to explore what role can social robots have in fostering children's socio-emotional skills—empathy in particular. Currently, my work focuses on studying and documenting design histories and practices leading to the creation of ancestral technologies in Colombia. This is a category of technologies with deep cultural, ecological and socio-historical value for the people and places where they were created. I use insights from this work to propose design practices and pedagogical approaches that lead to the development of more sustainable and just technologies.