Nathan Costello
Interaction design
National College of Art and Design Dublin
Specialisms: Interaction Design / UX Design / Design and Technology
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Nathan Costello
First Name: Nathan
Last Name: Costello
Specialisms: Interaction Design / UX Design / Design and Technology
Sectors:
My Location: Dublin, Ireland
University / College: National College of Art and Design Dublin
Course / Program Title: Interaction design
About
I am an interaction designer who questions how systems mediate our relationships,
memories, and identities. I am driven by curiosity, constantly seeking to explore new kinds of
experiences and interactions that return meaning to people rather than reducing them to
data points. My strengths lie in critical thinking, deep user research, and situating design
within specific cultural and emotional contexts. My graduate project explores simulated storytelling through an embodied AI social robot, reviving the Irish seanchaí oral tradition for contemporary audiences. I design interactions that feel considered and culturally grounded, not generic, producing work that provokes reflection while remaining genuinely meaningful to the people who encounter it.
Simulated Storytelling is a critical design project exploring how a social robot might carry cultural memory. It is an embodied AI presented as a speculative object: a constructed housing that holds the projection within it. It has a projected face and a synthesised Irish voice, and tells folk tales particular to a place, drawn from real archives. It does not generate stories. It only retells what it has been told, and listens for what has not yet been told. Working through a research-through-design approach, I developed it across multiple iterations, testing each in rural Irish communities and shaping it with them and their storytellers. Drawing on the tradition of the seanchaí, the community storyteller who carries local memory, I ask whether an artificial presence can sustain localised heritage rather than flatten it. It questions the tradition and its conventions, and makes space for new stories to be told.
Competitions
