The SNUG
Hugh Farrell
Caitriona O'Connor
Shane Sugrue
Barry Todd
Josh Wilkinson
UNQUALIFIED DESIGN STUDIO is a critically acclaimed design collective working across disciplines to create immersive and interactive installations designed to inspire and engage diverse audiences.
We invite these audiences to participate directly in creating their experiences together, by generating roles and provoking actions that intentionally blur the line between spectator and performer. We do this because we believe in the power of creative collaboration to foster and sustain healthy minds and healthy communities. We emphasise the quality of the design process over any particular product or outcome, using it as a critical terrain to reveal how societies structure themselves through social and material organisation. And ultimately, we aim to alter relationships between people and places, transforming the expectations and futures of both.
Team:
Shane (Creative Director) is a Registered Architect based in Dublin. He is currently a Marie Curie doctoral candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, funded through the Horizon Europe C-NEWTRAL project.
Caitríona (Programme Director) is a built heritage specialist. She is currently coordinating Ireland and Northern Ireland's joint bid for the Royal Sites of Ireland to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Bláthnaid (Art Director) is a graphic designer based in New York, with 14 years experience in visual communications.
Josh is an award-winning Australian interaction designer, artist & producer based in Reykjavik. His work focuses on innovative uses of sound to tell human stories.
Barry is an industrial product designer with a background in furniture design, joinery & cabinetry. He is a graduate of NCAD’s Industrial and Product Design programme.
Hugh is an Irish writer, dramaturg & producer working across theatre, music & visual arts. He regularly develops and produces work for a wide range of artists, writers and composers.
The SNUG is an experimental participatory design project exploring the place & places of conversation in contemporary societies. Developed by UDS with funding from the Arts Council (Irl), the project invites people to gather in the unlikely privacy of a 6x6m popup ‘chat room’.
The SNUG debuted in June 2024 at Carlow Arts Festival, hosting a curated talk series examining what makes us feel connected to each other & the world around us. Most recently, we were at Clonmel Junction Arts Festival 2025 with a programme focused on creative expression & cultural infrastructure in rural towns.
In these programmes, we always seek to incorporate divergent viewpoints from within & beyond spatial practice. We see this within the tradition of agonism - a form of dialogue doesn’t seek to produce consensus, but instead embraces tension & conflict as intrinsic to a just society.
The impetus for the SNUG came from a conversation about the void of meaning left in the shell of Ireland’s once almighty but increasingly disavowed spiritual & social institutions - the church & the local pub. Spurred by a sense we might be losing something, we wondered aloud about how a culture makes sense of itself in the absence of basic shared rituals - gathering, breaking bread, listening, confessing, singing, dancing. We speculated on what it might mean to resurrect some of these rituals without the institutional baggage & trauma they carry, by reclaiming the spaces where they occur - the infrastructures of ritual - and taking them out of their familiar context.
Our current goal is to take the SNUG on a nationwide tour of Ireland in 2026 to take a ‘cross-section’ of how we are talking & thinking about our towns & communities, making sense of ourselves as future ancestors to a changing society. If selected as LINA fellows, we would propose to expand this endeavour beyond Ireland, developing a programme of conversations with LINA collaborators & their networks across Europe.