Interface: Transplants, Aesthetics and Technology (Previously About Face: The affective and cultural history of face transplants)

AboutFace (2019-2024) is the first major investigation into the emotional and cultural history of face transplants. Using an emotion history approach, it works with surgical teams around the world, and with interviews principally from the US and UK to show how historical and qualitative research is central to understanding the outcomes of surgery and the experience of patients and caregivers.

That work has been published in surgical and humanities journals and is helping extended surgical teams make clinical decisions. Rebranded as Interface, to reflect the symbolic and cultural importance of the human face as a literal 'interface' between the individual and society, this project is now based at King's College London, where the PI leads a new Centre for Technology and the Body (part of the Digital Futures Institute, that explores how we can live well with technology).

Interface (2024-2027) will extend and develop the work of AboutFace by interviewing additional face transplant teams, patients and families in France and Finland, and complete a documentary based on work with face transplant patients and surgeons in the US. This will provide invaluable datasets for future researchers, and further contribute to the international development of clinical protocols, using historical and qualitative measures to show ways of capturing emotional experiences (of patients and families as well as extended clinical teams).

Core to this research is showing how taken-for-granted emotional concepts - like 'resilience' - have been politicised and need to be understood with reference to socially- and culturally-situated ideas about wellbeing, as well as evidence-based interpretations of what resilience means in specific historical times, places and contexts. It is also important to note that the technologies of face transplant draw from and share a wide range of digital technologies that have become central to everyday life.

This includes Virtual Reality, Facial Recognition Systems, 3D printing, and Artificial Intelligence more generally that develops cultural artefacts like photo apps, filters and deep fakes.

A critical development of this research, then, is to consider the ways in which the concern for appearance is manifested in and through these technologies not only in surgery but also through our cultural use of social media, and our ability to connect, or not connect with others. Interface's research will provide critical ethical, historical, cultural and social insights to software developers, academics, business leaders, policy makers and the public about the meanings of the face, and its links with mental health, emotions and personhood.

It will achieve this through the research and expertise of the PI, the support and guidance of stellar Advisory Boards drawn from the arts, humanities, social science and sciences, as well as the engineering and business sectors, and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) with world-class expertise in public engagement, outreach and disability.

To achieve these goals, this work will develop core research and engagement opportunities around technologies of the face beyond face transplants and across the lifespan. This will include pilot studies of young people and social media use in relation to transforming the face digitally; the choice and experience of cosmetic facial surgery in middle-aged women (and the ways digital technologies support the cosmetic surgery drive in domestic and clinical settings); and funding bids into the importance of facial expression in preventing loneliness in elderly people through work with social robots and care homes.

Working across King's College London, with world-leading experts in engineering, ethics, psychology, sociology, computing and medicine, Interface will show the historical importance of facial technologies - surgical, aesthetic, and technological - in understanding communication, wellbeing, identity and the self.