October is a busy month, here are the blurbs of 3 talks I am going to give in the near near future: Citic (Lyon, France) - October 15
I'll be on a panel about how the usage of digital technologies and the hybridization of the digital and the physical will influence our relationship to space.
SHARE Festival (Torino, Italy) - October 20
Title: Accidents and failures as creative material for the near future Abstract: This will be a talk about product failure, glitches, errors and accidents. It will focus on how people experience them and how they can be a starting point for creating near future worlds. Think for instance about creating prototypes and exhibiting problems within it to make them more compelling. Or showing something as it will work with the failures — so anticipating them somehow rather than ignoring the possibility. What will not work right? What problems will be caused? What does it mean? We will rely on examples of failed robots, absurd aircrafts or the intentional destruction of mobile phones and vending machines to show how studying these examples can be relevant in the design process. Based on these examples, the talk will deal with two issues: how can we include the exploration of failures in the design process? How to turn failures and people’s reaction to failures into prototyping tools?
Junior Research Day, Swiss Design Network (Basel, Switzerland) - October 28
Title: From Neuromancer to the Internet: the role of science fiction culture in design Abstract: This will be a talk about a feeling you must have had as designers. About comments such as "Ah, you're designing that interface from Minority Report" or "Oh yes, it's like that weird chair from 2001 a Space Odyssey". If your work is about interaction design, this kind of remarks are very common, but it also applies to other design domains. It is as if the visions described in science-fiction films and books led to expectations about what will happen in the future. The speech will uncover what is hidden behind these reactions.
The talk will address what design can learn from science fiction: original metaphors, anticipation of problems when using new technologies, speculation about peculiar types of material, etc. But the presentation will also deal with design fictions: how design allows making speculative and provocative products to raise questions about social interactions in the future.
We will mention examples such as failed robots, walking architectures or the metaphors that shaped the Internet. Each of them will shed some light on the relationship between science fiction and design.