4 h. workshop
Design in the future will be as much about the emotions and personalities of products and services as it will be about their technical attributes. This workshop will explore this process, and provide the skills needed to do so successfully.

Wearables
IoT
Neuroscience
Smart cities

The problems of future design are not simply technical; they are social. Devices will be active as social beings (either through deliberate design or the projection of characteristics onto them by users). As devices gain both senses and characters through more sophisticated sensors and algorithms, we need to consider the role human senses play in how we communicate in social places that fluidly mix people and devices in digital and physical ways.

This workshop aims to raise participants’ awareness and establish the core skills to negotiate this landscape of senses, sensors, and sociability. Participants will explore the ways they make meaning through their own senses in order to understand what hyper-user-centered design means for wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT). Drawing on knowledge gained from accessibility projects and research, this workshop will provide a framework of how our senses and emotions work and explore how this can be used in the design of interactions and conversations between new forms of devices and users.

Participants will learn about the 9+ senses and their role in sensory cognition, information theory, and gesture design issues. Participants will also be exposed to personal emotional and sensational mapping and testing; sensory substitution and multimodal/post-screen user interfaces; and sensory augmentation and neuroplasticity. By the end of the workshop, participants will be familiar with core questions and issues for wearable and IoT user experiences and begin to apply this knowledge to successful future product design.

Sketch by Inge Nahuis, consultant at GriDD Effective Information