Salon for the creative professional
Parallel at TH/NGS 2024, we organize a dedicated salon to discuss the impact of possible developments towards Generative Things for the daily practice of designers of things.
In this special Salon, we invite experts from connected things to AI scholars and design professionals to reflect on the impact on design methods and practice. We intend to create an interactive session to exchange experiences with other participants.
This Salon is powered by CLICKNL.
New relations with Generative Things
The theme of ThingsCon in 2024 is Generative Things. The digital twin of our physical reality has been silently established in the past decade, not by (local) governments, but by third-party ‘social’ services. Generative AI is now added as a companion for creating, decision-making, and making, and it will be integrated as part of our digital identity. The connections between the digital twin and our physical reality are still loosely coupled. We have already seen the first steps in coupling the “AI twin” and physical reality this year. Weak signals, such as devices like Rabbit and Humane, that attempt to bridge these worlds are emerging. While these promises may not deliver fully as expected, the conceptual direction is clear, and an acceleration is expected this year or hints of that future in the coming years, for instance with Apple Intelligence rolling out in 2025, and currently already Meta’s Rayban shades as the most evolved iteration of adding AI to mundane objects.
The coupling of the new artificial intelligence happening in digital lives to the physical world, the objects we use, and the places we live, raises questions about what this means for makers and designers of these things, how ethics will play out, and what new models of use and trust will emerge. Questions we ask ourselves:
- What hidden systems are beyond AI, and how will they drive/influence generative things?
- What if AI becomes Sneaky AI as part of the things we use?
- AI is not a tech interface but part of the human system; a co-performance. How will we understand the intentions of these new co-performing generative things?
- How to design for transparency, understandability, scrutiny, and contestability with things?
- How much of new things do we accept? How to deal with “e-waste”, what are the new supply chains? Can we create regenerative things?
Design for Generative Things
In this Salon we like to dive specific in the impact on design. Design for AI is already explored in both academia and practice for some time, how will this play out to the design of the generative things? Examples in the work of oio.studio for Space10, Acts not Facts, and research driven projects as Robert Collins in DCODE project. What can we learn from the first explorations and what happens in the design of physical and hybrid things if generative AI is added to the mix? How is the power of design helping to ensure the right choices?
Interactive session
We aim to create an interactive session that ignites the sharing of experiences. We invited a panel of designers and academics with vast experience in both designing for connected things and researching the impact of AI.
Program
13:30 Walk-in with lunch
14:30 Start panel and interactive session
16:00 Drink and connect
17:00 End
Location
The salon will take place at Volkshotel Amsterdam. More detailed information will be shared to registered participants.
Panelists
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is an author, consultant and entrepreneur with a background in design. She is Design Director at TPXimpact since October 2023.
Alex is a trustee of Mediale and the Restart Project and on the board of advisors of Working Class Creatives Database and Contextualising Science project.
She wrote ‘Smarter Homes: how technology will change your home life’ and ‘Creating a Culture of Innovation’, was the first UK distributor of the Arduino and founder of the Good Night Lamp which is in the permanent collection of the London Design Museum.
Iohanna Nicenboim is a designer and researcher from the global south, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Delft University of Technology. Her research focuses on more-than-human design in the context of AI. At the intersection between feminist theory and design practice, she explores practices of ‘designing-with,’ i.e., a socio-technical and relational approach to designing AI. In this topic, she started a More-than-human Design Platform. She is also one of the chairs of the DRS 2024 track More-than-Human Design in Practice in Boston.
Her PhD, funded by a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, has contributed methodological interventions and emergent notions for HCI and design research. She published several papers in international journals, including TOCHI, HCI, and diid, and led workshops and panels at DIS and CHI conferences – on More-than-human design, more-than-human AI, and generative AI. She co-edited a special issue in the HCI Journal on the More-than-Human Turn, served as one of the technical chairs for the DIS 2023. She edited the book “Resourceful Ageing,” and contributed chapters to several books, in the topics of More-than-human Design, Human-robot Interactions, and Domestication of Media and Technology.
Dries De Roeck is passionate about how people integrate and use digital technology in their daily lives, with a focus on creating solutions that empower individuals and address societal challenges. Based on his PhD in social sciences and industrial design, he has expertise in how design processes transform as products increasingly blend physical, digital, and service elements and what methods and tools can help designers and developers in these changes.
Currently, Dries works as a product manager at Helpper, a Belgian company offering accessible services to support vulnerable individuals in need of care. His current work is rooted in a commitment to fostering inclusion, ensuring that digital solutions are fair and meaningful for those who need them most.
Over the years, Dries has contributed to a wide range of projects, taking on roles as a designer and researcher in fields such as citizen participation, senior healthcare, and do-it-yourself electronics. As topics, he holds data ethics, personal agency, privacy and foresight close to his heart.
Simone Rebaudengo is a product and interaction designer based in Belgrade. He is a co-founder at oio – a creative company on a quest to turn emerging technologies into an approachable, everyday and sustainable reality for humans and beyond. His work focuses on building experiential versions of the future and exploring the implications of living and interacting with networked, smart and autonomous things.
Previously he designed future scenarios and products for The Museum of the Future in Dubai, founded a design fiction practice called automato.farm and he is an associate of the Near Future Laboratory. In his previous career, he used to work at BMW Designworks and frog jumping around fortune 500 clients doing design research, product innovation, and big delivery projects across Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Iskander Smit will moderate the panel and session.
Iskander is the founder and chair of Cities of Things, a research program that originated at Delft University of Technology faculty of Industrial Design, where he was a visiting professor and lab coordinator. Now, it’s a foundation for a knowledge platform in partnership with academic and industry partners. A special project is Wijkbot (Hoodbot), a prototype toolkit for urban robotics, developed in partnership with the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Iskander has been exploring human and machine intelligence relations from a design perspective, focusing on coexisting with intelligent things and their societal impact. Since 2024 Iskander founded Target is New as an independent future research studio, as a spin-off from the weekly newsletter with the same name.
Iskander is also the initiator and chair of the Dutch chapter of ThingsCon.
Register
This Salon is powered by CLICKNL. You can register to attend this (free) Salon via this form. We have a maximum capacity of 40 attendees.
