Curious things for curious people: Designing technology for everyday life November 11, 2007

Professor of Design and member of the innovative Interaction Research Studio, William Gaver, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture titled: ‘Curious things for curious people: Designing technology for everyday life.’ The Lecture will be introduced by the Warden of Goldsmiths, Professor Geoffrey Crossick, followed by a reception.

Admission free, all welcome. The Lecture is unticketed, but please e-mail [email protected] or telephone 020 7919 7033 if you plan to attend. Visit www.goldsmiths.ac.uk for map and travel information.

Lecture summary:
Digital technologies increasingly pervade our everyday lives. Sadly, they tend to reflect life as an endless round of work, entertainment and consumption. At the Interaction Research Studio, we design computational products that tell more interesting stories about who we are and what we care about.

The Plane Tracker, for instance, is an appliance that tracks passing flight traffic and imagines views of their journeys. The Local Barometer is a family of small devices that display text and images from local sources as if blown through the home. The Home Health Horoscope uses a set of 'shy sensors' to pick up indicative information about household activities and reflects this back to users in the form of automatically generated horoscopes.

Our designs share several features. They are purposefully made open-ended, even ambiguous, to evoke curiosity and engagement rather than provide predetermined experiences. They raise spaces of issues and possibilities, but allow people to find their own answers within them. They provide new views on the world, simultaneously asking questions about the values we find in technology, and the values we embrace more generally.

In this lecture, I will describe a number of the artifacts we have built and what happens when we allow people to try them for extended periods of time. I explain the design-centred methods we use for understanding people, exploring possible designs, and assessing the results, and propose these methods as an alternative to more traditional science and engineering approaches. Finally, I will discuss how doing this work in the multifaceted Goldsmiths environment is shaping our approach to address new issues in the future.

Official Website: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/interaction/