ThingsCon Salon #11: Make your home work for you
Sensors will be everywhere, also in your home: as part of smart devices and appliances, fixed to your home or brought in by yourself. Connected and smart will be the default.
This brings new opportunities for products and services, but also comes with new challenges. How to have the sensors work for you, and not for vendors of the appliances? Design choices play a big part here, and really understanding the sensors is both inspiring and necessary to make the best products.
In this Salon we dive deep in both understanding sensing and understanding the consequences for design. VPRO Medialab chose IoT (internet of things) in the home and its effects on media and our behaviour as their theme of research in 2018. As part of this research project, VPRO Medialab collaborates with ThingsCon Amsterdam and VanBerlo to work together on this Salon. ThingsCon Amsterdam is the Dutch chapter of Europe’s leading conference about the future of hardware, connected devices and Internet of Things. Also, we are happy to be guest at VanBerlo in Eindhoven, one of the leading product design agencies in the Netherlands.
The Salon consists of two parts: a workshop and a meetup.
16:00 – 18:00: Workshop
Starting at 16:00 we have a workshop that lets you dive into the depth of the sensors. You do not need to have deep technical knowledge, curiosity for the inner working for sensing products will be met. During the workshop by the VanBerlo team, we will create concepts for intelligent systems in the kitchen that help improve our daily routines. You’ll then get to pitch your concept during the meetup event that will be held in the evening.
The workshop ends at 18:00. Dinner and drinks are provided by VPRO Medialab. Of course you are invited to attend the meetup as well! There is room for 20 participants.
19:00 – 22:00: Meetup
At 19:00 the Meetup starts. We have invited speakers that will cover different aspects of the design for the smart home that works for you.
19.30: Opening by Iskander Smit (ThingsCon) & Annelies Termeer (VPRO Medialab)
19:40: Talk by Juanita Devis, talking on TerMITes for Electronauts, sensing energy at schools
Juanita Devis is a CityScience Advisor for the Changing Places Group, at MIT Media Lab. Her research combines architecture and urban design, technology and computer science, to investigate new strategies for future places of living and work. Juanita is currently involved in the Andorra Living Lab project, which combines different research topics (Tourism, Innovation, Energy & Environment, Mobility, Dynamic urban planning) for the future urban challenges of the country.
20:00 Workshop impressions: in short, we will share the workshop learnings in this Meetup.
20:20 VanBerlo UX Designer Koen Beljaars and Design Engineer Pim van der Meer.
As we are welcoming ever more digital technology into our homes and daily lives, the need for intuitive and meaningful interaction with this technology is increasing. We need to move from digital technologies that battle for our attention, to meaningful products and systems that integrate seamlessly into our daily lives. Here we will share with you a way of thinking during the design and development of new products and systems to help achieve this. We will also show you how this method has been applied in one of our latest cases.
20:40 Pitches from the Sensor Thinkathon: during the day teams of Design Academy students, VPRO storytellers and other creatives explore the storytelling potential of the sensing home. Can you use sensors in media, in telling stories and engaging audiences in innovative ways? The teams will give short presentations on their future visions.
21:00 Lenneke Kuijer is Assistant Professor in the Future Everyday research cluster of the Industrial Design Department of TU/e. Kuijer is a leading expert in practices-oriented design, a field within design and human-computer interaction research that draws on social practice theories. She is a multidisciplinary researcher who contributes both in social science and design research communities. Her main interests lie in the areas of social practice theory, research through design, domestic energy demand and the relation between designing computational artefacts and changes in everyday life.
Lenneke will present on the notion of co-performance, a modification of practice theories that aims to offer a new perspective on the role of artificial agency - from automated systems to autonomous devices - in everyday life.
21:20: Drinks.
Sign up for the workshop, the meetup or both, via the links below!
Workshop 16.00-18.00