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EventThursday TalkDI Webinar – David Chatting
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Design without Indifference
In this talk, I shall ask how we might design, build, and use systems without indifference to their complexity. To motivate this, I shall argue that while simplification and automation are seemingly commonsense responses to complexity, it can unwittingly exploit people and resources. I will illustrate this by unpacking some of the design intentions expressed in the past 200 years of domestic technologies, including those of the Victorian country home, the mass electrification of suburbia in the 20th century, the ubiquitous computing agenda of the 1990s, and in today’s Internet-connected domestic things.
In offering some alternative ways to design, I shall describe my recent work with Nick Taylor (Newcastle), and Jon Rogers (Northumbria) that attempts to make computing and networking visible in use, through the REAPPEAR project. I will suggest that a technically engaged Research Through Design practice is a broadly applicable way to engage with complexity, without being indifferent.
Bio
David Chatting is a practice-based design researcher. He is an interaction designer and technologist, who over the past 30 years, has worked with corporate clients, start-ups, artists, and latterly in academia. David is currently an Innovation Fellow at Open Lab, Newcastle University. He was previously a Senior Researcher at BT’s Broadband Applications Research Centre and was a Visiting Researcher at the MIT Media Lab.
David has a PhD in Design from Goldsmiths, University of London; an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art; and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham. His recent PhD thesis work concerns the domestication of the Internet, proposing some alternative, practical ways to design technologies for the home. He describes this practice as designerly hacking, a technically engaged Research Through Design that finds alternative (and often critical) design spaces.
Social Media – @davidchatting on everything
Running Order
16.00 – Welcome by John Vines
16.10 – Talk by David Chatting
16.40 – Q&A
17.00 – End
Limited seats at Inspace are available, please book tickets in advance.
* Please note that this webinar will be recorded *
Inspace or Zoom