Project information

submitted by
Britta Schulte

Co-Authors
Alexander Maclaren, Arika Dodani, Jyotsna Gorle, Michael Dean Wilde, Mohamad Ghadir Khalil, Phillip Mudavanhu, Youngmo Oh

Mentors
Eva Hornecker, Britta Schulte

Faculty:
Media

Degree programme:
Human-Computer Interaction (Master of Science (M.Sc.))

Type of project presentation
Artwork

Semester
Summer semester 2019

• Bauhausstraße 11
  (015)

Links
https://www.uni-weimar.de/qisser…
https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/med…

Project description

“Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design over the next fifty years”

Mark Weiser, father of ubiquitous computing.

Our surroundings and living spaces are getting smarter with each day, as for example homes are becoming more automated and technology driven than ever. However, IoT encompasses a lot more. It is crucial to make devices calm rather than just small or portable, such that they are integrated into our existence. In addition, the demographic composition of households in the 21st century is changing as more groups of adults choose to live together for a sense of community and economic savings. Much research has been done on the nuclear family, the family unit of the industrial era, but less has been done on groups of unrelated adults living together.

By engaging people in creative activities, such as cooking together or asking people living together to draw, sculpt or take photos, we collected data about people, their relationship to each other and their living space.

Building on this data, we developed creative artefacts that facilitate communication and nurtures social relationships between WG members or artefacts that are working towards developing not only the IQ but also the EQ of living spaces. The speculative devices we exhibit offer new directions for technology design in the home, but also pose questions about the way we connect to each other and the space that surrounds us.