| Beschreibung |
The Project explores smart-home concepts and futures that may be technically possible—but perhaps shouldn’t be brought to life. In this research-by-design project, students investigate how connected homes could shape everyday life, relationships, privacy, autonomy, and behavior. They begin by reading and discussing smart-home visions through the lenses of speculative design and critical design, then we go dark side and brainstorm deliberately problematic or unsettling scenarios. Through a small survey among fellow students / flat mates / friends, students shall complement these fictional ideas with real attitudes, habits, and concerns around domestic technology. Finally, they translate selected scenarios into low-fidelity electronic prototypes, combining physical computing with coding to make their speculative concepts tangible and experiential. The goal is not to design better smart homes, but to critically ask: just because we can automate it, does that mean we should? This course is perfect for students who enjoy tackling open-ended problems, individual and multi-disciplinary group work, and generating their own concepts. Topics include tangible interaction, privacy, data representations, interaction design, affordances, shape-changing interfaces and others.
Participants should be interested in a full project cycle: ideation, prototyping, study design and evaluation of the resulting prototype. This includes research, discussions, group work, conducting a field study, data analysis, prototyping with hardware (e.g., Arduino), working with materials (e.g., wood, fabric, plastics), or using traditional fabrication techniques (e.g., origami-folding). The project is most suited for students seeking 18 ECTS. |
