Keynote Talk of Prof. Dr. Paul Coulton on “Designing More-Than-Human Futures”

Contemporary design contexts that contain complex interdependence of human and non-human actants who operate from their own independent perspectives creating the need for More-Than-Human Centred Design. Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things represents such a design contexts and are indicative of this complexity in that the interdependent ‘things’ within such networks could be humans, toasters, algorithms, data, business models, etc., all of which operate from their own distinct perspectives. The potential economic benefits of these emerging and future technologies is ultimately linked to their adoption and acceptability by a majority of potential users. However, the processes that drive adoption and acceptability are rare considerations for research into emerging and future technologies and are often regarded as someone else’s future work.

Consumer Informatics invites you to Prof. Dr. Paul Coulton‘s talk on “Designing More-Than-Human Futures”. During his keynote talk, Prof. Coulton will explore contemporary design contexts and present examples of how approaches such as Speculative Design, Design Fiction and Experiential Design can be used to consider futures where the use of such technologies is mundane allowing us to consider potential barriers to adoption before embedding them into design patterns and approaches.

Paul Coulton is Professor of Speculative and Game Design at the University of Lancaster. His research interest can be broadly described as Speculative Design. Speculative Design combines real and/or hypothetical extrapolations of the development of emerging technologies with a consideration of the cultural landscape in which they might be deployed. As a former member of the School of Computing at Lancaster, parts of his research were conducted using a ‘situated’ evaluation methodology, using ‘app stores’ and social networks as experimental platforms. This element of his work has led to international recognition by both industry and academia, being selected as one of the 50 most talented mobile developers in the world from a community of over 2 million to be a founding Nokia Champion and the first academic invited to speak at Game Developers Conference. Increasingly, his work involves the non-entertainment use of a particular practice of Speculative Design, which is Design Fiction as a way to explore futures for areas such as the Internet of Things and Machine Learning. For more information about his work, please visit the website of Lancaster University: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/people-profiles/paul-coulton

Who?
The talk is free of charge and open for everyone interested in Human AI interaction.

When? 
We will meet on July 22. at 4:00 pm CET.

Where? 
The talk will be held via zoom. To join us, use the link:

https://uni-siegen.zoom.us/j/98403893287?pwd=NWxOT2ZaNEpBcWRZckJ5eVRlMVRYdz09