Friday Lecture: Dynamic making: tangible interfaces at the intersection of digital and analogue theory and practice
Tricia Flanagan is a practicing artist and textile designer. She holds a Ph.D. in fine art and established the Wearables Lab at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Tricia currently holds the position of Co-director of the Interactive Media Lab and lead researcher in wearables at the Creative Robotics Lab of UNSW Sydney, Australia.
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For user interfaces to become genuinely intelligent systems, we must enable the development of interactive systems that can recognize unpredictable state changes, such as emotion, intention, desire, empathy, etc. Computers are creative and offer seemingly unlimited opportunity for interaction and innovation yet there is also a pressing need for hand skills. This talk invites the audience to pause for reflection, to consider the risks of what might be lost to future generations who are in danger of losing touch with the essential core of humanity – making by hand. As we develop more intelligent technologies what is revealed is how little we understand of the complexity that makes up our own human form. By adopting an approach in which objects mediate human beings and human beings mediate objects we can acknowledge an alternative to the predominant separation of humans and things. The challenge is to fashion a future that is not based on predicting utopian visions but one that is responsive to changing conditions and acknowledges the relationship between the body and technology and their intra-action with the environment. Tricia Flanagan challenges us to acknowledge craft as a vital form of dynamic thinking, to design digital artifacts that reflect our human capacity, and to embrace new modes of risk to shape our future.