Haptic InterFace – Hands-On Rapid Prototyping Workshop for VIVID 2013

This invitation represents an opportunity to spend six intensive hours developing new ideas in relation to the body through the creative use of materials and praxis. Our aim is to provide a space where professionals and creative thinkers from a range of backgrounds explore the borders between art, science and technology.

This is a participant-driven workshop where you will be encouraged to collaborate, mash-up materials and technology and find ways to let innovation happen in real-time. Get an insight into the latest innovations in open source hardware gadgets and technologies and hi-tech Merino wool products from the workshop sponsors Seeed Studios and The Woolmark company. Then get your hands and imaginations to work guided by expert facilitators Dr. Sade and Dr. Flanagan as they fast track the creative process through a Rapid Prototyping workshop using low-tech body storming techniques. Participants will learn 3D pattern modeling for complex organic shapes as well as basic Seeedunio programming. Seeed Studios design modular electronics for quick prototyping and small scale projects. They also carry inventories from community innovators, and help people make, distribute their designs and collect the revenue.

For user interfaces to become genuinely intelligent interactive systems, we must enable the development of interactive systems that can recognize unpredictable state changes, such as emotion, intention, desire, empathy, etc. User interfaces of the future will acknowledge the relationship between people, places and things as emergent spaces that generate meaning through everyday activity and therefore one in which users themselves act as co-designers. 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 both mind and body.

Please BYO laptop computers to this workshop.

Please use the form to register your interest.

5th to 6th June 2013