ThingsCon Salon #11: Make your home work for you

Sensors will be everywhere, also in your home: as part of smart devices and appliances, fixed to your home or brought in by yourself. Connected and smart will be the default.
This brings new opportunities for products and services, but also comes with new challenges. How to have the sensors work for you, and not for vendors of the appliances? Design choices play a big part here, and really understanding the sensors is both inspiring and necessary to make the best products.

May 17th: ThingsCon Salon - Make your home work for you
In this Salon we dive deep in both understanding sensing and understanding the consequences for design. VPRO Medialab (https://www.vpro.nl/medialab/) chose IoT (internet of things) in the home and its effects on media and our behaviour as their theme of research in 2018. As part of this research project, VPRO Medialab collaborates with ThingsCon Amsterdam and VanBerlo (https://vanberlo.nl/), one of the leading product design agencies in the Netherlands.

The Salon consists of two parts: a workshop and a Meetup.

16:00 – 18:00: Workshop
Find more information on the workshop and RSVP at this meetup page: https://www.meetup.com/Thingscon-Salon/events/249630539/

19:00 – 22:00: Meetup
At 19:00 the Meetup starts. We have invited speakers that will cover different aspects of the design for the smart home that works for you.

19.30: Opening by Iskander Smit (ThingsCon) & Annelies Termeer (VPRO Medialab)

19:40: Talk by Juanita Devis, talking on TerMITes for Electronauts, sensing energy at schools (https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/andorra-energy-environment/overview/).
Juanita Devis is a CityScience Advisor for the Changing Places Group, at MIT Media Lab. Her research combines architecture and urban design, technology and computer science, to investigate new strategies for future places of living and work. Juanita is currently involved in the Andorra Living Lab project, which combines different research topics (Tourism, Innovation, Energy & Environment, Mobility, Dynamic urban planning) for the future urban challenges of the country.

20:00 Workshop impressions: in short, we will share the workshop learnings in this Meetup.

20:20 VanBerlo UX Designer Koen Beljaars and Design Engineer Pim van der Meer
As we are welcoming ever more digital technology into our homes and daily lives, the need for intuitive and meaningful interaction with this technology is increasing. We need to move from digital technologies that battle for our attention, to meaningful products and systems that integrate seamlessly into our daily lives. Here we will share with you a way of thinking during the design and development of new products and systems to help achieve this. We will also show you how this method has been applied in one of our latest cases.

20:40 Pitches from the Sensor Thinkathon: during the day teams of Design Academy students, VPRO storytellers and other creatives explore the storytelling potential of the sensing home. Can you use sensors in media, in telling stories and engaging audiences in innovative ways? The teams will give short presentations on their future visions.

21:00 Lenneke Kuijer is Assistant Professor in the Future Everyday research cluster of the Industrial Design Department of TU/e. Kuijer is a leading expert in practices-oriented design, a field within design and human-computer interaction research that draws on social practice theories. She is a multidisciplinary researcher who contributes both in social science and design research communities. Her main interests lie in the areas of social practice theory, research through design, domestic energy demand and the relation between designing computational artefacts and changes in everyday life.
Lenneke will present on the notion of co-performance, a modification of practice theories that aims to offer a new perspective on the role of artificial agency - from automated systems to autonomous devices - in everyday life.

21:20: Drinks.