Tidernas Kafferep! (Tea Party of the Year!)
The goal of this workshop is to explore the role of interactive systems and artefacts as props in our daily role playing and catalyst for stories through which we tell others and ourselves who we are.
Gravitating round the hands-on experience of designing, producing and trying out a story catalyst, this workshop provides the setting and fuel for a discussion of interaction design and personal technologies. Participants will exeperience how acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of human communicative strategies and quirks of social interaction provides opportunities for designing richer interactive systems and artefacts.
Background
Digital technology has left the office, and is moving into our homes and onto our bodies. Electronic systems and artefacts – the cell phone is one obvious example - take on expressive uses as they interfere with personal identity and overlap with fashion.
This shift poses new challenges to us designers of interactive systems and requires us to rethink our assumptions of digital technology, what it is and what it is used for. It seems that neither the notion of the computer as a tool nor the idea of the computer as a medium is longer fully adequate. Here we focus not on the interaction between man and machine, but on interactions between people that are more or less mediated, facilitated, or modified by digital artefacts and systems.
HISTORY AND PRACTICALITIES
Since 2004 UNSWORN have hosted Tidernas Kafferep! seven times at institutions like Malmö University, Lund University, Chalmers in Gothenburg, and ITP at New York University. Participants' backgrounds have ranged from computer science to art and interaction design.
This workshop is usually run in intensive half-day sessions (3-4 hours), with 9-20 participants per session. It is valuable for all who has an interest in one or several of the following topics:
- Interaction design for non-work contexts
- Wearable technologies
- Design of digital interactive systems and artefacts beyond the screen
- Post-optimal use qualities
- Social interaction
- Interventionist fieldwork and prototyping
