Synergies: design-smart materials-ubicomp

Sharon Baurley's Research Statement:

We adopt and appropriate material products to define ourselves. Digital communications technologies increasingly share common attributes with material products in terms of how they enable people to construct an identity, to be expressive and form communities. The revolutionary growth of digital media and communications is allowing groups and individuals to collaborate, create and share their own material.

When material products converge with digital technology and materials science, what will happen? We can’t anticipate all of the end-use applications in advance because what actually happens in practice is the emergent outcome of user dynamics. How can we gain prior knowledge of emergent behaviour? This new genre of products will require input from an array of sectors. How do industries who do not have a history of working together, communicate and collaborate?

I am concerned with new types of design products that involve the fusion of the real and digital, and how materials science can realise this interplay. I am interested in how design can be pivotal in brokering collaborative activity between these disparate experts, as well as with users/consumers, and provide a new way for digital and materials science to ideate latent product concepts and create new markets. I am interested in ‘design for appropriation’, and in how users can design what they consume.

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