Shanghai’s Simone Rebaudengo will feature at CanUX 2016

The renowned Italian IoT futurist will make his CanUX debut this year.

 Domesticating Intelligence
} Nov 12, 2016 2:10pm / 40 MINUTES

With increasing amount of intelligence imbued in everyday products, designing for and with that intelligence is turning into a matter of understanding not only the perspective of the person but the one of the product too. As these products leave the ‘lab’ and enter our daily lives, they will be inserted into situations which they may not understand and which may not understand them. As it happened with learning-thermostats misunderstandings, roombas attacking hair and self-driving cars misbehaving, more examples will show the need for designers to define new languages, tools, and interfaces for products that might have to be understood, trained, tamed, trusted and in a way lived with. In this talk, Simone will break apart few of the assumptions we have about smartness and intelligence of today and will jump into a few parallel present and future scenarios to look into the good, the bad and the funny situations that will emerge in the attempt of domesticating intelligence in our everyday lives.

 Speaker Bio: Simone Rebaudengo

In a future world of overpopulated, smog-filled cities and self-aware appliances, what will the everyday objects that frustrate and delight us—our gadgets—look like? Simone Rebaudengo, an Italian interaction designer based in Shanghai, isn’t just dreaming them up. He’s actually building the prototypes.

He has been constantly speculating about those futures at Automato and, for the past four years, at frog, where he worked with Fortune 500 clients and small startups in bridging the gap between design research, product innovation and big delivery projects across Europe, Asia and Australia.

His products and scenarios are believable enough to be real, but come from hypothetical and questionable futures. His research focuses on exploring the implications of living with networked and somewhat smart products that change, grow, and are intelligent enough to take their own decisions and show a point of view.

He’s been teaching and presenting at CIID, SUPSI, China Academy of Fine Arts, Tedx, IxDA, SolidCon, Thingscon and Dconstruct. His works have been published internationally in Wired, Fastcompany, The Atlantic and Designboom. He has won numerous industry awards including two 2014 IXDA Interaction Awards for “Addicted Products”, and a 2015-2016 Internet of Things Award for Best Design Fiction for his “Ethical Things” project.

He originally started as a product designer in Italy and then realized that he preferred sensors to chairs. Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands labelled him as a design engineer, but he mostly played with tangible interfaces, interactive spaces and generative architecture. Some time ago he also tried to install an “addicted toaster” in the office of the British Prime Minister with Haque Design Research, and he convinced students to do similar things at CIID, SUPSI ,Tongji University and Academy of Fine arts