PSFK CONFERENCE LONDON: Speaker Katrin Baumgarten On Re-Humanising Interaction Design

On the morning of September 10, PSFK will gather the people behind some of the most inspiring British and European projects that we have covered on PSFK.com. These brilliant creative minds will present their work that explores innovation at intersections of fields that include art, design, branding, retail and technology.

Get tickets here: PSFK CONFERENCE LONDON

One of our speakers will be Katrin Baumgarten, a local designer & technology artist whose work experiments with physical human experiences. Kristin will share how a spectrum of emotions can impact industrial design and user interaction.

Your work revolves around the idea of disgust. Can you share a thought on what has led you to exploring this notion in particular?

Today, designers concentrate just on pleasant emotions— the beautiful and slick— but paradoxical emotions can actually intensify the relationship between object & user. One of these is disgust. It especially triggered my interest because of the strong link between attraction and repulsion, which is something we are scared to admit once we grow up.

What emerging trend, idea or technology are your excited to see develop in the future?

Any kind of responsive structures, the Internet expanding as a new bio-organism, open source projects profiting from collective knowledge.

What other projects are currently inspiring your work?

Lucy McRae is creating future human archetypes existing in an alternate world, Lisa Bufano is an interdisciplinary artist and a dancer who often uses prosthetics in her work, and also Michael Burton’s ‘The Race.’

What are your thoughts on how disgust can be an important element to consider for interaction and product designers?

Interaction today is all about the “user friendliness” of something and improving productivity and efficiency. Unaware, the user then adopts roles as dictated by these machines that tell him what to do and when. This cold and mechanical behaviour needs to be “re-humanised,” the interaction with the machine should be guided by human behaviour, desires and emotions, instead of restricting our will to logical rules. While this wasn’t technologically feasible with slow computers and narrow interfaces, we are now at a stage where computing power is virtually endless and interactive interfaces are becoming more diverse. I believe disgust is a very powerful emotion that has just the right mixture of controversy, fascination and repulsion to be reintroduced as a human factor to our daily routines— which are nearly exclusively technology related.

Thanks Katrin!

PSFK CONFERENCE LONDON