Experiencing the Future Mundane

Through the design, development and implementation of the Living Room of the Future (LRoTF), we build upon existing work to progress two strands of research. The first explores how media broadcasters may utilise Object-Based Media (OBM) to provide more immersive experiences. Created in conjunction with the BBC R&D the LRofTF utilises OBM to dynamically customise television content according to audiences’ personal, contextual and derived data. OBM works by breaking media into smaller parts or ‘objects’, describing how they relate to each other semantically, and then reassembling them into personalised programmes. In addition to this media-delivery aspect, the LRoTF explores data protection issues that arise from OBM’s use of data by integrating with the privacy-enhancing Databox system. The second research focus develops understandings of Design Fiction. While the ‘World Building’ approach to Design Fiction describes strategies that place emerging technologies in potential futures, this work expands the scope of these prototypes to create a world within which audiences co-produce a ‘lived’ experience of the future as an ‘Experiential Design Fiction’. By combining the audience’s context with the fiction’s diegesis this research demonstrates a method for extrapolating today’s emerging technologies to create an immersive experience of a possible mundane reality of tomorro

RTD2015 11 Walking off the garden path: a design journey

<p>This paper illustrates various digital-nature artefacts, which emerged from a reflective design journey to enhance and support novel connections to nature in a garden.</p> <p>The research imperative is to explore possibilities for the design of digital technologies for changing people’s interpretation of a National Trust garden, encouraging encounters through the artefacts that take visitors off the garden path and reawaken them to the “presence” of the garden. The process began with an exploration of the criticisms and possibilities of technolo- gies suggested within the writings of Heidegger, Borgmann and Feenberg, which were complemented by insights from natural history writers such as Deakin. These writings guided the design sensibilities for the creation of a collection of interpretation artefacts including Audio Apples, Rhubaphones and a Nature Meditation Egg. Much of the work was situated in a Walled Kitchen Garden managed by National Trust.</p> <p>Research through design complements the research philosophy because it demands space for reflection and conversation, and enables inclusion of different voices within the design journey. The methodology has helped address the question of whether a design lens that begins with criticism of technology can change the way we design, and the artefacts produced.</p> <p> </p