ThingsCon Stories

Has the fun gone missing from IoT? Iskander Smit and Dries de Roeck argue for bringing playful thinking back to connected products.

In this episode, Maxilian Brandl & Philipp Kaltofen explore what it means to design beyond centering humans.

How to design meaningful voice interactions? With Felipe Pierantoni. As his thesis project, Felipe developed a toolkit with 45 practical guidelines to support designers in creating voice experiences that foster well-being.

Simon Höher heads the Hybrid City Lab, and also co-founded ThingsCon. In this episode, we discussed what systems design can learn from this year of global crisis.

At Futurium, Gabriele Zipf and Antja Karoli help visitors engage with building blocks of various potential futures. In our conversation they share how this works in practice and how this helps explore desirable futures.

Together with Adrian Gradinar, Michael Stead and Paul Coulton of Imagination Lancaster contributed a piece titled "Must All Things Pass? Designing for the Afterlife of (Internet of) Things” to ThingsCon's RIOT Report 2020. In a speculative design scenario they describe how AI-supported things will be able to enforce their own right to repair in the future and thus protect the environment. What would be, the authors ask, if a greater degree of sustainable decision-making were to be delegated to the things themselves rather than to their users?

This week we chatted with designer and IoT pioneer Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino about the role of designers in designing "good things". Are designers placed in the right spot in the process to even do this?

Elise Marcus is the founder of the Studio of Earthly Matters. As a sustainable mindset designer, Elise Marcus develops new ways for humans to connect with each other and their surroundings. In our conversation, Elise tells us how and why we might move from circular design, which aims at having a neutral impact on the environment, towards regenerative design that focuses on leaving the environment in a better state than before the product.

Our guest today is Michelle Thorne, senior program manager at Mozilla Foundation and co-publisher of Branch, an online magazine about the sustainable internet. The internet as it is today is a massive contributor to environmental issues. In this episode we discuss options for making the web greener and more sustainable, and what role AI can play in this effort.

Welcome to ThingsCon Stories, a new podcast by and for the ThingsCon community. In Season 1, our hosts speak to experts in the field of responsible tech & society. Concretely, we interviewed the contributors to our annual publication, the State of Responsible IoT report (RIOT Report for short), who explore how we can make sure that the systems that make up our technologically connected world — IoT, smart cities, etc. — work better, and for everyone. You can learn more about ThingsCon at thingscon.org.