We are extremely excited to announce our third keynote speaker for the conference, Amber Case.

Photo courtesy Daniel Root

Amber is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds. She is the author of Calm Technology: Designing for the Next Generation of Devices, An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology and the recently published book Designing Products with Sound: Principles and Patterns for Mixed Environments.

Amber is a sought after speaker and her TED Talk We are all cyborgs now has been viewed almost 1.5 million times.

Amber will speak on the Internet of Things, technology and our future:

Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. How does it affect us as individuals? Does it help us learn or does it get in the way? What are the implications for the way we learn and teach in tertiary education? How does technology help us engage with community? The world is no longer dominated by desktop computers. We are mobile and more organic. We need an equivalent computing and design framework to ensure that technology fits into our lives and empowers us. We need to live alongside it instead of being controlled by it.  To find some direction, we can look to concepts of Calm Technology. The terms calm computing and calm technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary. How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of getting in the way? How can designers can make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead. We’ll also look at the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and at future considerations of ethics and automation. 

Find out more about Amber on her website and follow her on Twitter (@case0rganic).

Read more about all of our fabulous keynotes.