JOYFUL AND CARING
TECHNOLOGY FUTURES

PARTIALLY FUNDED THROUGH THE ERASMUS+ BLENDED INTENSIVE PROGRAM (BIP)

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This summer school is organized by Escola Universitària ERAM (University of Girona, Spain) as part of the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP). It has the aim of introducing students to the field of interaction design and research. In particular, students will learn how that discipline at the intersection of design, the social sciences, and technology can allow them to contribute to shaping technology futures that are increasingly joyful, caring and socio-emotionally rich.

The program will be primarly hands-on: you will work with students from different countries on a design project centered on imagining how future technology might contribute to enriching people's experiences of nature in ways that are both fun, social, and environmentally caring. Through the project, you will produce a catalog of speculative tehcnology ideas as a means of getting acquainted with the fundamentals of interaction design - with special emphasis on concepts and methods related to play and playfulness, experimental design, criticality, and future-making. Our aim is that you experience first-hand what it means to do interaction design and begin to play with your possible role within that field. We hope that that will open new career possibilites for you, both in the industry and in academia.

We'll start with an on-line session (of roughly 1.5h) where we will introduce basic concepts and invite you to work on lightweight exercises in preparation for the in-person event.

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Following, you will travel to Girona to participate in a one-week in-person workshop. There, you will work in group projects to envision future technology concepts aimed at enriching the human-nature interplay joyfully and caringly.

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We'll conclude with a wrap-up on-line session where we will reflect on the learnings from the design work done throughout the summer school. We will help you to figure out how to pursue a career in interaction design. The following page provides the details of our program

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THE SUMMER SCHOOL WILL INVOLVE THREE PHASES

Preparatory session / on-line
What is interaction design?

In this session, we will introduce students to the discipline of interaction design and show a broad palette of examples of works in this space. We will end with a practical exercise.

Wrap-up session / on-line
Shaping up a career in interaction design & research

We will reflect on the summer school activities, on the design projects and processes completed by all students involved, and on the main learnings from those processes. We will also use this wrap-up session to orient students towards and exciting future career in interaction design and research.

Summer school / in person

Monday: Brief, planning and early Ideation.

We will present the design project you will work on throughout the week. We will create teams of 4-5 students each.

Tuesday: Contextual research over a trip to a nearby forest.

We will engage the forests around us to do contextual research for the project: by looking closely at your own experiences of the nature, you will begin to gather ideas about how technology might support forestry experiences.

Wednsday: Data analysis and brainstorming

We will analyze and reflect on the findings from contextual research. Based on that, we will brainstorm speculative technology ideas that respond those findings. in the afternoon, we'll travel to Girona.

Thursday: Concept development and rapid prototyping

Back in Girona, we will wrap up the ideation process by developing our best concpets into solid ideas. We will work on the prototypes of the ideas.

Friday: Exhibition, reflection, and farewell celebration

We will wrap up your project by presenting it. We will talk about our final designs and also about our process. We will ilustrate the final concepts with prototypes so everyone can understand and discuss them.

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The summer school will take place in the context of the Playful Living Lab: a research laboratory focused on investigating how design can support increasingly playful ways of living. Using cutting-edge co-design methods, the lab engages diverse stakeholders to imagine, from the
bottom-up, how to playfully reconfigure mundane areas of everyday life, such as food practices, urban experiences, nature-related activities, or learning. Overall, our aim is to contribute to a future where people’s day-to-day is more playful, social, fun, and caring.

The members of the lab are interested in a plethora of areas of human life that could benefit from a playful augmentation. One of our main areas of expertise is the design of technology for the nature. Over the last few
years, we have produced a body of research around the potential of playful technology to enrich human-nature interactions. At the summer school, your will learn about our research and use it as a platform to do creative, ground-breaking interaction design work.