Professor Dr Elisa Giaccardi
Full Professor of Interaction Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft
In this talk, Giaccardi argues for fundamentally rethinking the ways in which we design. No longer a stabilising process, design must position the crafting of agency as foundational to our understanding of autonomous technologies as was once the notion of function to our understanding of tools. To illuminate this, Giaccardi introduces and discusses examples from healthcare, mobility and sustainability, unpacking how designers might consider what is uniquely human and uniquely artificial in the performance of agency, and how should they attend to the ethics of this co-performance as a decentralised act of design with probabilistic outcomes.
Profile
Elisa Giaccardi is Professor and Chair of Post-industrial Design at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), where she leads the research group, Connected Everyday Lab. From 2018, she also holds a visiting position as Professor of Post-Industrial Design at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. After groundbreaking work in meta-design, collaborative and open design processes, Giaccardi has during the last years focused on the challenges that a permeating digitalisation means for the field of design. Her recent research engages with “things” in new ways, with the starting point that “things” now hold both perception and possible agency (e.g. AI), and thus “participate” in design and use in ways that previous industrially produced objects could not.
From TU Delft | e.giaccardi@tudelft.nl | Publications
