:: investigating the role of the designer in shaping consumer's interaction with technology

Products impact on how we think, influencing and even shaping people’s behaviors. In interaction design this influence is even more apparent, due to its intrinsic focus on how people use objects or services and in defining how technology will merge with people’s lives. This thesis project tries to understand better the designer responsibility implied in this influence. This was done by looking at different points of view about the social role of the interactive designer, and by investigating the influence of design on people.

As an output from these explorations, two interrelated projects were done. First, a project called Bakedbits, which expresses the concept of “Appetite for Technology” by looking at the consumer’s relation to electronic objects and at issues of waste, banalization and superficial seductive features.

Paneluce poster. Click on the image to launch Bakedbits project.

Second, the Mobile.Seed project, a communication of a future scenario where objects could motivate users to engage in an ecological ideology without need to renounce to the consumer’s society acquired benefits. It is a redesign of the end-of-life of a mobile phone and an exploration on the possible changes in the relationship between the consumer and the device.

Mobile.Seed illustration. Click on the image to launch project.