When Things Come Alive!
This talk presents a novel and fun way of interactions we will have with devices of tomorrow.
Imagine, on one of these regular mornings, you go to your kitchen to make breakfast, and hear your toaster saying “GOOD MORNING” in a voice good enough to brighten up your day. What happens when inanimate objects start talking to us?
This talk presents an exploration into ‘devices with character’. How the character affects the interactions and behavior that they have with us, and how this can be leveraged to make devices more understandable and fun.
Gaurav Patekar
About Gaurav: Hi, I am Gaurav, I am a student at National Institute of Design in India.
The domain on ‘thing-making’ started for me as long back as my memory takes me. Be it clay houses or small paper models of cars and houses or chemistry experiments from items stolen from my mother’s chemistry lab. How things work and why they work the way they do has always been something of interest to me. Curiosity has always been the driving factor. That’s what made me break open all the toys and things in the house and that’s what landed me in an engineering college where I studied mechanical engineering. There I learned how things work. I enjoyed it a lot but I felt that something was lacking. I didn’t learn how people work and how people and things work together. In an attempt to understand that, I ended up in a design school, which is where I am currently. I am studying this discipline called ‘New Media Design’ which is a merger of media arts and interaction design. And the philosophy that we follow here is of making. We believe in making our visions into reality and testing them. At this place I feel I have found people who are equally weird to actually give a serious thought to my weird ideas, so I feel quite at home here.