Wendy Ju
Stanford University
Transforming Design: Interaction with Robots and Cars

Many people assume that the advent of autonomous robots and machines will obviate the need for interface and interaction design. As these technologies become increasingly real, however, we are seeing that designing machine behaviors and responses that are legible and sensible to people is in fact critical to their function. So long as machines are working for people, with people or around people, they need to be designed in ways that people understand for these machines to be safe, adoptable and useful. Ideally the design of these interactions takes place before the machines are built, and indeed should substantially inform what sorts of machines should be built. In this talk, we showcase the latest in interaction design work being pursued at the Center for Design Research, particularly around techniques we use for prototyping future interactions with smart products, interactive furniture, and autonomous cars.

Wendy Ju is the Executive Director of Interaction Design Research at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, and Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the MFA Program in Design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She received her PhD from Stanford and a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. She is the author of The Design of Implicit Interactions, available from Morgan and Claypool.