Informing the form

With the new technologies there are new possibilities for service design and these can bring some values of the material to the technological realm. Synchronicity of the voice, sharing a rhythm and personalization of online environments, are some of those features.

When tuning witnessed presence, ‘sensing it’, between human beings and machines the principle of the handshake could be applied. Both move 50% towards each other. The machine can recognize and anticipate the human being. In this anticipation user values are first. Features like historical awareness can be interesting, but are not part of the core experience.

When designing new work one looks at values and locates something in a particular community and see what shape the hardware and the technology. It is an interesting question to reflect upon the effect of this way of ‘informing the form’. To be able to inform the form, the community does not have to have consensus as before, on what values should be represented. Today’s technology is capable of materializing many ideas and forms. It is a question of self organization and self ordering now.

CN