Designing Behaviours in Design Education

As everyday products increasingly have the capacity to sense, make decisions, analyse and learn, designers need to understand the potential complexity and cross-disciplinary nature of designing 'behaviours' in interaction. If products are to become adaptable open-system learning sentients it may be that to design 'effective behaviour' demands that products become independent agents that have a flexible multi-purposeness leading to 'learnt, controlled and communicated sustainable behaviour'. If Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world, there may be a need to examine the implications of a non-human agency making choices and imposing those choices on the world. Artificial Social Intelligence [1] may need to be expanded beyond how robots interact [2] to a reflection on ‘designing socially acceptable intelligent artefacts’.

To design 'interaction' is already a highly complex environment. Behaviours cannot be designed like you would a product feature. How can we develop a design education that allows Designers, Scientists and Engineers to develop tools and methods to allow a greater inclusion in intelligent product and service development?

Alan Murray will use his experience as former Guest Director of the Funlab at the Design Academy Eindhoven, as former co-creator and Director of Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design, Technical University Eindhoven and as co-creator and Co-Director of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh to propose how we might effectively collaborate to develop multi-disciplinary teams to design speculatively in complex environments