If all you have is a hammer | Designing digitally augmented physical tools

Since the dawn of mankind, the history of the human race is reflected in the history of their tools and their usage. Many of these tools provide augmentation to our physical capabilities: power tools increase the body's strength, bikes increase locomotion efficiency, and glasses and microscopes increase vision and the human ability to explore the world. However, more interestingly, tools also shape the way we think.

It is known that "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" (Maslow's hammer), and to some extent, this is true for any type of tool, asthey unconsciously reshape our perception of reality, our consciousness, and our understanding of how to interact with the world surrounding.

In this talk, the speaker will show examples of digitally augmented physical tools that shape our perception of reality and give us new perspectives on how to design for supporting prototyping as an exploration activity, and virtual-physical interactions.

Speaker: Andrea Bianchi

Biography
Andrea Bianchi in an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Computing, and the director of the Make lab at KAIST, in South Korea. He researches in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) focusing on building tools for prototyping interactive system, and hardware devices for body augmentation in Mixed Reality.