Program online conference 2021

ThingsCon 2021 conference was organized fully online due to the latest covid measurements in The Netherlands and Belgium. We invited you to join us on 10 December 2021 17:30-20:00 CET.

Below is the full program inclusive of the speaker’s bios. The online program of ThingsCon 2021 was powered by CLICKNL.

Theme: EVERY___

The COVID pandemic cut short what we once called ‘regular’ life. Everyone and everything moved online or was somehow pushed into the digital realm. Our physical and digital realities are blurring more than ever. For the coming year, it will be interesting to see how this sudden change impacts our work and day-to-day lives.
What will stick? What will fade away?
Will connected technology have a new place in society, or are we all fed up with our screens and longing for a more tangible world again?
To capture these questions, this year’s Thingscon theme is EVERY_____. How the world around us has rapidly ‘upgraded’ or ‘iterated’ upon itself to support novel ways of living, working, and learning.

Program (all times CET):

14:00 Exhibition open
16:30 pre-drinks (BYO)
17:15 Stage open
17:30 Opening and welcome with organizers Dries, Iskander, and Lorna, and moderator Monique.

EVERY__thing (17:40-18:20)
More-than-human
17:40 Simone Rebaudengo – keynote
18:05 Elisa Giaccardi – on Dcode

18:20 Break / Community Stage
18:30 Student pitches

EVERY__one (18:45-19:10)
How can you trust? Who can you trust?
18:55 Manon den Dunnen

19:20 Break / Community stage

EVERY__where (19:30-19:55)
AI city interventions
19:30 Antony Liekens

19:55 Student awards ceremony
20:05 Closing & spatial drinks

Speakers

Simone Rebaudengo

Simone Rebaudengo is a designer of future narratives and products. His work explores the future where things are a bit more like people and people will be a bit more like things. He has published fables about more than human futures, created immersive installations about being an appliance with Bruce Sterling and a short movie that won the Robot Film Festival.
He’s a founder and director at oio, where he collaborates with companies such as Google, Ikea, and Dubai’s Museum of the Future. His works have been published internationally on Wired, Fast Company and The Atlantic, awarded by Red Dot Design Award, Core77, Interaction Awards and exhibited in galleries and museums such as Vitra Design Museum, Triennial Museum in Milan and MAK Vienna.

Elisa Giaccardi

Elisa is Professor and Chair of Post-industrial Design, and Director of Design for Interaction (Msc program), Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Associate Editor, Springer HCI, and Project Lead, international DCODE Network.

In her role at Delft University of Technology, Professor Giaccardi leads the Connected Everyday Lab. Her work focuses on the challenges that permeating digitalisation means for design. From early digital networks and social media to IoT and AI, her interests reflect a persistent concern with design as a shared process of cultivation and management of opportunity spaces – and the transformative role technology can play.

A pioneer of metadesign, networked and open design processes, Professor Giaccardi explores how modern digital things ‘participate’ in design and use in ways previous industrially-produced objects could not.

Manon den Dunnen

Manon den Dunnen will introduce us to Synthetic Media and Deep Fakes from the perspective of the Dutch police. She will also discuss some of the key challenges as an invitation to the ThingsCon community for help.

Manon den Dunnen is strategic specialist on digital transformation at the Dutch Police and organizer of the SensemakersAMS community. Manon’s main focus is on raising awareness about the consequences of digization for the constitutional values and how to counter or adapt where necessary. Next to talks, workshops and advisory reports, she’s also actively building towards change with partners in knowledge networks and projects like the Digital Trust Infrastructure.

Anthony Liekens

Toward hackable cities. Anthony shows examples of IoT projects in the city of Antwerp where citizens are deeply involved to think and build citizen science tools and, as such, contributing to smarter cities.

Anthony Liekens is a maker and a mad scientist. He runs Makerspace Antwerpen, where he helps citizens, organisations and companies to build smart hardware and to expand business models with smart opportunities. Where hardware is often considered to be hard, Anthony makes developing smart solutions doable. 

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