A new approach: Using design to humanise technological objects

London – At the London Design Festival Network Evening last week, held at The Future Laboratory’s Elder Street office, LS:N Global senior journalist Rowland Manthorpe spoke to Jason Holley, director at Universal Design Studio, about its work with the Science Museum’s newest permanent gallery.

The gallery – Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World – is the largest new gallery commissioned by the museum for 20 years. Its focus is on the importance of information technology, and how it as altered the landscape and ourselves. Holley spoke about the challenge in bringing interest and an emotive element to many technological objects on display. ‘The beauty of the objects is in what they do,’ he said. ‘How do you give these objects a voice?’

Universal Design Studio found solutions by unearthing the human stories behind the technology and creating an interactive gallery with an architecture that has an ‘intense physicality’ to counter the intangible nature of information technology. To find out more, watch the video above.

LS:N Global will be exploring the challenges of making technology emotive in our forthcoming macrotrend, Awakening Tech. For more, watch our video preview and buy tickets for our Autumn/Winter 2014 Trend Briefing on The Future Laboratory’s Eventbrite page.