Designing for Tangible (Un-)Connectedness

This one-day workshop aims to take a critical stance towards designs for connecting or re-connecting individuals, who are geographically separated, ranging from family members and friends to work colleagues. We would like to discuss and materialise different aspects of remote connections, such as spatial conditions or the evanescence of being connected and respective ephemeral designs. From participants we aim to hear success stories of tangibly connecting people over distance, failures of doing so, as well as critical designs that highlight the potentially negative aspects of being geographically dislocated. The workshop will engage with the experience of living at a distance hands-on through prototyping material artifacts as manifestations of distance, ephemerality, etc.