Tech Beyond the Screen is a series of events which looks at what the opportunities and challenges are as digital technologies move from screen-based devices to becoming embedded in the real world.

If you are a start-up, digital or creative business or an individual interested in preparing for (and engaging with) the internet of things, place and everything, Tech Beyond the Screen should inspire and inform you.

Tech beyond the Screen is delivered by the Digital Catapult Centre Brighton, a collaborative R&D lab which helps business ideas become innovations and innovations get to market.

If you want to be kept informed about all the Tech Beyond the Screen events (and others that the Digital Catapult Centre in Brighton is organising), sign up to our mailing list here.

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How do we design great user experiences for people engaging with real world, ‘smart’ technologies?

What can we take from existing best practice and what do we need to invent?

If you are in UX and digital design, join us and Jason Mesut, Ben Sauer and Marianna Obtrist, to discuss.

About the speakers

Jason Mesut leads teams to develop progressive products and services with an experiential focus.

Ever since the iPhone, there has been an obsession with touchscreens in consumer electronics. Making them bigger. Increasing resolution. Providing extra dimensions of touch.

They're flexible. You can update the interface. They're cool. But... Many of the services we use today just don't work that well as a result of this touchscreen obsession. In this talk, Jason Mesut will explore three key areas:

1. The touchscreen obsession

2. Different interface futures beyond the touchscreen

3. How teams will need to work together to create the products and services of the future

Ben Sauer is a UX Designer and Product Strategist at Clearleft, helping very large organisations and small startups make more effective digital products for the people they serve.

Right now voice UIs like Siri are, well…. hit and miss. But all the big players are heavily investing in voice UI, let’s suppose it will be much smarter, soon. What does that mean for us designers? Will screen UI even be required? Should we be changing our workflow now? In this talk, Ben will look at the current capabilities of Voice UIs, how the APIs are connecting to apps, what’s next, and how this might change our design process and products.

Ben will also run a workshop where we’ll imagine a whole bunch of new products, really fast! We’ll create a veritable smorgasbord of IoT products, ripe for the picking.

Marianna Obrist leads the Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab, a research group dedicated to the investigation of tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences. Marianna will speak about SCHI Lab’s research project ‘A ‘Flavor’ of Things to Come in Human-Computer Interaction’.

The senses we call upon when interacting with technology are restricted. We mostly rely on vision and audition, increasingly (and rapidly) harnessing touch, whereas, taste and smell remain largely unused. Compared to other senses, like sound and light, where we can measure frequency ranges and convert them into a digital medium (bits), taste and smell are not easy to classify. There are specific classification schemes for the perfume, wine and beer industries, for example, but these do not apply to the range of experiences we might want to design for in user interfaces.

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Tech beyond the Screen is delivered by the Digital Catapult Centre Brighton, a collaborative R&D lab which helps business ideas become innovations and innovations get to market.

If you want to be kept informed about all the Tech Beyond the Screen events (and others that the Digital Catapult Centre in Brighton is organising), register here.