Democratizing Technology for a Creative Society

RCC is pleased to announce this talk by RCC Fellows Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez and Nono Martinez Alonso.

Creativity is at the heart of every single individual. The use of our imagination in combination with design, science, humanities, and art, is a powerful mode of self-expression, a fundamental characteristic of intelligent human beings. 

Across history, creative media have been widely accessible to society. Any individual with access to a brush and a canvas was able to paint and start mastering his own skills. Today new design media are emerging thanks to the rapid evolution of technology. However, fields like computation, robotics, 3d printing, video games, or augmented reality are far from easy to use as creative tools, without investing a great amount of time learning how to use them. It is our challenge as designers to democratize the affordances in creativity and new modes of expression that come with these technologies, and provide non-designers with improved access to them.

 In this talk, we will discuss the role of “design interfaces” as mediators between complex technological frameworks and the non-expert community, as the new paradigm in human-computer creativity. We will showcase several examples of software, hardware, installations, and platforms created by experts but designed for the novice, and the ways these tools may bring creativity back to society.

Sponsor: Real Colegio Complutense 

Contact: Kim Conant