IDM x Onassis ONX Speaker Series Fall 2024: Flesh Feedback

Please join us for the first event of our IDM X Onassis ONX fall speaker series with Keith Kirkland, Friday 09/27 3-4:30PM in Room 325 at 370 Jay Street Brooklyn, NY. Keith’s talk, “The Haptic 9: Building ‘The 9 Bridges’ to a wearable haptic world”, will provide an overview of the challenges facing the design and mass adoption of wearable haptics, informed by the lessons he learned from his work on the Wayband, a sort of “haptic compass” designed to help those with visual impairments navigate through physical space.

Bio: Keith Kirkland is a mechanical engineer, accessories designer, and industrial designer turned haptics enthusiast, professor, and futurist. He is deeply excited about reimagining the use of the sense of touch (haptics) in movement learning, education, and product design. He is a serial entrepreneur inspired by the accessibility of touch, equitable business models and wearable tech. Kirkland is currently the Leonard Pryor Fellow for Accessibility at the Kansas City Art Institute. His work in haptics has been recognized by the Pratt’s Rowena Reed Award, SXSW, The Smithsonian, TED, Dropbox, Google, Verizon, The Kansas City Art Institute, The Yokohama Government, Perkins School for the Blind, Unilever, Bauhaus, The Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation, EY, and the MET Museum. 

RSVP required for non-NYU guests through Eventbrite. Every visitor must be registered and provide a unique non-NYU email address. On the day of the event you will receive an email pass, bring identification and the pass (you do not need to print it out) for security.

About the Fall ‘24 Speaker Series: FLESH FEEDBACK: DESIGNING WEARABLE SENSATIONS

With the ubiquitous adoption and domestication of wearable devices that continually feed us streams and bursts of data relayed through touch, we’ve already become acclimated to practices of remote haptic sensing, knowing, communicating, and socializing. An emerging generation of wearables, with varying degrees of success, attempt to route more complex, engaging, and affectively compelling forms of touch through these contacts opened up between flesh and technology. At the same time, these new material intimacies with data expose us to a range of vulnerabilities, as our bodies can be monitored and remotely stimulated, often without our consent. Often ideated as our most ‘ancient’ sense–or alternatively as a ‘neglected’ sense–touch takes center stage in this year’s IDM X Onassis speaker series, as a compelling mix of artists, designers, industry professionals, and academics each take up questions about our changing embodied relationships with digital technologies. 

Organized by Kit McDermott and David Parisi

Host or Publisher Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU Tandon School of Engineering