Publisher's Synopsis
Homo Ex Data: The Natural of the Artificial selects the complexity of the interplay between humans and technology and show how they mutually influence each other. It presents products and texts that demonstrate this exciting development, and goes beyond the impact of digitisation on our product world. The products selected highlight the complexity of the interplay between humans and technology and show how they mutually influence each other. This also evidences how much the role of the designer is changing: When developing smart artefacts, designers have to take into account technical functioning and the growing significance of data in addition to the user experience, because these artificial things are supposed to be integrated as naturally as possible into the world of humans. To pay adequate tribute merely presenting current design approaches to pose the question of how design creates a new reality of life through marrying human factors and digital technology. Professor Dr Peter Zec analyses this paradigm shift in an introductory essay, and comes to the following conclusion: "The natural and the artificial will combine to form a new 'bioartificial' reality." After Homo sapiens and Homo faber, a new type of human is emerging 'Homo ex data', a human whose living circumstances are determined by the generation and transfer of data.
