Post by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology

“How might we allow pain patients to more intuitively express their experience?” 💡 This question stood at the beginning of “Embodied Artefact Making”, one of the projects presented during the first artloop Tea Talk at AIT last week. Diotima Bertel, Scientist at the Center for Technology Experience, presented a method developed by her team which uses dolls to allow patients suffering from chronic pain to better explain their problems and make this information available to health professionals. Masafumi Nishi, Junior Scientist at the Center for Innovation Systems and Policy (ISP), presented a series of projects developed at ISP, including “Clay Futures”, where clay is used to imagine futures in stakeholder workshops, and “Tech Ethos”, a card game where citizens get to think about the impact of different technologies that was recently featured in the journal Nature. The presentations were followed by vivid discussions between participants with very diverse backgrounds, from sociology through battery technologies to high performance vision systems, virtual reality, audio analysis or artificial intelligence. At the start of the first artloop Tea Talk, Klaus Speidel, Head of artloop, remarked: “There was already art in the loop at AIT long before artloop formally became a programme – and this is something the Tea Talks want to show!” During the informal exchange following the talks, participants brainstormed new project ideas, and ways creative methods might also be used in their own business units. 🧠