Designing the Emotional Ergonomics of Cyberspace with Shuya Gong

Welcome to the weird wild web—a place previously constrained by carefully designed and rigorously A/B tested user journeys leading you to anything and everything all of the time…as long as it’s served up with a side of algorithmically targeted ads. We’ve learned a few lessons from web2, and as we’re building the frontiers of this next iteration of the internet, what are the navigational tools we'll need to explore the cyberspace that we’ve uncovered so far? If the Industrial Era needed physical ergonomics to make our machines easier to use, and the Information Era needed UI/UX to make data more ergonomic to our brains and become human readable, in this next age where we exist in cyberphysical realities, what are the emotional ergonomics we need to navigate an increasingly chaotic system of financial and information exchange? As the internet entangles more of our daily lives, what interactions will help soothe the chaotic patterns that algorithms send towards us? The skeuomorphic phase of web2 helped ground digital interactions in physical metaphors, but as web3 introduces new capabilities that are digitally native, what are the metaphors that help us make sense of the intuitive interactions that both delight communities and are easy to adopt? In an ecosystem with the collective power to shift economies of value, how do we start to design for attention as the scarcest resource? In a spacetime where our daily rituals involve bowing our heads to look into palm sized digital sanctuaries, what is our technological theology? What if we could associate smells with our seed phrases to help us remember them? What if we could feel the size of a transaction being processed? This hands on workshop hosted by an interaction designer and Harvard lecturer takes you on a multisensorial field trip to explore these questions and more—holding up a mirror to reflect collectively on what we’ll need to build the internet we’ve hyped. Bring your bodies and your senses—we'll be co-creating the first draft of "Interactions for a Multi-sensorial Internet: An Interaction Design Toolkit for Web3" (and brand and rename it to something more catchy) and work towards launching it as a public good throughout 2023. https://twitter.com/ohmygong Shuya Gong Interaction Designer Chaotic Goods, ReFI DAO, We3.co, IDEO CoLab Ventures Shuya Gong is a futurist who uses their background in mechanical engineering and venture design to imagine and build new cyberphysical spaces. Shuya started at IDEO CoLa in 2015, building prototypes with blockchain, AI, AR/VR, and other emerging technologies and has since worked with innovation teams at Target, H&M, Nasdaq, Fidelity, and more on how technology will shift systems spanning food, fashion, finance, and fertility. You can find their work at shelves on Target and in circular reuse systems at coffee shops world wide but is most fond of having minted a GPT-3 generated NFT that resulted in a cease and desist from Forbes 30 Under 30. Shuya is a lecturer and innovation fellow at Harvard School for Engineering and Applied Sciences where she researches collaborative advantage. She practices regenerative design as a partner and founder at Maybe Ventures, LLC and is a Design Director of IDEO's futuring studio. Talk to them about living live without plastic, rapid prototyping, time perception, chaotic systems, and the dystopian, utopian, and just topian ways that technology might change our daily lives.