Guest Speaker: Merja Ryöppy

Merja Ryöppy from Syddansk Universitet (University of Southern Denmark) will give a talk to the lab.

Object Theatre in Design

I’m actress and PhD research fellow at SDU Design Research & Theatre Lab, University of Southern Denmark. Theatre Lab provides a space to apply improvised theatre and object theatre to explore social relating and human interaction with novel products in design processes. I’d like to present you briefly my Ph.D. Project ‘Object Theatre in Design’, which is about understanding how Object Theatre methods can support interaction design in order to create meaningful interactions between (intelligent) objects and people. My main supervisor is Jacob Buur, professor on User-Centered Design at SDU, and my studies are done in collaboration with design students and design researchers as part of ongoing projects. I am interested in future collaboration possibilities in Nottingham as part of my research exchange in the fall 2018. Together with my co-supervisor Sean Myatt (senior lecturer in Theatre Design) from NTU, we will set up a series of object theatre workshops with multi-disciplinary design teams to develop and evaluate the potential of this way of working. I would love to hear if there is interest and prospects for making joint workshops with MRL. Looking forward to meet you all!