Cyborg Anthropologist | Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology | Author, Speaker (USA)
Hall AAA | Friday | 11:50AM
Ah, now we’ve got a title that really catches your attention. That’s right, Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, a professional who studies how humans and technology get waaay too close and what happens when our gadgets start to feel like extensions of our bodies (cue the existential crisis). She’s not just looking at tech from the outside; she’s diving deep into how it changes us as humans, emotionally, socially, and even physically.
Amber’s job is to ask the tough questions: how does tech shape our behavior? How do we avoid becoming walking, talking Wi-Fi hotspots? And most importantly, how can we make sure that technology works for us, and not the other way around? Amber has been working on the answer as a Mozilla Fellow, one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology, and a successful author — her books, like Calm Technology and A Kids Book About Technology, provide a blueprint on how to make tech less soul-sucking and more, well, human-friendly.
In a nutshell, Amber’s the perfect guide if you’re feeling a little too plugged in and need a bit of sanity in this tech-driven world. She’s the one who can help you break up with your devices (or at least get them to stop ghosting you for five minutes). She’s the human behind the screens, but also the human who knows how to keep the screens in check. And when it comes to the future of humans and tech, she’s basically the one you want leading the charge.
Amber Case: Designing Calm Technology
We all know our attention is practically extinct and that everyone’s basically a scroll away from losing it, so the question is: how do we create tech that enhances our lives instead of hijacking them? Enter Amber Case, who’s here to make you rethink our relationship with technology with what she calls calm technology — devices that know when to step forward and when to fade into the background. In this talk, she’ll break down how to design products that respect our attention while still getting stuff done, striking a balance between automation and sanity. No more beep-boop distractions every five seconds. Only technology that knows when to shut up.