NY Education Division holds the Inspire the NEXT: Cognitive Immersion Seminar, exploring the future of experience design -Ministry of Education Republic of China (Taiwan)

NY Education Division holds the Inspire the NEXT: Cognitive Immersion Seminar, exploring the future of experience design

Date: 2017-01-30

The Education Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York (TECO) and the Asia Experience Design Association (AEDA) jointly organized the Inspire the NEXT: Cognitive Immersion seminar, held on December 9, 2016. Its focus was the topic cognitive immersion, and the closely related experience design. According to Wikipedia, “cognitive immersion” is “a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world” and “experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions”. The seminar also explored the currently very popular and trendy related ideas of “virtual reality”, “augmented reality”, and “artificial intelligence”.

Tickets to the seminar all quickly sold out. More than 120 people explored and learned more about the popular virtual and augmented reality technology from some insiders from several famous tech design institutes in New York. The speakers included Dan Chen, a senior designer at MIT M.S.A IDEO, Liu Xin from MIT Media Research Lab, Peter Stanik, manager at Global Design Service, and Seamon Chan, Palm Drive Capital Venture capitalist. They talked about the new cognitive immersion concepts and various related marketing strategies.

User experience design is all about improving products’ usability, accessibility, and the pleasure provided when people interact with a product in order to enhance user satisfaction. These days we are in a new era when every computational system has some degree of built-in artificial intelligence (AI). In the speakers’ opinion, the boundaries of today's technology and platforms are becoming blurred. Experience design is no longer just about linking artificial intelligence and hardware; these days, to go further and create a quality cognitive immersion, designers need to create a new user experience, deeper and wider, and provide a new immersive interface.
The next generation user experience will not just simply connect smart devices with AI, but will create cognitive immersion. New designs will create deeper engagement with artificial intelligence, and conversational immersive interfaces. This includes virtual reality, augmented reality, the internet of things, and robotics.

All of the speakers agreed that virtual reality using current technologies is an inevitable design trend, and it will greatly change our existing world. Charlin Chang, Director of the TECO-NY Education Division, commented "The Education Division in NY is very proud to work with AEDA to establish a platform for young designers from Taiwan. Through a series of technology forums, we’ve taken concrete action to support young Taiwanese exploring the new experience design, to stimulate their creative thinking, and to engage in and challenge science and technology trends.”