Researcher from JIBS one of the speakers at Interact London 2016

When thought leaders from all over the world gathered in London earlier this week to share their expertise within digital design and user experience, Andrea Resmini from Jönköping International Business School was one of the speakers.

Interact London is a yearly conference to which almost 20 world-leading experts are invited to inspire and share their knowledge. The experts are mainly leading practitioners from the business sector, but among them there are also a few selected academics and researchers.

The purpose of the conference is to discuss trends within user experience, and to give room for alternative views and perspectives that depart from the mainstream. The participants are mainly people in managing positions in different types of service companies – from health care to banking – or design firms.

The theme of this year was “How will people interact with technology in the future and how do we design for it today?”.

“Some of the themes that were discussed are the role of emotional intelligence in the design, and the overall shift towards a more strategic role of design as digital becomes ubiquitous in everyday experience,” says Andrea Resmini, Senior Lecturer at Jönköping International Business School, who was one of the conference speakers.

Andrea Resmini himself talked about cross-channel ecosystemic design. This relates to a new way of looking upon user experience.

“Focus has moved from products and services to experiences, from production and consumption to co-production between different suppliers, and from viewing physical and digital as separate domains to seeing them as blended spaces. We need to take into account the entire ecosystems in which individual experiences occur when someone for example takes part of a product or a service,” he explains.

The participants of the conference are offered a whole day of workshops and two days full of presentations by the invited speakers. There is also plenty of room for networking and social activities at the end of the day.

“This is an important forum where academics and practitioners can share their knowledge and experiences, and conversations happening during the conference rapidly reach a larger audience through social media and the like,” says Andrea Remini.