Earlier this year, I saw an event to be held at the Royal Institute of Great Britain which caught my eye. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino was giving a lecture on Uncanny and Unloveable: The Future of Emotional Robots. As a user experience designer, I’m quite interested in emotions, while Brad, as a nerd, is quite interested in robots. So I booked tickets for us to go. 

Alexandra’s talk was part of a larger series on A.I., curated by Ben Hammersley. The next lecture was by Matt Webb, titled Botworld: Designing for the new domestic world of A.I. which unfortunately we couldn’t make. I believe I got a taster from this talk at UX London which touched on similar areas. 

The third and final lecture was by Ben Hammersley himself, who spoke about A.I will kill us all: Post-digital Geopolitics.

The two lectures I attended were thought-provoking and enjoyable. I’ve included my sketchnotes from these talks but there was so much to absorb that I don’t think they are the best examples of my work to date. I didn’t pace myself well when capturing everything. I actually took a break after these talks as I just wasn’t happy with my sketching. Thankfully I’m back on the wagon now. 

In other news, I’ll be attending Pleasure & Pain at the Royal Institute in May and hope to be sketchnoting there also.