Vanessa believes that the future of technology is to empower humanity. It should help us to identify and reach our life goals, to deepen our relationships with others and with ourselves, and it should help us to understand who we have been, who we are and who we want to be. She calls this Designing for Meaningfulness and wrote a PhD about it in collaboration with Danish companies developing new devices.
Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter completed a PhD on Designing for Meaningfulness in Future Technologies at Aalborg, University Copenhagen whilst working in industry with design and technology agencies to expand and define this area. Her PhD came after 10 years working in industry, developing new smart products and being increasingly more worried about the trends in product development.
Designing for Meaningfulness (DFM™) has been used by design companies, companies developing new smart products and medical devices, and has been presented in over 50 workshops, talks and seminars.
The research includes both a value based investigation of the Mechanics (value based parameters) and Manifestations (physical qualities) of Meaningfulness. These are starting points for ideating and evaluating products or services in terms of designing for three scenarios:
Examine your company, products and services from a lens of meaningfulness.
Vanessa's company, Kintsugi Design, specializes in designing new technologies, strategies, and futures with meaningfulness at the core of their practice. The below examples open on Kintsugi Design's website.
Vanessa speaks at conferences, on podcasts, as part of panel debates, and in digital sessions about Designing for Meaningfulness.