Immersive Tech Week Keynote: Jonathan Hanahan

Join us for a keynote from Jonathan Hanahan, Associate Professor and Chair, MDes for HCI and Emerging Technology in the Sam Fox School at WashU. Presented as a part of Immersive Tech Week 2025.

Lunch will be served.

Abstract:

For most of its existence, communication design has prioritized visual feedback to users. Even today’s digital interfaces only use other senses, like touch and sound, to alert users to look at a device. As our physical and digital worlds further entwine, a new feedback methodology is required that embraces alternative senses as primary feedback methods, particularly in compromised experiences—where a screen is unavailable, dangerous, or distracting from a primarily complex task. 

Jonathan Hanahan, Associate Professor of Design and Chair of MDes for HCI and Emerging Technology, is interested in evolving a pedagogy that builds on the foundation of craft associated with visual design yet translates it into alternative senses as a catalyst for a world where adding more screens is no longer a valid solution. Through the Sensory and Ambient Interfaces Lab (SAIL) at Wash U, founded in 2022, Hanahan is building a body of research into alternative feedback strategies that invert the visual-first priority of digital feedback and investigate how information is translated through ambient strategies that “complement a human’s environment, rather than impose themselves on it.”

Through this presentation, Hanahan will showcase the evolution of SAIL, including current research with WashU athletics, primarily the rowing team, to develop haptic interfaces for performance enhancement. These foundational pilot investigations aspire to further collaborative opportunities in other compromised experiences including medicine, military, safety, and more.