Interface design education strategies for hybrid spaces: digital sensing and shared representations

Recent limitations to the use of physical space have brought renewed attention to the concept of hybrid spaces and the possible interactions between virtual and physical systems. Through sensors, online databases, and locative technologies, digital communication designers emerge not only as designers of the interface between users and technological systems but also between users and a hybrid world that mixes physical senses and new perceptions mediated by a technological system whose presence is increasingly less visible and whose pervasiveness is constantly growing. In this context, design education can offer translations that allow for the perception of digital space and for our ability to act on it, it must provide a representation of territories made up not only of spaces and people but also of data and mediated connections, and it must allow for their perception in terms of a new reality on which it becomes possible to reflect and act. This communication interface, placing elements of different worlds in the same artifact, provides a synthetic space that enables users to act on a heterogeneous reality.