Perverting the Everyday: Co-speculating a Strange Product Catalogue
Hosted by tiat (the intersection of art & technology) + ash + Sang Leigh + Liz Dorman + Megan Gole + Era ✴
Register with organizer
What to look forward to
Participants will reimagine everyday appliances as strange, misbehaving “smart” products, developing speculative product pitches and lifecycle concepts for a shared online catalogue. The 2.5-hour collaborative workshop will be led by Sang, an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Design at Cornell University and director of the Machine Poetics Lab, whose work explores human-technology relationships.
Inside the event
*Designing faux product pages for the strange appliances of an alternate reality.
Perversion of Interfaces is a collection of objects that claim to be “smart,” but often fail, misbehave, or do something anomalous. A camera that resists taking pictures, a smart light that longs for intimacy, or a prescription device that does face-reading. They are familiar, humorous, worrisome at times, and mostly confusing.
This workshop builds on this notion of "perverting," inviting participants to imagine an alternate reality where "smart" products diverge from contemporary design norms. Drawing from the exhibition's theme of wildly expressive computers, participants will take a familiar, mundane home appliance and completely reimagine its lifecycle.
This will be a participatory, conversational workshop where we will work in small teams to make pitches for speculative products, imagine product-consumer lifecycles, and produce an online catalogue as an archive for our collective "perversion" of familiar objects and rituals.
The workshop will take about 2.5 hours and we recommend bringing laptops!
Agenda
- 20 min - Intro and Conversation
- 20 min - Product Pitch
- 1 hour - Concept Development in Groups
- 20 min - "All Hands Review"
- 30 min - Finalization and Launch Celebration
About your instructor
Sang is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Centered Design program at Cornell University, where his research focuses on the notion of symbiosis between human and technology through making. His current interest lies in new horizons of AI systems that are interpretive, embodied, and entangled. Through the design of alternative technology artifacts, he envisions new forms of human-computer relationship that better support individualities, somatic experiences, and long-term engagement. He leads the Machine Poetics Lab, which engages in a mix of art, engineering, and empirical methods to explore future technology experiences.
More on tiat
tiat is the intersection of art and technology! tiat is a gallery for artworks using technology as a medium and gathering place for creative technologists to experiment, exhibit, and expand their practice. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖
This event is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition, Every Thing Computer. An exhibition of playful computing and experimental interfaces, exploring tactile, physical, social, and expressive relationships with machines. Presented in support with Era.
tiat
tiat, 151 Powell St, San Francisco, CA 94102, USA. Confirm the venue with the organizer before traveling.
Open in Google Maps ↗Details come from the event listing and the organizer page; registration is managed by the organizer.
Last checked: Nov 12, 2026. Confirm current availability before making plans.
Organizer page checked: Nov 12, 2026. Check registration for the latest details.