Òscar Tomico, reflections on design

Òscar Tomico

© Pere Virgili
Òscar Tomico

The objects around us are such an important part of our world that sometimes we do not even realise that they transform our lives. The design of tools and machines, for example, not only makes our daily life easy or difficult; it also determines how we live. In this sense, designers have an “ethical responsibility” when they decide to give shape to an object that will be used by millions of people, explains Òscar Tomico, a young Catalan researcher working at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands). It is not that the designer has to relinquish their work and become a mere “facilitator” who draws, in a simple fashion, what some consumers believe they want, but rather that a social commitment has to be reached so that the designer can take their role as a transformer on board in a conscious and positive way. Tomico proposes a “joint reflection” between designers and users to address the basic reasons that drive designers, user motivations and social values.

“Our department is not the classic industrial design team, as we focus on the phases prior to design, studying society and detecting opportunities to design what the future may be like”, he asserts. His proposal involves “achieving a more natural, more human relationship between people and technology; the whole body, its movements, and the clothes we wear, can be used to communicate our identity, better understand our body’s condition or improve physical capacity”.

Òscar Tomico was born in the Esquerra de l’Eixample district of Barcelona in 1979. He took his PhD at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech (UPC) in 2007 with a thesis based on constructivist psychology, studying subjective experience applied to the design of interaction. He has been a visiting researcher and speaker at different universities and design schools and co-directed the “Creative Challenge” project by Philips (2009). Tomico curated the exhibition presented at the Disseny Hub Barcelona by the Department of Industrial Design of Eindhoven University of Technology, where he has been working for five years; he is currently employed as assistant professor of the Designing Quality in Interaction research group.

“The work done by my research group makes sense in an area with an industrial fabric such as the south of the Netherlands; Catalonia is making a lot of progress, and I believe that the research we do in the Netherlands in the design of intelligent products and systems could also be applied in our country, for example, to intelligent lighting or textiles”, says Tomico, who concludes: “It is not a luxury; the joint reflection technique can be applied to any area. I have worked with people from la Salle, Telefónica and Turisme de Catalunya on similar projects.”

Joaquim Elcacho

Science and environment journalist

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