Dani Clode
Augmentation Designer
Workshop
Designing the Future Body: What Happens When Technology Becomes Part of Us?
Workshop description
What happens when technology moves beyond being a tool and begins to extend the body itself? Led by augmentation designer Dani Clode, with researchers Lucy Dowdall and Julien Russ from the University of Cambridge, this session uses the Third Thumb as a model to explore the evolving relationship between humans and technology. Through design, neuroscience and emerging AI-enabled control systems, the group will examine how people learn to use new physical capabilities, how the brain adapts to an additional robotic body part, and how increasingly intelligent systems could change the way we control augmentative devices. Combining research data, live demonstrations and open discussion, attendees will explore the boundaries between tools, prosthetics and augmentation, and consider a growing challenge for human–machine interaction: as technology becomes more capable of sensing, predicting and acting, how should control be shared between human and machine?
About
Dani
Dani Clode is an augmentation and prosthetics designer exploring how technology can extend the capabilities of the human body. She created the Third Thumb, a robotic additional thumb used to investigate human–machine interaction. With neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge, her work explores how the brain and body adapt to augmentation, and how these insights can inform the design of more intuitive, human-centred technologies.