Explore Parenting Without Pixels with Continuum at SXSW Interactive 2016

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Explore Parenting Without Pixels with Us at SXSW Interactive 2016

August 16, 2015
by Lee Moreau

The world changes constantly, and technology evolves by leaps and bonds. What hasn’t changed—ever—is how children develop and grow.

We’re excited to announce that we’re organizing a panel for SXSW Interactive 2016 focused on the future of parenting. Our world will undoubtedly continue to be filled with technology—but it is our vision that this future will not be one with screens.

Instead, ambient interactive objects will sense our children’s sleep patterns, encourage their learning through play, and track their milestones. Products will be intelligent and efficient, but not nagging or annoying. Automation—of our homes, errands, and, yes, our cars—will be seamless as they support us living healthier, richer lives. And parents won’t be replaced by robots—artificial intelligence takes a backseat to enchanted objects that perform as part of a connected ecosystem.

Technology will enable parents to monitor nutrition, facilitate connections with family networks, and allow toys to adapt and challenge kids as they progress and develop.

Put simply: we won’t see a future inundated with iPhones and tablets. Instead, technology will be integrated into our lives, will help facilitate parenting, and will encourage early child development.

At SXSW, our rockstar panel wants to explore this future with you. We want to dig into how the evolution of technology will influence parenting. We’ll talk about the importance of maintaining human connections and parent-child bonds, and the ways tech can integrate into our lives without disrupting those connections. And as we turn our children’s data into action, how do we preserve the integrity and nostalgic ritual of raising our kids, while using quantitative facts to improve how we parent?

A vote for our panel, Parenting without Pixels: The Tech-Enabled Future, brings these four future thinkers to the stage in Austin, to converge on this topic:

Jean McKenzie, EVP, Fisher-Price

David Rose, CEO, Ditto Labs; Visiting Researcher, MIT Media Lab

Rosalind Picard, Director, Affective Computing, MIT; Chief Scientist, Empatica

Chris Bruce, CEO, Sproutling

We’ve got just shy of 30 days to make enough digital noise about our panel to move the needle. Your support is appreciated, as are your comments on how what you think the future looks like, and questions you’d like answered about the future of parenting.

filed in: made real, NXT, design trends

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