It was wonderful to be invited back to AHO and Oslo in early May by my old friends and sometime colleagues there – and the opportunity to speak about past projects but also what I’m doing now at Lunar Energy.

My framing was around the two biggest human-built machines on this planet – the cloud and the grid.

The former is the (much-younger) result of emergent properties and software that has traversed boundaries of territory and nations, while the latter has been a mainly top-down, deliberate design which is very anchored to geography, regulation and legacy technology.

When you put them together you start to get some interesting new possibilities for our energy transition – e.g. virtual power plants as made possible by Lunar’s Gridshare platform.

My talk was kindly hosted and supported by IxDA Oslo. Their extremely professional recording and transcription of the event was turned around in record time and can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who came, and your thoughtful questions and conversations afterwards. It was a lot of fun, and a delight to be back in Oslo after more than a decade.

The next day I hosted a workshop with Mosse at AHO for her students, which I entitled “Electrosheds”, after Kevin Kelly‘s “Big Here Quiz” that aims to locate you at the heart of their watersheds and local ecologies. I’ll talk about that in a separate post.