From Business to Buttons, Malmo

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My talk at “From Business To Buttons” in Malmo has been recorded and is online with all the rest of the event here.

It was a gentle ramble through some territory Tom Coates and myself explored last year, with some added detail about the Dopplr Personal Annual Report.

It’s about 40 minutes or so if you’re really bored…

Malmo was a blast (literally, in terms of the weather and horizontal rain) thanks for the invite and hospitality from the Business-to-Buttons crew, especially all the interaction design student volunteers I hung out with and pointed us to the best bars and art exhibits in the city, including the fantastic Sonic Youth exhibition I snuck away and saw…

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My talk from Frontiers of Interaction, Rome 2009

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Which I’ve written a little bit more about over at the S&W Pulse Laser.

I felt I rushed the talk, which was probably not wise as I was giving it in English to an Italian audience, but there’s stuff in there I want to dig into further in the coming months for sure. If you for some reason feel the need to punish yourself and want to see my lack-lustre performance it’s captured forever here, but deep thanks to (most of) the audience for indulging me and not falling asleep or wandering off chatting into the gorgeous Italian sunshine… I know I would have…

The concept of “Thingfrastructure” in the talk is something I’ve found myself scribbling in the margins of my moleskine for a few months now, and it’s something I want to come back to: resilience in services, especially when connected to things – and whether it’s possible to design ‘things’ that generate resilient services for themselves. I think it’s been in the back of my mind since Ryan Freitas gave an excellent talk on the subject at MX last year in San Francisco. Anyway – as I say, I’ll keep scribbling, and hopefully others will too.

Thanks very much indeed to Leander, Matteo, Manuela and all the team behind Frontiers for the kind invitation to speak and a wonderful time in Rome.

UPDATE:
The good folk at Adaptive Path have pointed out that (unbeknownst to me) Brandon Schauer was walking this path a few months ago. He’s a smart cookie is Brandon.

A couple of upcoming talks in June

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I’m very pleased to have been invited to Frontiers of Interaction ’09 in Rome, on June 8th, where I’ll be talking alongside comrades Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield and Fabio Sergio as well as loads of other excellent folk on the event’s themes of “social networking, the internet-of-things and smart cities”.

This is the territory that I’m most excited about working in, and to be at an event dedicated to it in one of the worlds finest, oldest, most-beautiful cities is a real treat.

From Rome at the beginning of the week, it’s to Malmö for From Business To Buttons on the 11th and 12th of June, where I’m going to be talking more about Dopplr and personal informatics, specifically going into some detail on the design process behind Dopplr Annual Report.

Maybe see you at one or the other…

UPDATE:
Going to be giving an ‘open lecture’ at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design on Thursday. Looking forward to visiting CIID for the first time!

Max Gadney

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Max Gadney, originally uploaded by moleitau.

I was fortunate enough to work with Max from 1997-1999 right at the beginning of BBC News Online, one of the hardest and funniest times I’ve had in my life.

He’s still at the BBC commissioning and cultivating interesting new formats for online stuff, but he has another life where he creates some lovely blends of comics illustration and infographics for WW2 magazine.

On his blog he also goes into great depth on the decisions and techniques he employs in the creation of the pieces, for instance, this one.

It’s a fabulous resource for those interested in narrative infographics, not least because Max is completely honest about what he thinks has and hasn’t worked.

He’s both exploring what’s possible with some fantastic work and learning in front of us.

Lovely.

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The Helsinki City Run

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is tomorrow, and I’m in it (with my Arphid chip…)

Thanks to everyone who has donated money in support at http://www.justgiving.com/moleitau: we’ve made about £700 for research into Parkinson’s Disease. Brilliant. I just have to run the 21k now, which according to this brilliant page on wikipedia, is about the length of Manhattan.

There’s still a little time left to donate if you want to pile some last-minute pressure on me…

My knees have joined Twitter

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My knees have joined twitter, originally uploaded by moleitau.

I’ve got two weeks until I run my first half-marathon in Helsinki, and for reasons of disaster, debauchery, duty and plain-old laziness I’m well behind in my training.

So, I thought I would try some auto-cyber-bullying.

I’ve often said that my favourite people on twitter are inanimate objects, so I’ve created a twitter account for two things that won’t be animate for much longer: my knees.

The theory being that you can follow along the final two weeks of my training, and if you see me skipping or slacking, you can shout marine-corps-drill-instructor-full-meta-jacket-style abuse @moleitausknees.

In order to further-up-the-social-pressure, I’m running to raise money for The Parkinson’s Disease Society, so please do pop-along to my justgiving page and put something in the pot to make sure I finish…

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