“Tony was right”: Etech ‘09 call for proposals/papers

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The Etech ’09 call for proposals/papers has been out for a week or so, and it’s theme/focus is “Living, Reinvented: The Tech of Abundance and Constraints”, which makes me doubly-excited to be participating this year on the program committee along with some y’know, actual smart people: Mike Walsh, Annalee Newitz, Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Webb, Nat Torkington, David Pescovitz, Timo Hannay and Kati London.

Over the years I’ve given Etech a fair bit of Tony-Stark/Warren-Ellis-inspired ribbing, so now it’s time for me to put-up-or-shut-up and find some “genuine outbreaks of the future” – so, if you know of anyone (including yourself) nudging up the future slider on the reality EQ, please encourage them to submit something as soon as…

The full CFP can be found here, and some of the themes I’ll be particularly looking forward to seeing the proposals for are:

  • City Tech: Our cities are growing, getting bigger faster than ever before. People are rushing to them in search of economic and social opportunity?jobs, urban living, and access to culture. How can technology help us create livable, prosperous, sustainable cities? What should mass transit look like? How can we infuse urban infrastructure with sustainability? How are cities using citizens? data to become smarter? What can economics tell us about the way urban populations will change and behave?
  • Materials & Mechanics: Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We?ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?
  • Mobile & The Web: The next billion people will come to the Web via connected mobile devices. Currently, many of these devices are humble dumb clients, but the iPhone, Google, and Nokia are bringing smarter clients to the masses with open platforms. How will these mini-computers change our lives? How will these jumbo-sized sensors benefit us? Will we be able to use the third screen to view an augmented world? What data will be collected and who will have access to it? Is the Web ready for the Next Billion? What will their web apps look like?

I have a feeling the key to this is going to be a distributed, active hunt in territories unfamiliar – so if you have a friend who’s a grad student doing weird things in a lab somewhere, and architect or an engineer sketching strange bio-mimetic structures on pub beer-mats; or anyone outside of the usual O’Reillysphere that you know who’s doing something exciting, do encourage them to take a look at the CfP.

Let’s make Tony proud…

—
P.s.: I’ve taken Matt Fraction‘s “Tony was right” slightly out-of-context here, via the ever-lovin’ Ryan Freitas.

Jessica Helfand and Tony Stark vs. Don Norman, Paul Dourish and Joss Wheedon

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Jessica Helfand of Design Observer on Iron Man’s user-interfaces as part of the dramatis personae:

“…in Iron Man, vision becomes reality through the subtlest of physical gestures: interfaces swirl and lights flash, keyboards are projected into the air, and two-dimensional ideas are instantaneously rendered as three and even four-dimensional realities. Such brilliant optical trickery is made all the more fantastic because it all moves so quickly and effortlessly across the screen. As robotic renderings gravitate from points of light in space into a tangible, physical presence, the overall effect merges screen-based, visual language with a deftly woven kind of theatrical illusion.”

Made me think back to a post I wrote here about three years ago, on “invisible computing” in Joss Wheedon’s “Firefly”.

Firefly touch table

“…one notices that the UI doesn’t get in the way of the action, the flow of the interactions between the bad guy and the captain. Also, there is a general improvement in the quality of the space it seems ? when there are no obtrusive vertical screens in line-of-sight to sap the attention of those within it.”

Firefly touch table

Instead of the Iron Man/Minority Report approach of making the gestural UI the star of the sequence, this is more interesting – a natural computing interface supports the storytelling – perhaps reminding the audience where the action is…

As Jessica points out in her post, it took us some years for email to move from 3D-rendered winged envelopes, to things that audiences had common experience and expectations of.

Three years on from Firefly, most of the audience watching scifi and action movies or tv will have seen or experienced a Nintendo Wii or an iPhone, and so some of the work of moving technology from star to set-dressing is done – no more outlandish or exotic as a setting for exposition than a whiteboard or map-table.

Having said that – we’re still in tangible UIs transition to the mainstream.

A fleeting shot from the new Bond trailer seems to indicate there’s still work for the conceptual UI artist, but surely this now is the sort of thing that really has a procurement number in the MI6 office supplies intranet…

Bond Touch table

And – it’s good to see Wheedon still pursuing tangible, gestural interfaces in his work…

Clod Computing

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S&W, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Just a small public apology to anyone that I owe email / work / anything.
I had a major hard-drive failure on my MacBook last Thursday, and didn’t manage to put in place an alternative computronic infrastructure til yesterday.
I’m off down the genius bar tomorrow, but the signs are not good for the patient.
So, please be patient?

But it bears repeatin’ now.

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Will Wright from his now legendary Long Now talk with Eno, as quoted by Jim Rossignol in his excellent book “This Gaming Life” (my emphasis below)

“When we do these computer models, those aren’t the real models; the real models are in the gamer’s head. The computer game is just a compiler for that mental model in the player. We have this ability as humans to build these fairly elaborate models in our imaginations, and the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.“

Yep.

That’s still the mission plan.

Polite, pertinent and pretty: a talk at Web2.0expo SF, April 2008

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Polite, pertinent and pretty: a talk at Web2.0expo SF, April 2008, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

To which you could add ‘tardy’: a shameful two months after the event the slides and notes from the talk are now up online here. Sorry to everyone who asked for them – and thanks for your patience!

It was a presentation by Tom Coates and myself on an area that fascinates us both – the coming age of practical ubicomp/spimes/everyware.

Although hopefully grounded in some of the design ideas explored in our respective current projects, it was a whistlestop tour around the ideas and conversations of many.

The title slide shows Timo Arnall‘s everyware symbols and obviously, Adam Greenfield‘s and Bruce Sterling‘s books loom large, as well as the work of Dan Hill, Matthew Chalmers, Anne Galloway, Schulze and Webb, Christian Nold and many others who I’ve been fortunate to meet, mail or read around this subject.

There’s certainly some scenius going on. As if to underline this, Nicholas Nova’s posted his slides from what sounds like a fascinating talk today: “Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People”.

Looking forward to a summer of more digital/physical brainfood…

Symbolic reboots

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New Building, New Bills, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Bryan Boyer’s master of architecture thesis project blew me away when I came across it today.
It’s called “Reclaiming Utopia” – an imagined new Capitol for the US government. It seems well-considered and suitably imposing – but the killer part is not the building I think.

For me it’s the almost science-fictional level of world-building touches around his project of new currency featuring the building, folk art and even commemorative plates.

Puts you in mind of Paul Verhoven’s ad breaks in RoboCop and Starship Troopers in terms of really convincing peripheral visions of a world.

It puts you in a future-fictional America where something or someone has caused and completed a reboot of the Union’s sacred symbols.

Zoolook

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We launched public profiles on Dopplr yesterday – and the thing that seems to get people talking is their personal velocity, rendered as an animal.

I’m not sure when this occured to me, perhaps it’s my fascination with daemons and familiars – but it seems to strike a chord.

The hardest part of implementing this was finding enough animals at lower speeds – the internet has lots of data on fast, exciting beasties, but not so much on the slowpokes.

We’d love to get more members for our menagerie…

If you’re a zoologist or know one please get in touch!

No, really.