Dan Williams wades through the trough of disillusionment of the Internet of Things.
I have some summary links at http://www.iamdanw.com/said/atoms-are-hard/
Tagged with “brighton”
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Atoms are hard
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Brighton SF with Brian Aldiss, Lauren Beukes, and Jeff Noon
On the eve of dConstruct 2012, Jeremy Keith hosts an evening of readings and chat with three of the brightest stars of the science-fiction world at the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton.
- Lauren Beukes, author of Moxyland, Zoo City, and The Shining Girls.
- Jeff Noon, author of Vurt, Automated Alice, and Channel SK1N.
- Brian Aldiss OBE, author of Hothouse, Nonstop, and the Helliconia trilogy.
Event details: http://brightonsf.adactio.com/
Transcript: http://adactio.com/articles/5740/
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Pocket Scale
I punch in a keycode and enter the office. Three steps through the door I swipe my travelcard against an old wooden box, which starts spitting out a radio station based on forty million people’s answer to the question ‘What songs would a Joy Division fan like?’ The sexyfuture arrived yesterday, and it colonised my pockets.
Even on the days you leave your phone at home, you carry enough hacked objects to unlock space and time, provided you find the right door. What should we be thinking about as we bring our products to life? What are we strapping to our keyrings? And what does all of this mean for a scale we’ve been familiar with for centuries?
Matthew will empty his pockets live at dConstruct to find out, revealing the five things he’s carrying around with him in Brighton and why.
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/matthew-sheret
Writer and editor Matthew Sheret is Last.fm’s Data Griot, using everything from tweets to radio scripts to tell stories about Last.fm’s numbers.
He has worked for the likes of Newspaper Club, 4iP, Thomson Reuters and Dentsu London and in 2008 co-founded We Are Words Pictures, an ad-hoc team of comic book creators who promote the work of up-and-coming creators.
In his spare time he edits and publishes the anthology Paper Science and plays with Lego.
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The Transformers
When you think of a city, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely it is the stuff that it is made up of: its streets and buildings, its parks and squares. But what sets a city apart, aside from its architecture, is how all that stuff is put to use. A city’s nightlife, a city’s cuisine, a city’s culture. In other words, what people make of the space they live in when they are at play.
Play isn’t limited to the ‘soft side’ of urbanism. In fact, it turns out a building isn’t some prefixed structure capable of doing one thing only. Adaptation and reuse continuously transform what a city’s architecture is for, often from the bottom up. In this way, a city’s people shape their homes as well, quite literally.
What is at work in this process of city transformation, is nothing less than play. In cities, just as in games, people and the space they inhabit shape each other. Thus, in our Western cities, where reuse is overtaking construction of new space, we are all becoming architects.
In this session Kars looks at how game culture and play shape the urban fabric, how we might design systems that improve people’s capacity to do so, and how you yourself, through play, can transform the city you call home.
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kars-alfrink
Kars Alfrink is ‘Chief Agent’ of Hubbub, a networked design studio for applied pervasive games. Hubbub works with organizations to create games that take place in public space, engage people physically, and are socially relevant. Amongst other things, these games are used to encourage good citizenship and to facilitate cultural participation.
Besides this, Kars teaches at the Utrecht School of the Arts, where he mentors students who are pursuing a Master of Arts in Interaction Design or Game Design & Development. He is also the initiator and co organizer of ‘This Happened’ — Utrecht,a series of lectures dedicated to the stories behind interaction design.
In his spare time, Kars practices a traditional Japanese martial art, and tries to keep up with geek culture.
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The Full Stack of Entertainment: Storytelling, Play and Code
Forget transmedia. Forget alternate and augmented realities. Forget multimedia magazines, tablets, phones and puzzling QR codes. Our challenge lies in figuring out the full-stack of entertainment, designed from the bottom right to the very top: for phones, physical objects—part of the Internet of things or otherwise—tablets and conventional computing devices, where art, code and design mesh together perfectly with directorial vision.
These teams producing our next generation of entertainment are right at the heart of Steve Jobs’ placing of Apple at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Where did they come from, how are they evolving entertainment and how are they making storytelling, play, code and technology sing?
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/dan-hon
Dan Hon is a Creative Director at Wieden Kennedy in Portland, OR, where he works on the intersection between storytelling, games, play and code. A former lawyer, he’s worked for Mind Candy helping to build their first product, Perplex City, and co-founded Six to Start, an award-winning entertainment production company in 2007. He’s most known for being passionately for, and against, ARGs. He does not play World of Warcraft anymore.
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Oh God, It’s Full of Stars
The relationship between digital and physical products is larger than if it exists on a hard drive or a shelf. It’s the tension between access and ownership, searching and finding, sharing and collecting. It’s a dance between the visible and the invisible, and what happens when we’re forced to remember versus when we are allowed to forget. How does this affect us—not just as makers, but as consumers of these products? Does collecting things matter if we don’t revisit them? We may download, bookmark, tag, organize, and star, but what then?
A digital Zen master would say that if everything is starred, nothing is. We’ve optimized the system for getting things in, but how do we get something good out? How can we make meaningful connections between all of this stuff, and make constellations out of all these stars?
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/frank-chimero
Frank Chimero is a graphic designer and illustrator. He makes pictures about words and words about pictures. His fascination with the creative process, curiosity, and visual experience informs all of his work. Each piece is part of an exploration in finding wit, surprise, and joy in the world around us, then, trying to document those things with all deliberate speed.
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What Is the Shape of the Future Book?
We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.
This is not what matters. Surface is secondary.
What are the core systems comprising the future book? What are the tools that need to be built?
As designers we will need to provide the scaffolding for these systems. The interfaces for these tools. Not just as surface, but holistically—understanding the shifting of emotional space, the import of the artifact, the evocation of a souvenir, digitally.
How will we surface the myriad data just below the words of digital books in organic, clean and deliberately designed ways? How will we shape the future book?
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/craig-mod
Craig Mod is a writer, designer and publisher concerned with the future of books, publishing, and storytelling. He lives in a tiny Bay Area village in the California full of dreamers, endless yogurt, and trees that let loose money when shaken just so. His writing appears mainly on his website, but has also appeared in the New Scientist, The New York Times, and A List Apart. He works as a designer for Flipboard.
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Reality is Plenty
Lately, Augmented Reality (AR) has come to stand for the highest and deepest form of synthesis between the digital and physical worlds. Slavin will outline an argument for rethinking what really augments reality and what the benefits are, as well as the costs.
Rather than considering AR as a technology, we will consider the goals we have for it, and how those are best addressed. Along the way, we’ll look at the history and future of seeing, with a series of stories, most of which are mostly true.
AR may be where all this goes. But how it gets there, and where there is, is up for debate. This is intended to serve to start or end that debate, or at a minimum, to bring the conference to a close by pointing at the future, perhaps in the wrong direction.
http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kevin-slavin
Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-Founder of area/code. He has worked in corporate communications for technology-based clients for 13 years, including IBM, Compaq, Dell, TiVo, Time/Warner Cable, Microsoft, Wild Tangent and Qwest Wireless.
Slavin has lectured at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Parsons School of Design, and has written for various publications on games and game culture. His work has received honors from the AIGA, the One Show, and the Art Directors Club, and he has exhibited internationally, including the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst.
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The data will improve rockets
Narratives shape our journeys through data, and those stories don’t have to be complicated to have a huge impact. All you have to do is think about your audience – your companions – and where you want to take them.
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Spacelog & story patterns: How to design experiences like you would a good book
We talk a lot about narrative and story, but what exactly is a story? What makes it move you? Starting with Spacelog.org, a brief look at some simple story patterns to make digital experiences that can inspire the soul.
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