dConstruct / tags / dconstruct2013

Tagged with “dconstruct2013” (9)

  1. Is My Laptop Ruining My Life?

    Adam Buxton considers the pros and cons of life lived through a laptop.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/adam/

    You may know him as one half of Adam and Joe. Maybe you’ve seen him on the telly in Have I Got News For You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, or The IT Crowd. Or perhaps you know him as Famous Guy in They Crashed From Space There.

    He provides his own unique commentary on contemporary culture; music videos in particular. In fact, he goes one step further: he provides commentary on commentary on contemporary culture …if you count YouTube comments as culture.

    Adam is the host of BUG at the BFI Southbank in London, a show featuring a selection of brilliant, strange and otherwise noteworthy music videos. The show has since gone on the road, and even on to the telly box.

    You can keep up with Adam’s shenanigans on his website.

    Be warned: he has been known to go on an occasional sushi bender.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 laptop comedy technology twitter:user=adambuxton

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  2. Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area

    In the 1980s geophysicist Andy Hildebrand was working for Exxon analysing seismic survey data. Hildebrand created digital signal processing software that took recordings of waves travelling through the ground from dynamite explosions and processed them to find hidden pockets of oil.

    In 2013 the software has a new name and a very different purpose. You can hear its output on the radio, on YouTube and on X-Factor. No longer a tool for geophysicists but for pop stars. Auto-Tune uses the same process that identified underground rock layers to make vocals sound pitch perfect. To an algorithm there is no difference between Kanye’s voice and an oil deposit.

    Auto-Tune isn’t the only technology shaping our lives in unexpected ways. In this talk we’ll look at our software mediated world, it's consequences and our role in it as creators.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/dan/

    Dan W. makes things. Sometimes those things are made of atoms. Sometimes they are made of bits.

    Display Cabinet is a mixture of both. And even the purely digital services Arrivals and When Should I Visit? are designed to make smooth your journey through the world of atoms and matter by giving you easy access to information from the networked world of bits.

    Dan works at Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. You can find his scrapbook on Tumblr where he documents the seemingly science-fictional collisions of technology and society that he sees happening all around.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 technology privacy networks society culture twitter:user=iamdanw

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  3. Fan is a Tool-Using Animal

    What happens when you build a nice website, and a real community shows up that doesn't meet your expectations?

    Since the earliest days of Usenet, fandom has wandered the Internet, finding remarkable ways to assemble websites, plug-ins, and online forums into tools for sharing and organizing erotic fiction. Often ostracized and ridiculed for their hobby, this community of rather gentle people has learned to work with the materials at hand, building for themselves what they could not get from others, in the process creating a culture of collaboration and mutual respect other online projects can only envy.

    Fans are inveterate classifiers, and the story of how they have bent websites to their will (in a process reminiscent of their favorite works) may change the way you think about online communities, or at the very least, about librarians.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/maciej/

    Maciej Cegłowski is my favourite writer on the web.

    But don‘t take my word for it. Have a read through Idle Words and see for yourself. Travel, food, jellyfish, and space shuttles are just some of the subjects he has tackled. Perhaps you‘ve heard about Argentina on Two Steaks a Day or maybe you‘re familiar with The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.

    When he‘s not lovingly crafting words, Maciej lovingly crafts Pinboard—the bookmarking service with the radical business model of actually charging customers money (see also: the revolutionary Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud that offers startup funding of $37 to successful applicants).

    His pragmatic approach to building a sustainable and scalable business is a breath of fresh air in the fetid miasma of most startups, and his observations and updates on the Pinboard blog are almost as good as Idle Words.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 fan fiction slash fiction writing culture collaboration twitter:user=baconmeteor

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  4. The Heroes and Anti-heroes of the Information Age

    In the information age, data is the new currency and access to it is power. With battle cries such as “Information wants to be free”, “Hack the planet” and “we are legion” – Hackers have risen to infamy. But why are they so influential and how are they shaping the world to come?

    Hackers, as manipulators of technology and information, are playing a key role in the future of man & machines evolution. As change agents, they continuously push the boundaries of technology, exploring new frontiers such hacking the human body and the brain, turning science fiction inspirations into a reality. Hackers are people who can communicate with machines – and the world needs such individuals to act as mediators, synthesizers and modems - between data, humanity and technology.

    But Hackers can also be villains, creating dangerous technologies. So, with great power comes great responsibility, and the transformative power of hacking can become a positive influence in years to come, but only if we learn to embrace and harness it.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/keren/

    Remember the film Hackers with Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie? Well, it’s thanks to that movie that Keren Elazari decided to dive into the world of cyberspace.

    Now she is a security expert with extensive experience of large scale commercial and national cyber security issues. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, she now divides her time between Tel Aviv University and the Singularity University in California.

    Through it all she has maintained her love for the near-future worlds of sci-fi and cyberpunk.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 technology security hacking privacy hackers twitter:user=k3r3n3

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  5. Tech and the Uncanny

    Sarah Angliss is a musician …and robots are her instruments.

    There's the robotic crow Edgar Allan, Hugo the singing ventriloquist’s dummy head, Clara 2.0 the baby doll that plays the theremin, and the Ealing Feeder, a 28-note, polyphonic, electromechanical carillon.

    Sarah’s band Spacedog is renowned for its live performances featuring theremin, vocals, percussion, saw, laptop, and of course, robots.

    Sarah is also a sound historian and she has been called in occasionally by BBC Radio 4 and the World Service to share her expertise on the phonograph and other early music machines.

    You can keep up with all her activities at sarahangliss.com.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/sarah/

    Sarah Angliss is a composer, automatist and sound historian, fascinated with the uncanny (Das Unheimliche) - an idea she researches through her performance, her robotic creations and in the archives.

    The uncanny is the familiar, presented in an unfamiliar form, something we find strangely compelling yet unsettling. It’s the voice message that remains after death, the ventriloquist’s dummy, the hyper-real video game character or the Doppelgänger of folklore.

    At dConstruct, Sarah will consider how we can harness the uncanny to make digital experiences more compelling. She’ll also be exploring moments in history when technology, from phonographs to mobile phones, seemed to take on a peculiar caste - causing fault lines in our understanding of human identity.

    According to Sarah, if you’re looking for the next revolution in telecommunications, go in search of the uncanny.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 uncanny technology music instruments robots automata twitter:user=therematrix

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  6. Great; things are connected, but what will they actually talk about?

    We take it for granted that smart and connected products will bring a benefit to our lives, but connecting is only the first step.

    To get away from the repetitive visions of the connected, efficient and sterile home of the future and to look for new and more human scenarios, we need to shift from designing internets to designing relationships of things.

    People have bias, stereotypes and cultural beliefs that they pass into the products that they design. Companies have business goals that they have to meet and rivalries with other competitors. If we take the point of view of a product in this scenario, how will its life change?

    New relationships and conversations will emerge between products with different goals or references and at the same time with people that will live with them.

    If we stop only drawing dotted lines between products, but we actually start looking at what relationship could emerge on that line, we will find ourselves exploring a new way of understating services and interactions with connected products.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/simone/

    Simone Rebaudengo hails from Turin, lived in Sweden for a while, and now spends most of his time in Munich where he works as an interaction designer with Frog Design.

    His fascination with the way that people and objects interact with each has led to some amazing work. Not content with exploring the Internet Of Things, he‘s experimenting with the Internet Of Things With Feelings. He paints an all-too-believable picture of how network-enabled objects might behave when they know how other objects on the network are being used. I, for one, welcome our neurotic robotic overlords.

    We invited Simone to come along and speak at our other conference, UX London, and it was a smash hit. I remember thinking, “Oh man, this is perfect for this year’s dConstruct!”

    You’re going to love him.

    You can see Simone’s work at simonerebaudengo.com and you should really check out his Tumblr blog, Designed Addictions.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 technology toasters product design psychology addiction networks hardware hacking twitter:user=fishandchipsing

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  7. Don’t Feed the Trolls

    The web community is one of the most vibrant and fun groups I’ve ever been lucky enough to be a part of. Like any vibrant community, sometimes people don’t play nicely.

    In this session, I will discuss what it has been like to be shy and be on twitter, mailing lists, and open source. I’ll talk about my experiences consulting on massive CSS overhauls, and ways to defeat trolls—including your own inner troll!

    I’ll also share a timing attack for your brain that might just surprise you.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/nicole/

    Nicole Sullivan and her business partner Nicholas Zakas are like The A Team of front-end web performance. If you have a CSS problem, if no one else can help you, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire …The Stubbornella Team.

    Before starting up her own consultancy Nicole worked inside Yahoo, building a culture of performance and quality with the front-end developers there. Now she embeds herself in companies like Facebook when they need to get their style sheet bloat under control.

    Nicole's approach to front-end development is encapsulated in her OOCSS framework — a modular and maintable way of building interfaces on the web. She also made CSS Lint, a piece of opinated software to help developers write CSS to the highest standard.

    But for all her immense knowledge about CSS and performance, Nicole’s most powerful skills are in the areas of collaboration and communication. She is a tireless crusader for knowledge and as if she did’t have enough projects to keep her busy, she recently organised CSS Conf in Florida, the first of its kind.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 trolls behaviour psychology communication twitter:user=stubbornella

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  8. Infinite Inputs

    In the beginning… there was the keyboard and the mouse. Today, the kinds of input our computing devices support keeps growing: touch, voice, device motion, and much more. Each additional input type offers new possibilities for interaction that requires our interface designs to adapt.

    When will this deluge of new input types end so don’t have to keep re-designing our software? It won’t. Not until everything is input.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/luke/

    Luke Wroblewski is the Zelig of the web world. Think of all the major turning points in the history of the web and I bet you’ll find that Luke was involved in some way.

    It all started back with his stint at NCSA, birthplace of the world-changing Mosaic web browser. Since then Luke has gone to work with all manner of companies, large (like Yahoo) and small (like Bagcheck). His latest startup is Polar, the mobile app that’s like hot-or-not for the world, getting big value from micro interactions.

    Along the way, Luke has made the web a better place thanks to his meticulously-researched books. He wrote the book on web form design. He wrote the book on mobile first design. Heck, he even coined the term “mobile first” …which means he‘s mobile first first.

    There‘s no shortage of people in Silicon Valley with opinions about technology, but what sets Luke apart is his razor-sharp focus on data. So whatever it is he has to say at dConstruct, you can be sure that it’s backed up with facts.

    Luke is also a blogging machine. You can try to keep up with the firehose at lukew.com.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 technology interface input interaction book:author=luke wroblewski twitter:user=lukew

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct

  9. Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

    In this presentation, Geoloqi co-founder Amber Case will take you on a journey through the history of calm technology, wearable computing, and how developers and designers can make apps “ambient” and inspire delight instead of constant interaction.

    This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing starting from the 1970’s-2010’s and how mobile interfaces should take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way.

    http://2013.dconstruct.org/conference/amber/

    Amber Case is a researcher exploring the field of cyborg anthropology. How cool is that‽

    Amber is also the director of the Esri R&D Center in lovely Portland, Oregon. Her work there started when Esri acquired Geoloqi, her startup that provided location functionality for mobile apps.

    Amber is a captivating presence when she’s geeking out about the interaction between humans and technology, hence her barnstorming appearances at TED and South by Southwest.

    Right now, her work involves non-visual augmented reality, the future of location, and reducing the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect.

    Her home on the web is caseorganic.com.

    download

    Tagged with dconstruct dconstruct2013 technology interaction interface ui twitter:user=caseorganic

    —Huffduffed by dConstruct