In the first week of March I travelled to the San Francisco Bay area. The purpose of my visit was to meet with key people relevant to my research. During my visit I had the opportunity to talk with Mike Liebhold at Institute For the Future about their ‘blended realities‘ research and the crossovers this has with my own PhD research project [more of which soon].
I also had the opportunity to meet up with Howard Rheingold, who guided myself and Michel Bauwens on a fantastic walk in the Muir Woods/ Mt Tamalpais State Park. We were treated to the most phenomenal views of the bay. During our walk I learned more about Michel’s fascinating work at the P2P Foundation and discussed the politics of knowledge production and the role of orthodoxies, particularly in relation to Isabelle Stengers recent work.
Later in the week I attended the Intel Research Berkeley open house session. I caught some great projects on show. Amongst them was Mash Maker, a drag-and-drop system for creating web 2.0 style ‘mashups’, as well as Eric Paulos et al’s ‘Common Sense’ projects, a mobile phone-based platform for sensors to enable community action and citizen science. I hope to return to Berkeley later this year to follow the progress of the Common Sense/Urban Atmospheres project(s) as part of my fieldwork [again, more soon].