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“Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City – An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture”
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“Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the publ
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“Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, “sterile” boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology… Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don’t lend themselves to the sort
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“our argument for a more “hope-
ful”research practice is both “ontological”(that urban technologies are, to
some degree, unstable and therefore precarious achievements) and “episte-
mological”(that our knowledge of the practices through
links for 2008-05-06
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An economist journo does a reasonable job linking ‘smart mobs’ to citizen science via Eric Paulos’ “Ergo” air quality sensing project and the broader urban atmospheres work.
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Jessica Kraft sez: “Who says you need a PhD in ecology or a research grant from NASA to make a scientific breakthrough? Citizen science is a growing movement of thousands of amateurs who collect, enter and classify data that would have taken researchers y
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Intel Berkeley’s “Participatory Urbanism” project, which is interlinked with the broader system of “Urban Atmospheres” projects, such as “Ergo”
links for 2008-05-02
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A Masters student’s project: “I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone’s phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last sem
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“A Ghostbike is a junker bike that has been painted stark white and afixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed by a car driver. Ghostbikes are intended to be memorials for the fallen and reminders to everyone to SHARE THE ROAD with one anot
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There was an interesting radio programme aired today about the influences of the political movements surrounding May ’68 upon and from French philosophy (partic. Ecole Superieur). It features interview excerpts with Badiou, Foucault, Henri-Levi, Ranciere
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“Cultural studies has historically concerned itself with the cultural practices of the everyday and the now. However, as a politically motivated discipline, cultural studies has an ongoing preoccupation with cultural, economic, and political change, and t
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“Cati Vaucelle, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab will present two recent projects developed for the Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group focused on Gesture Object Interfaces.
“At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In
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BBC News journalist swans around PARC looking at ‘cool’ stuff…
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“Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work. Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use
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“By anticipatory governance, we mean the ability of a variety of stakeholders and the lay-public to prepare for the issues that NSE may present before those issues are manifest or reified in particular technologies.”
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Richard Donahue’s personal site
Laying claim to technological futures
At the recent Association of American Geographers annual conference in Boston I was lucky enough to take part in an interesting session: “Governing Technologies(I) – Representation, participation and governance in the ‘digital age'”, organised by Matt Wilson and Kevin Ramsey of U Washington.
I particularly enjoyed talks by Jeremy Crampton on ‘progressive’ political blogs as cartographies of left-leaning American politics, Richard Donahue on critical cartography, digital mapping and how participatory GIS might be usefully engaged with, and Matt Wilson on cyborg subjectivation (via Harraway) in relation to GIS technologies.
My own talk was an attempt to articulate one of the specific questions that is arising in my research, and how we might look to answering: Do anticipatory practices of technology development condition expectations for those technologies? What follows is an edited and tidied version of my notes.
links for 2008-04-10
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The blur between future fictions popularised as such and those expounded as forecasts or predictions is a tricky space to navigate, as illustrated by an interview between ‘SF Signal’ and Prof. Michio Kaku
links for 2008-04-09
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“More than 1,000 youngsters are taking part in the two-year study into their physical activity and eating behaviour. Global Positioning System (GPS) watches and waist monitors are worn to measure their movements to and from school.”
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“The Digital Geographics Group at Microsoft Research India seeks to further the state-of-the-art in the representation, analysis, and visualization of digitized geographic information. As location-aware technologies such as GPS and geographic information
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Microsoft’s ubicomp research page (apparently)
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“Every object has a story to tell, and some of those stories are pretty important… the labels on objects only tell a part of that story”
“This video provides a brief overview of the AURA project, which builds communities of people scanning bar-codes.” -
The Microsoft Community Technologies Group, which aims:
“To collect, measure, map, and explore data about social cyberspaces focusing on conversation and discussion environments.”
“To design and prototype collective interaction tools, interfaces, and vi -
“Origami is a code name for a small project with big plans. Our team wants to make Ultra-Mobile PCs a device you won’t leave home without, but we need your help…”
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Commentary on the Microsoft “vision of a future health service” video.
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A ‘future vision’ of banking, including ‘magical’ gadgets with all the fantastical bells and whistles one might desire, from Microsoft’s Industry Innovation Group
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“When Brian [Eno] first moved to New York City he found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our fo
links for 2008-04-08
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“The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed – al
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An interesting precis of a recent talk given by a PhD candidate positively recounting future aspirations for the web: “The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what s
links for 2008-04-07
links for 2008-04-04
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“We used the Twitter API to monitor the public feed and capture data on 37,248 tweets over a 24 hour period.” The Web interface is by far the most popular with 56% of postings, then IM 8%, Twhirl 7%, Twitterific 7%, and Text 5%. No data on how this migh
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“We are big fans of a collective licensing solution for the music file-sharing dilemma: music fans pay a few dollars each month in exchange for a blanket license to share and download whatever they like; collecting societies collect the money and divvy it
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“A new study by Canadian research firm Pollara has surfaced data indicating that Malcolm Gladwell’s popular theory about key influencers moving markets may not be valid. Gladwell’s arguments in the 2000 book The Tipping Point had reached levels of cliche
links for 2008-04-03
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“NTT DoCoMo, Japanese mobile operator, has announced the use of a new contact-less payment terminal for taxis…”
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“Millions of children are using social networking websites intended for older users, according to a study by the media regulator, Ofcom.
“Research into internet use has found that, among children with internet access, more than a quarter of eight to 11
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“Even the most outlandish science fiction could become fact, says professor Michio Kaku, of City University in New York” … “Einstein gave hope to scientists chasing the most outlandish theories when he famously declared: “If at first, the idea is not ab
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“By 2020 the terms ‘interface’ and ‘user’ will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans. It is one of the predictions in a Microsoft-backed report drawn from the discussions of 45 academics from the fields of computing, science, sociology an
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‘Computer technologies are not neutral – they are laden with human, cultural and social values. We need to define a new agenda for human-computer interaction in the 21st century – one that anticipates and shapes the impact of technology rather than s
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“Martin Heidegger’s work is pivotal in the history of modern European philosophy. The New Heidegger presents a comprehensive and stimulating overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of our ti
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UC Irvine’s Lab for Ubiquitous Computing