Came across this whilst doing some convergence research. Fantastic.
"Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the "Daily News", a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn't afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand."
Had a really interesting evening at the at abrahams event hosted by Arup on the theme of "collaborleaders". at abrahams is curated by abrahams and Claire Curtice Publicists with this event chaired by Sophie Howarth from the School of Life. The evening highlights were Philip Sheppard playing an impromptu cello solo and then later joining Steve Lodder and John Etheridge to show how three musicians can come together and improvise a piece of music - collaboration at its best. The video below is a bit shakey - i had to improvise ;-) but watch how the three are continually watching each other - to quote one of the general observations from the evening "the non verbal communication amongst the collaborators was visible".
atabrahams impromptu collaboration from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.
Other highlights included:
re the cello "it's a Banks probably made near here in 1750" i wonder which of todays tools we will be using in 2250
re workshops - can you be forced to collaborate or do have to want to collaborate?
re architect and designer - "the collaboration only involved about 4 hours of working together with each other" but then many hours of the teams working together towards the finished product
re can it be built - "not yes you can, but yes we can"
re the ego in the collaboration - the economist does not have signed articles it is a team effort by the editing staff.
and finally... a poem by Roger McGough for the egotistical collaborator
The Leader
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I'm the leader
I'm the leader
OK what shall we do?
The World Economic Forum on Africa are using our Drivers of Change voting application to solicit public opinion prior to the event on the challenges African countries need to be the most prepared for in the coming year. The highest ranked Drivers of Change will be used in a session during the event. 1200 votes had been cast by with one week to go before the public vote closes on Thursday 11th.
A global call to action and an invitation to urban dwellers to describe through photography the places and things they love about their cities, and those that they could do without.
Cutnpastecities launched this week out of the foresight team at Arup. The brief is to capture through photography what you really like in a city, what makes it tick, and what you would like to see more of in the future. They can be spaces or services, aspects of everyday life or temporary events. Alternatively, describe something that should be removed from the city, a building you could do without, a service that just doesn't work. These are a CUT. Things you like are a PASTE.
The project will culminate with an exhibition of curated insights, stories and speculations based on the images.
To get started all you need is a photo you have taken with a few keywords that highlight what is special about that place or aspect of the city, along with a description of what you would CUT or PASTE.
How do I submit a photo?
If you are a Flickr user add them to the cutnpastecities group. Or if email is easier then just send them to photo@cutnpastecities.com with the following information:
* is it a CUT or a PASTE?
* what you like or dislike, specifically
* add some tags that describe the content of the photo
* describe the location (address or city or geocode, adding to the map)
Any rules?
The photo must be one that you have taken, and one that we can use with your permission. The photo remains your intellectual property; cutnpaste cities will credit you as you wish. Any size and resolution is accepted.
To keep track of progress visit the flickr group or http://www.cutnpastecities.com/
I spent the weekend at the Yahoo Hackday last week. As Crave puts it
"The idea behind it was simple: you've got exactly 24 hours to hack together the most interesting, innovative, useful or fun piece of software or hardware, using developer tools from Yahoo, or anyone else for that matter. "
David Filo opened the event, I learnt alot about the Yahoo API's available - a great way for them to show me what i could be using... and thought the talk by Rasmus Lerdorf on hacking with PHP was great.
Next steps - how to organise a hackday at Arup for the virtual design, BIM, GIS and intranet communities...
Thanks to David at Oracle and Roland and David at Nesta for taking the time to get together a bunch of corporate bods who are tasked in some form with trying to nurture innovation in their respective organisations. The group is still reasonable embryonic with a few different agendas becoming clear. I am keen to catch up with others to discuss what Arup are doing and to learn about the approaches and lessons learnt in other corporate contexts. At the other end of the spectrum the group were also keen to pool resources on identifying SME's start-ups who they should be investing in "it takes too long to use normal networking techniques to monitor and assess all the new start-up out there..." Not quite sure how the latter applies in my environment yet, but one to watch.
Inevitably a couple of ideas to pursue came out of the session. Great chat with Chris Parker from Ordnance Survey. Talked about the possibility for some open innovation activity around their new OS open space API, their GeoVation project ["GeoVation will let government, business, community and individuals work together to develop ideas that benefit society, make money or both."] and an upcoming hackday that may be of interest to the Arup GIS community.
Of interest via Kelvin Pitman, Director of Open Innovation at Crown Technology, was their "problems we want solving" section of their website.
Spent a really interesting morning at one of the Arup Design Schools - thanks to Richard and Richard for the invite! Notes from the event were tweeted but i only tagged the last one, photos are on flickr and the slides are on slideshare.
Excellent few days at ETech, book full of notes and lots of links in delicious, but a few memory aids for myself....
On the first day and half, lots of talk about sustainability (many talks had Drivers of Change issues being rolled out and cited), less on the "this is what we have done", but a positive feeling that the design community were well positioned to contribute to the solution. Second day and half became more techie.
Tim O'Reilly on stuff that matters - I liked the motto he used about his attitude to running his business "business as a road trip - need to keep an eye on gas tank - but trip is not a tour of petrol stations"
Mike Kuniavsky - Thing M - on spimes and tagging objects with spimes or RFID's "there is a long history of craftsmen adding meta data to objects, for example silver marks"
David Merrill - Siftables - showed demos of some really compelling word games with his cookie sized ubicomp devices. Potential opportunity to develop some serious play activities using these interfaces to manipulate scenarios...
Siftables word game from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.
Aaron Koblin - amazing demo of his processing work and his Amazon Turk "artificial, artificial intelligence" projects. He launched his "bicycle built for two thousand" on wednesday night.
Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.
The next day he and the guys from Velodyne http://www.velodyne.com/lidar/ demoed their Lidar system...
Lidar demo at ETech09 from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.
Which was used in the Radiohead House of Cards "video"
Interesting comment that lidar being installed in vehicles creating the google streetview layer of google maps - coming soon a real 3D map of the street...
Other great stuff included Ben Cerveny on operating systems for the built environment, Andrea Vaccari MIT senseable city lab on understanding the temporal signature of space - great comparison of geotagged photos from flickr showing locations where americans visit vs where italians visit in italy, Jennifer Magnolfi from Herman Miller on programmable buildings and quoting Danny Hillis on "flexibility is modular or programmable", and Julian Bleeker from near future laboratory / nokia on design fiction and diagetic prototypes. He showed a great video of the Death Star over SF to "imagine, to materialise ideas and to speculate about a different kind of world"
Presentations and SlideShares are on the ETech site [including our own Chris Luebkeman]
My links to things of interest are on delicious
Am at ETech 2009 this week. The event has just started with Tim O'Reilly talking about his grand challenges, a focus on scenarios and a really nice couple of slides on the characteristics of rewarding innovation. Paraphrasing...
"think of business as a road trip, you need to keep an eye on gas tank to make sure you don't run out of fuel, but the trip is not a tour of petrol stations"
One to remember for anyone running internal R&D funding programmes...
To get pointers to what I am finding interesting watch my etech delicious feed or twitters.
Last month we were asked to pull together a short thought piece for an internal Global Buildings event at Arup on the "Future of Design". The pre-recorded piece was being used alongside feedback from clients on their view of the value of design. Both pieces provided the introduction for break out groups to think about 4 plausible scenarios for Arup in the years ahead.
The ideas in this video have been distilled from a number of issues raised in the Convergence Drivers of Change cards which I am currently working on. Any comments, reactions or suggestions would therefore be gratefully received. The five catalysts for thought were:
Design thinking - should we take a strategic role as designers
Collaboration - do we have design communities
Skills - do we nurture the top bar of T shaped people
Tools - should we share our toolmaking with the world
Complexity - which performance data streams do you use
Today's Future Designer from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.
"The role of the designer in the business world is changing. With increased activity at a strategic level and the innate skills that support community and collaboration, the designer has the skill set to play a pivotal role in today's business. In addition, they have the desire to work with new tools and are experienced in making the complex simple. In a world where technological innovation has increased the complexity of both the products and services we consume, achieving elegance has become the hallmark of good design."
Another great piece of work by Dopplr and this time it is even more personal. Just received my dopplr2008report.pdf. 50,000km traveled, away from home for 55 days and the velocity of a duck (5.73 km/h). I love the timeline that links through to the flickr images - just need to figure out how to add one in for Ambleside...
A second interactive lighting workshop is being held at Arup, organised by Tinker with presentations from Arup, UVA and Philips Lighting.
The workshop will cover an intro to DMX control using Arduino, examples and stories from light installations by Arup, UVA and Tinker, insight into emerging technologies and products from Philips and access to DMX controllable installations (Forcefield, and Optimise) so that you can test your learning on real installations.
If you are interested in hacking DMX controlled lights with Arduino or just want to learn about how interactive light installations work then why not join us... the project page is on the Tinker site
At Imperial College for a UK centric workshop on current state of the art in Ubiquitous Computing research in the UK. Most of the UK universities were represented with talks covering the Art and Design of Ubiquitous Computing, the Politics of Ubiquitous Computing (sustainability and environment issues) and the Science and Technology of Ubiquitous Computing.
Gonzalo had a poster accepted based on some of our previous work. My notes from items of interest follow.
On Christmas Eve Forcefield Interactive went live with the addition of two sensor inputs to allow visitors to the exhibition to play with the light installation.
A kiosk inside the space as well as facing the outside of the window on Fitzroy Street allowed visitors to put their Oyster card on a reader and have their card trigger a unique color to travel throughout the light sculpture. Additionally, a color sensor inside the space allows visitors to place an object of color on a reader, select the color and send it traveling through the installation. The default light display is generated using Perlin noise with the 192 lights being controlled by a single Arduino.
Other collaborators included Tinker.it and Artificial Tourism
