After last years experience at TED I really wish this post was coming from me, but instead it is coming from our TED Global competition winner Salomé Galjaard.

While most people buy tickets for TED more than a year in advance, I only learned that I was going two weeks before the start of the event. By winning a ticket in an internal Arup competition, I got the opportunity to experience TED in real time, after seeing many of the presentations online. On Monday 12 July, there was an Arup tour through London that people could sign up to and that lead us the Royal Courts of Justice, the Darwin Centre and the Royal Albert Hall: a great way for a group of international TED visitors to already get to know each other.

When arriving in Oxford the same evening, the TED atmosphere was already present: hundreds of interesting people gathered, dying to get to know each other and share ideas. It was almost impossible to stop for a minute and think (and have some dinner) since there would always be someone who recognized you from the online attendees list, who was secretly trying to read your badge or who just came up to you for a chat. To me, this was really the most impressive part of TED: all these people that are truly interested, who have amazing stories to tell and who are an wonderful source of inspiration. It was, from the beginning on, truly a mind blowing experience. And the presentations didn't even started yet!

Tuesday began with TEDUniversity, in which people who were not one of the main presenters got the chance to tell their story and share their ideas. Chris Luebkeman was one of them, with a story about context, and it got a lot of positive responses!
The afternoon started off with the first of an enormous amount of TED lectures. The dozens of talks were divided into 12 groups and would continue until Friday afternoon. The sessions were called for example 'Found in Translation' featuring data journalist David McCandless, 'Human System' featuring Matt Ridley describing what happens When ideas have sex, and the research of Tan Le who can learn a computer what our brainwaves mean (very useful to control for example an electric wheelchair).
All these presentations, and hopefully also the musical performances will be released on the TED website in the coming year.

Even though the TED-blues hit me pretty hard (as predicted by the organisation) I already know this has been a life changing event. The coming months will probably be spend on digesting everything I heard and experienced, which will definitely influence not only my personal life, but also my work at Arup. Take for example the story of Mohammed from Bangladesh: he has been invited as a TEDFellow (people who are doing extraordinary things, often in developing countries) to come to Oxford. He told me that the government has come up with the most horrible urban plan for his home town. It means that there will be too little space for everyone, no place for nature or good public transport. On his own, he's on a mission to come up with a better plan. He has launched an international design competition and will fight the authorities wherever he can to keep his city liveable. I believe that Arup can help him: not necessarily with money, but maybe with good advice and some local support.

Hopefully I will be able to help Mohammed, not only because his website could use some help from an interaction designer, but also by linking him to people within Arup.
I must admit though that some of my time will also be spend on figuring out how I can be a part of the TED-family again next year.

Many thanks Arup!

Salomé Galjaard.

Last week I attended a small gathering at Philips Design to workshop ideas for a public lighting scheme in Eindhoven.

The most important aspect of the Web of Light workshop for me was the focus on the motivation for installing any of the multitude of technology wizardry available. The question "Why?" took us beyond the functional aspects of safety and security or the aesthetic art installations, and forced us to think about the different community perspectives that "public light" could play in creating stimulating urban environments.

The discussions through the day meandered between different ideas but the three themes we presented at the end encapsulate the major themes of: creating interventions to encourage the digital natives to interact in public spaces (a positive take on hanging around on street corners); encouraging community interaction through creating desirable shared public spaces (a midnight urban farm was proposed as a vehicle for productive light and a beacon(s) of activity); and the idea of displaying the inputs and outputs of the creative community at Strijp S (the new smoke stacks).

Looking forward to seeing how these ideas develop both in terms of creating useful applications and in the technology backbone to be delivered (66 acres of individually addressable LEDs). [Note: one route to next steps will be through a design challenge for the Hot100 at PICNIC 2010]

It is 40 years today since Ove Arup presented the "Key Speech" in Winchester. I can remember reading it in late 1999 before I joined the firm and cynically thinking what a great leaders pitch. But within a year, and maybe through working on projects like the wobbly bridge, I observed that most of what he wrote is actually embedded in the culture of Arup.

Below are the aims (A), means (C) and results (B) which I find useful when trying to explain to others how the firm is organised. I try to avoid describing the matrix structure, or the markets, practices and businesses since I am not sure if that makes sense to others. But the points below give a sense of the song we sing as we head off on our daily endeavor.

A - The main aims of the firm are:

1. Quality of work
2. Total architecture
3. Humane organisation
4. Straight and honourable dealings
5. Social usefulness
6. Reasonable prosperity of members.

B - If these aims could be realised to a considerable degree, they should result in:

1. Satisfied members
2. Satisfied clients
3. Good reputation and influence.

C - But this will need:

1. A membership of quality
2. Efficient organisation
3. Solvency
4. Unity and enthusiasm.

Item A2 is probably very familiar to people in this century, but is one of the fundamental ways of working that has led to Arup organically growing to our position today:

The term 'Total Architecture' implies that all relevant design decisions have been considered together and have been integrated into a whole by a well organised team empowered to fix priorities. This is an ideal which can never - or only very rarely - be fully realised in practice, but which is well worth striving for, for artistic wholeness or excellence depends on it, and for our own sake we need the stimulation produced by excellence.

I like the Douglas Adams quote:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

(The Salmon of Doubt)

This speech was written before I was born and reflects what is normal in the way my world works [sometimes].

Gonzalo had a demo of his UCL / Arup CASE research at Pervasive this year and I was presenting at a workshop on "Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive computing". We had great feedback on the ambient displays with several requests for others to use the devices as communication media on their own projects. Next steps will be to make robust units with doorways into different datasets (e.g. resource use at Arup offices).

Place stat* demo

The workshop was an interesting mix of researchers but heavily focused on the domestic energy monitoring market which was a shame since i think pervasive computing has much to offer the commercial / public building space and will probably have a greater impact than the domestic. Notes are at the bottom of this post but of interest was the use of social norms to influence behaviour, the use of REST to interface data and the lack of looking at patterns in the data to understand meaning. All three of which are areas we are looking at with the internal "Seewatt" research project.

Also of interest was the keynote by Henry Tirri SVP and Head of Nokia Research - which had two key take-aways:
- 4.6 billion users of mobile services, 1.6 billion have bank accounts - what do the other 3 billion do? the demand for banking services via telcos in growth markets. I had heard this anecdotaly but the numbers referenced were very significant.
- on the issues of understanding energy management on mobile devices where transmission is major energy expense ie use cached local version or continually pull from cloud - the future is not about bandwidth or cost but the availability of energy to sustain device use. Whilst he side stepped the question on the commercial drive to get users to replace handsets on 2 year cycles it was interesting that they recognise the benefit in the research community developing methods for continually trying to use less resource.

And finally a great video from the conference on the Formamat project at: http://formamat.com/

Links at http://delicious.com/djdunc/pervasive2010

Photos on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/pseudonomad/tags/pervasive2010/

Notes from WP2 - Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive computing

Andreas - Cyprus - interacting with smart meters using REST principles - using Web Application Description Language (WADL) to describe services. Using TinyOS nodes to simulate energy meters. http://www.webofthings.com/energievisible/

James Scott - Microsoft Research Cambridge - predicting occupancy to control heating and cooling of domestic properties - measured temp on boiler, outside and on at thermostat + using GPS to predict arriving home. Debate - INFORM OR CONTROL?

Jon Bird (Yvonne Rogers) - Open University - CHANGE project - http://www.changeproject.info, Tidy St (Brighton), "social norms" (life of brian - we are all individuals - i am not) boomerang affect - people gravitate towards the average - ie if they were below the average they tend up towards it - research done on beer consumption in US. Tidy St - displaying energy use of each house in the street - they liked the idea initially but then got slightly uncomfortable. http://www.caniturniton.com a project which says if the national grid is under stress or not (a one pound circuit will tell you the current frequency - also http://www.dynamicdemand.co.uk/). So compare national demand with tidy street average.

Jorn - Fachhochschule - matrix of types of usage (info, advice, automation) and data aspects (data sources, processing, interface, control / sharing)

Tatsuo - Waseda Uni - EcoIsland, game play to involve participants. Users add their behaviours and get recommendations for how to reduce resource use (from Japanese gov list of activities). Being used in 7 houses / families.

Matthias - Fraunhofer - energy awareness and self awareness - took measurements from an office / home and then asked inhabitants to review and describe their behaviour during that period. Not the graphs, it is understanding the graphs that is important - the behaviour. About events that occur not the readings themselves (the kink in the curve).

Karthikeya - School of Art and Design, Aalto Uni - Helsinki Energy Informer - video record usage of light switches (to see which ones were on) to monitor the use of lights in an office space - usage sent back to inhabitants via text. Drop in usage between 1st and 2nd week of trial "due to Hawthorn effect" of people being monitored. More activity in use of light switch in second week.

Daphne - TUDelft - a community based approach for engagement. http://www.livvinggreen.eu/ - changing beliefs, incentives, education, community mgt (Gardner & Stern 1996) - focus here on latter, community mgt.

Jorge Zapico - KTH - http://www.sustainablecommunications.org/ and an interesting hackday output to compare CO2 to other stuff "to try to help people understand what the measurement kg of CO2 means http://carbon.to/ and http://www.jorgezapico.com/

Giulio - Helsinki Inst. for Info Tech - iPhone app to feedback usage of appliances in lab and also survey / quiz to challenge people to think about resource usage BeAware - http://www.energyawareness.eu/

"Cialdini has an interesting take on persuasion" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini
"lots of talk about sensing and visualising but not much on data mining and making sense out of the data"

Half the team have spent this week in Jordan to launch the "National Campaign for Public Awareness on the Drivers of Change". The patron of the campaign is His Majesty King Abdullah II and our client is HRH Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, President of EHSC.

Royal Scientific Society's Science Week was themed around "change"

We are advising El Hassan Science City (EHSC) on the design and implementation of the campaign which is going to be delivered by an all Jordanian team. This has been very interesting for us on many levels (the politics, the protocols, the language...) but has also meant that we are developing a process to support the running of Drivers of Change workshops by others. The plan is to run 50-100 workshops with local communities across all levels of Jordanian society from Amman to remote villages in the regions. The objective of this first phase of the campaign is to understand what is driving change in Jordan, what the implications are, and what the government and local communities can do about it - to build a sustainable, positive future for the country.

FB choreographing workshop through translator booth.

As part of the official launch of the campaign we hosted a series of workshops during the Royal Scientific Society's Science Week to engage key stakeholders, train the campaign team, and trial design elements of the workshops before taking them out into the various communities of Jordan. The four workshops were attended by community partners, ministers, academics and and members of the Royal Scientific Society. Next step will be to deliver the mechanisms for collecting all the data generated in the community engagements, process it, and make it available to the participants and the people of Jordan. There are some really interesting opportunities here for an "open data" project.

Delegates using iPad during coffee breaks.

We also had a really interesting iPad application at the conference to solicit feedback from delegates on what they thought was driving change. The app used the eight sets of DoC cards. We collected over 400 responses with the themes of Water, Energy and Poverty emerging as the primary categories. Next up we will be delving into the data further to identify the specific issues which came out on top.

Screen shots of the iPad application.

The iPad certainly attracted some attention and helped in getting people to play with the voting application but the Jordanian students who were doing the polling did a fantastic job asking delegates for their input. The iPads also ended up on the stage during the opening ceremony with two students presenting HRH with a screen with a "large red button" to start a countdown clock to mark the start of the project.

The launch of the campaign - the countdown clock starts.

More photos on flickr

Press coverage - 'The 18-month campaign launched yesterday entails holding workshops for citizens from all sectors across the Kingdom including universities, business, banking, civil society, academia, the Jordan Armed Forces, ministries and public agencies among others. "The campaign seeks to increase the involvement of citizens in the decision-making process and start a nationwide debate on issues of top priority to the Kingdom," Bashir said.'

I spent last week at a TSB Sandpit on User Centred Design for Energy Efficiency in Buildings. 5 days with 30 people from academia and industry thinking about how UCD could be used to support energy efficiency in buildings.

We were successful in winning a few projects "Social BMS" and "YouCaretaker". The former will be a schools based project to map energy / resource use overlaid with socialised data to create "data shadows" which describe continuous real time use of the school environment. The latter is focused on creating an online community to support the sharing of data and best practice amongst stakeholders in the operation of buildings. Both projects have a really interesting mix of partners of which more will follow on the blog once the projects get started. There are still a few hurdles to jump through before kick off (in Sept) but it is supposedly down hill from here.

The event was facilitated extremely well by the guys at Know Innovation (they have a write up on their blog)

links are on delicious tagged UCDEEB
photos on flickr

Alan Gibney was over at Arup a couple of weeks ago testing a Wireless Sensor Network design tool in number 8 Fitzroy Street that he developed during his PhD on a tool for wifi access point positioning.

Using a 3D info of the building the tool allows us to figure out the best location for network gateways based on the required location of sensing nodes and the material characteristics of the building. This particular installation was of interest since the majority of the office is open plan which means that the "stuff" that interferes with wireless signals is much more dynamic and difficult to model than say a concrete wall or a glass partition which is traditionally quite stationary and has modelable properties.

Data Capture Process

The process shown in the sketch above involved 1] identifying sensor locations on the fourth floor of number 8 Fitzroy, 2] walking around the floor plate taking measurements of signal strength for each node in different areas, 3] mapping the signal strength, 4] generating a heatmap of gateway options, 5] running agent based optimisation algos to select optimal gateway positions.

Signal strength of node in different locations of office

The signal strengths were then loaded into the design tool to verify that the actual were similar enough to those predicted in the model. With a mean error of 1.41 the model seemed pretty robust.

The design tool then allows a variety of gateway / sensor nodes positions to be tested and compared for different types of optimisation (battery life, signal robustness, minimising nodes required etc.)

Topology of possible WSN

A ray launching method is used to propogate the signal strength from a node to a gateway with the journey being recalculated using a motif model that describes the radion propogation model of a material. The image below shows the heat map generated for a gateway positioned in the open plan area of the office.

Candidate gateway locations

Measurement vs Prediction

Heat map based on signal strength from gateway

Next steps are to use the design tool to model the whole building in preparation to roll out a 200+ node WSN in the building. The aim of the installation will be to monitor light (lux) levels in the office alongside occupancy to analyse and optimise both light comfort levels and energy efficiency.

More detail on the WSN design tool is available at:

Motif Model

Propagation Model

Optimisation Algorithms

All images on Flickr

I spent the day at Imperial College Business School as part of a Design London and Living Labs Global event to bring together the tech and public sectors to talk about connected cities and to launch the Living Labs Global report Connected Cities Handbook - "a book about opportunity and frustration" (Sasha Haselmayer)

The day was a mix of talks (mine is here), discussion sessions and elevator pitches: a great poem from TfL (on Design London website soon) and itiner.pl real time traffic info looked interesting (on living labs global showcase site). Below are my notes and points of interest.

Nick Leon - introduced Connected Cities education programme, an initiative between Design London at the RCA and Imperial College London and Living Labs global. The 3 day course introduces mechanisms for service providers to take ideas from concept to living lab to market place. Subjects covered include: well connected cities, transforming public services, the city as a system of systems, from idea to pilot to early market, true public private partnerships for innovation, innovation and new business models.

Dominique Laousse - RATP / Prospective and Innovative Design - "The mobility cocktail" how to make sense of the ubiquity of the mobile both from human ethology and urban ecology. Chronosapiens, promiscuity of the crowd, beta-city, wikipolis, metapolis. Trains, trams, buses in RATP for 30% of travelers it is their primary place to read - do we design for this? project Future en Seine - Re-enchant every day trips - leaving a trace, a narrative. project Musetrek - re-discover trip pleasure - info on stations? projects Social freight - with MIT - low cost delivery of small packages by existing travellers for elders, workers, ....

Andrew Davies & Lars Frederiksen - Innovation Mgt and Sustainable Cities
Case study of work with Arup on learnings from developing an eco city - Dongtan - shifting from industrial age to ecological age approach.

Erkko Autio - Prof. Qinetiq EPSRC Chair in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor - mapping relationship between early stage entrepreneurship against GDP - interesting clusters of geographic regions.
"Entrepreneurship happens in cities"

Panel discussion.
Stephen Dodson DC10Plus
Victoria Thornton Open House London
Micael Gustafsson Oresund IT

Questions and observations floating around the room at the end of the day.
What is the most successful application of technology in the fabric of the city?
We need brave CIO's who are prepared to push technology to solve problems?
Why is there a mismatch between the concepts being shown in the demos / elevator pitches and what we see in our local cities?
Are the leaders in local authorities empowered, accountable to their constituents, capable of delivering the kinds of systems being pitched.

Photos of the day are on flickr

We recently finished the last leg of a great project we had been working on for the World Economic Forum. Our task was to create an online presence for the SlimCity knowledge cards we had produced in 2009. The aim was to make the cards accessible to a broader audience than those at the SlimCity workshops. As such, all the cards are accessible via the SlimCity website where they can be read online, browse the relationships between the cards, download a pdf version or leave comments on the themes raised by the cards.

[more images]

Arup has been a knowledge partner of the World Economic Forum's SlimCity initiative which is just coming to a close. SlimCity provided a global, risk-free platform where cities and the private sector could exchange best practices to deliver resource efficiency at the city level. One of SlimCity's major deliverables was the SlimCity Knowledge Cards, researched and produced by Arup (managed in our team by Marcus Morrell).

[more photos]

The cards, which follow a similar format to the Drivers of Change cards, were targeted primarily at City Mayors as well as CEOs from relevant sectors. They differ from Arup's Drivers of Change cards in that they offer practical solutions to many of the problems facing cities, rather than raise questions and issues. In compiling the cards, Arup's researchers selected content on the basis that any Mayor could ask the question "Could we do this in our city?" The were given access to the Forum's membership and network and carried out in depth-in interviews in addition to desk research.

DG INFSO (Information Society and Media Directorate-General of the European Commission) is exploring the idea of pilot projects on "Open innovation for future Internet-enabled services in "smart cities". Their recent communication "A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game" recommended that "the CIP will support SMEs piloting highly innovative technologies, and the development of open platforms for user-driven innovation".

As such under the "Competitiveness and innovation programme" (CIP), theme 4 "CIP ICT PSP" will probably consist of 5 pilot projects to be funded on internet based technologies and services in the city. At least one will have a focus on use of RFID technologies. Call expected Q1/2010 deadline Q2, info day Jan 2010. More at http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp/

Making a strategic move from islands of services to common open platforms requires investment beyond the scope of a single application developer or city. It is important that cities connect, share and identify common best practice through pathfinder projects that can drive the development of common open platforms. User-driven open innovation methodologies or ecosystems such as the Living Labs are being proposed to nurture this process.

Pilots are being proposed that would combine all three of the following synergistic elements: 1) user-driven open innovation, 2) connected smart cities, and 3) Internet-based services.

Ideas around the following themes are of interest:

• smart living: participatory urban planning and co-design of spaces
• green digital agenda: master-plans for digital infrastructure to enable low carbon, e.g. energy production, environmental monitoring, buildings and facility management, traffic and transport ('Urban Information Architecture' or CIM in Arup)
• The citizen in transformation: citizen as an active co-producer, as
• well as consumer, of content and services, e.g. wellbeing, health, inclusion and participative democracy

The only pity is that it will be five large scale (10mil Euro each?) projects rather than one hundred 50k Euro projects. Just think of the diversity of urban informatic / internet of things prototypes you could build around Europe with that finance...

Still if you have any project ideas you would like to pursue around the theme of user centred / urban design led applications that the future internet may be able to support then please get in touch. They EC are keen for these projects to be urban design 'pulled' rather than technology 'pushed'.

Brussels 16.11.09

Spent an interesting day at Curve, Leicester speaking to the Amplified Leicester (@AmplifiedLeic #ampleic) crowd via an invite from Sue Thomas @suethomas.

The aim of their project is to:

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking key connectors across the city's disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project enabled by social media. Our objectives are to:

• Develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city's grassroots innovation capacity through connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• Provide practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

They were keen to get an insight into how Arup approach thinking about the future so I introduced Arup, our approach to foresight, innovation and research, and the Drivers of Change research. The presentation is on slideshare.

At the end of the session I asked each participant to try and list out some of the drivers which they think will affect Leicester / their lives. Copies of the cards are on flickr with some highlights below:

• homes designed for 2.3 kids
• is there enough work for everyone
• reduced public - funding doing more with less
• breakdown / change in "the family"
• constant quest for growth
• combining cultures and cohesion
• data security
• less professionalism
• credit crunch
• aviation and the extended Leicester family

As a note to self, had a couple of interesting chats over cakes on how the cards / research tools had been used in schools and the community. Quite a few teachers have asked about using the cards in schools - might be an idea to set up a schools group on the ning site to share how schools have been using the cards - would be great if others could share how they have / would like to use the cards with kids at different ages. Sharon was thinking of using them in a school project linking a Leicester school to one in India... On the latter re community there was an interesting discussion about how "tag cloud" like tools could be used to canvass opinion from the local community in addition to the traditional community meetings by the Police.

Was a pleasent surprise to be speaking the excellent Curve Theatre in Leicester (an Arup job with architect Rafael Vinoly). I had read about the "inside out" theme but was impressed with how well it had been done. The 32 tonne acoustic shutters around the stage were raised when I was there meaning that you really could see all the inner workings of the theatre. Excellent. More photos are on flickr.

Interesting SENSEI quarterly meeting at Telenor in Oslo. The WP5 guys spent most of the week hacking in the reception of the Radisson where wifi was good and ports were open to get the demo working for the plenary on Thursday. The pan European testbed is starting to take shape with islands of sensor networks in Norway (2 in the plenary room using two different sensor platforms), Finland (Sensinode) and Romania (where the primary Sensei platform is hosted).

Had some interesting discussions on the proposed field trials - three have been proposed to date including:

1] environmental monitoring using mobile sensor nodes fixed to buses in Belgrade (EYU)

2] workplace monitoring using room access, comfort data, booking information (TID)

3] sports / environmental monitoring in the customisabale environment at eXperience Lab (UTwente)

In the pipeline is to create a SENSEI wrapper to connect the current Arup sensor network data. I need to also throw in a couple of actuatable devices in there. Need to explore possibilities of connecting to and from SENSEI platform via Pachube. Second Life was also mentioned as an interesting platform to test the horizontalisation theme. If we can create a connection between SENSEI applications and objects in SL then we have a virtual mechanism to test multiple uses of SENSEI data.

Also discussed in the field trial session was the issue of horizontalisation. A key goal of the SENSEI architecture is to facilitate the ability for nodes within islands of sensors networks to be re-used by multiple applications. It would be interesting to do an Architecture School project during one of the field trials where all the sensors / actuators being generated for the field trial are accessible for a group of designers to re-purpose / re-imagine the kinds of services that such data could create. Get in touch if you are interested and have a bunch of students...

The photo at the top of the post is of the Telenor buildings in Fornebu, Oslo. I was impressed with the art around the building - striking to me was the digital facade when i arrived which advised that i "think differently" and "be kind to others". The buiding long facade installation was created in 2002 by Jenny Holzer. I also loved the Daniel Buren columns and the large glass mosaic:

More photos on flickr

Just back from a beautifully sunny Brighton attending dConstruct 2009. The blurb says: "dConstruct 09 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow." Great low cost conference, sold out, great speakers, in a great venue. Below is a summary of observations during the day.

First up was Adam Greenfield talking about "Elements of a Networked Urbanism". Lots of interesting pairs now >> new got me thinking about how the digital layer may manifest itself in our cities. Of particular interest were information that:

expires >> persists - as we create geolocated information that is stored in the temporal ether history will persist - both at a public and personal level.

wayfinding >> wayshowing - typically signs are located statically (even if they have dynamic content). Mobile mapping is already creating the personal "showing" devices of the new.

objects >> services, vehicle >> mobility, ownership >> using, I can understand the Spotify example and the StreetCar one (although i have never used the latter), but I like to own my Triumph, do I need to? Not sure. Do i want to? Yes. I think there is more to ownership than functional need. When i look at my young son he is desperate to own toys - not just play with them but he wants to take them back to his cave. How will we release our desire to own?

Schelling >> shoaling - rather than the static mtg points (under the clock at Grand Central) a move towards dynamic, social networked "i am here" gatherings.

community >> network - you don't necessary want to know everything about your neighbours, ignorance can make community friendships easier, in the virtual space you connect to those who have similar affinities to you more easily, in a way that you cannot in cities. You cannot necessarily overlay online social space to the physical cities - if we did would it look like the suburbs?

consumer >> constituent - in the new we are equal co creators - what will this mean in the urban environments we are desiging?

Second up were Mike Migurski and Ben Cerveny from Stamen on the theme of "Let's See What We Can See (Everybody Online And Looking Good)" Great walk through of some their projects which i had seen but not analysed before.

Ever felt alone sitting by yourself on a telecon call? moveon.org was a project where they mapped large numbers of people listening into conference call based meetings to give people a feeling of participation since they can "see" others on a map.

For sfmoma artscope, they were given a 6000 strong art collection and asked to create an interactive web based browsing interface. One key aim was to get the zeitgeist view. They used pan, zoom, tile metaphors of mapping. Each image of artwork is rendered as a tile with top left showing first bottom right showing most recent.

One of my favourite nebisms was "dimensional synesthesia" - taking the temporal time line of the collection and transposing it into the spatial. Visualisation being used to stimulate a different way to look at the data. One for me to explore with our internal R&D / innovation projects website (6 years of data 2000+ projects)

Also great to get a first hand demo of the hurricane tracker web app which i had read about but not really looked at. On the meta view of the hurricane tracker "the individual instances when taken together allow us to understand the whole piece" another nice nebism on *sculpture in possibility space*.

The final speaker of the day was Russell Davies (Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We've Learned From Printing The Internet Out)) who i have heard much about but never heard. A great, funny speaker who uses props on stage - excellent! Best quote was one he made at Guardian conference re Stuff we read in 2008 "we have broken your business, now we want your machines" Take away message was that we need to think more about how we embed the web in the world around us (and not just try to put the world into the web).

Other comments that i liked included:

Brian Fling (What's Next? How mobile is changing design) "twitter the product is not a website it is an api" the result of mobile is that the future of web is not about a single website but about designing for different contexts. Mobile - portable, personal and ubiquitously connected.

Robin Hunicke (Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback) on making your app juicy (fun, playful, engaging - more bouba less kiki) and introduced the MDA framework to me (mechanics dynamics aesthetics) examples of juiciness included: prius energy display, armchair revolutionary website, wii, iphone

August de los Reyes (Experience and the Emotion Commotion) supporting use of MDA but in an industrial design perspective. Also his great prickles and goo clip - http://www.neticons.net/prickles

books to search out:
The emotion machine - Marvin Minsky (via August)
The nature of technology - Brian Arthur (via Russell)
Digital Fabrications - Lisa Iwamoto (via Adam)

Just back from my first TED. Have watched the videos over the past couple of years and have heard first hand accounts from past participants, so was looking forward to living it in real time.

We organised a workshop in parallel to the TED U(niversity) sessions. The new Drivers of Change cards were one of the gifts given to the 700 participants and the aim of the workshop was to introduce people to the cards and how they could be used to help people generate ideas worth spreading. The feedback on the day was excellent and we have several people to follow up with post event. The results of the TED group voting are on the DoC voting application with details of the voting and photos on flickr.

Thanks to the TED guys for showing the results of the Drivers of Change workshop votes on the main stage at TED Global. Bruno gave an excellent overview of the results and mentioned the pointer to the open voting set at vote.driversofchange.com/ted-global-2009/

I went native at TED and reverted to pen and moleskine so below are a few notes which act as reminders for things i want to chat to people about and talks that i want to come back to when they are online. They are listed time linear since that is how my moleskine works.

Stefan Sagmeister - two things stuck in my mind - the very cool Casa da Musica dynamic identity, take a look at Brand New's explanation and his approach to the seven year (itch) sabbatical which he justifies by describing how he is pulling forward 5 years worth of retirement and interspersing it in yearly blocks (the sabbaticals) into his work life. Great idea - but how to reintegrate with clients upon our return?

Gordon Brown was surprise speaker and has generated much discussion in the media (and at the event). His talk was very polished, he made the woman next to me cry, and he got a standing ovation. He also got slated for insincerity and auditioning for his next job. Either way "the power to communicate across borders" enabled by the photograph and the increasingly convergent phenomena of the internet in making these stories told in real time was an interesting theme.

Evan Grant, seeing the sound of nature as patterns in the sand - excellent talk, well worth watching again when on-line. He introduced me to Cymatics and had my mind racing with applications I want to try.

Rory Sutherland - an ad man at Ogilvy, he usually speaks at "TED Evil". A fun presentation to watch - he suggests that engineers should not have spent 6 billion to build CTRL to reduce journey times but should have invested in making the journey so enjoyable that people would not notice the time they spent on the train. His suggestions included using the 6 billion to pay for super models to serve free champagne to all! Great story about the new Diamond Shreddies.

Mathieu Lehanneur - showed a great piece of product design where a kids asthma device inflates over night so that the kid has to take his medicine in the morning to "look after" the inhaler.

Rebecca Saxe - fires a magnetic pulse into her brain to deactivate a group of neurons that controls her moral perspective of other peoples actions. The Pentagon are calling but she is not taking their calls...

Henry Markram - "the drugs developed today are largely emperical" he is building a model of the brain so that they can start to simualate how the brain works. Need to watch this one again to figure out how this "actually" works and am interested in the implications for the Artificial Intelligence community.

It was good to see Manual Lima presenting visualcomplexity and Candy Chan had an interesting talk on community information architecture experiments - unseen conversations in neighbourhoods - worth a look for those interested in urban information systems.

One of the really inspirational talks for me was 89 year old Elaine Morgan making a compelling case for questioning facts that we assume to be correct. She wants the academic world to reconsider the aquatic ape theory.

Another great Urban Info project was the Mannahatta Project presented by Eric Sanderson. They have geo referenced historical data of 17th century Manhattan to bring into focus the ecology today and "plan for the urban ecosystem of the future". Great presentation, bought the book.

Architect to watch Bjarke Ingels showed two great projects which stuck in my mind - Danish pavillion for the Shanghai expo (they are flying out the mermaid) and a local housing development that creates a little mountain in the flat landscape - note to self, pick up a copy of YES IS MORE / AN ARCHICOMIC ON ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION (ISBN 8799298805).

Itay Talgam - what kind of leader are you? - an excellent presentation using clips of conductors showing different styles of leadership. It needs the visuals to explain - one to watch on video.

ones i need to watch again are:
Loretta Napoleoni
Misha Glenny
Parag Khanna