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
Attending Conferences Redux http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=68216304788 - notes for my main themes of Etech:
In general:
Not as techie as I thought it would be, heavy focus on DoC and the need to save the world.
Felt like a large design contingent.
Quiet. This was my first but venue seemed much bigger than the numbers there...
Favourite things i heard:
"business as a road trip - need to keep an eye on gas tank - but trip is not a tour of petrol stations" Tim O'Reilly
"Thank you for making me relevant to my son" Velodyne guy after demonstrating the Lidar system
Ben Cervany on "operating systems for the built environment" gave me a new language to explain Sensei
Favourite things i saw:
Siftables - when can i buy these for my kids
Aaron Koblin - the Lidar / Radiohead work was amazing - tech plus open data, geek heaven
Senseable City - temporal signature of space geotagged photos from flickr showing locations where americans visit vs where italians visit in italy
What i will be doing differently:
Contacting the guys at AMEE to stream BMS data
Asking people i met to contribute to the Convergence research
Proposing "games" we could create to develop the next phase of drivers of change.