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.

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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).

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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.

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.

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

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."

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/

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."

Great presentation by Saul Griffith at ETech this year. Two points stick. 25min 25sec in he compares his "low estimate" of his actual energy usage and it turns out to be much higher than all other footprints currently being used on the internet. The slide after then makes the point beautifully by suggesting the next Nobel prize for economics should be awared to the person able to accurately calculate our energy usage... The second point was 36min 40sec in. The list of what we as individuals can do was brilliant "these are all things we want to do anyway" - spot on. So why don't we do it.

I admire his goals for 2010 and really hope he obtains them.

Chris posted a link to the story of stuff 20 min video last week. I am re-blogging for two reasons. First it is a really well put together video and a great information piece covering many of the issues I hear the Drivers of Change researchers talking about in a CONNECTED way. Second, the story of stuff website is an excellent example of making it really easy for other people to use your work such as the section on *host a screening* or the provision of embeddable video like this:

Voting closed on the poptech voter after 4500 votes cast...

Chris was at Poptech 2007 last week. Great blog coverage at blogginglive and a nice post by Ethan Zuckerman. Chris used the DoC voting app to canvass opinion on current drivers. The top votes (today) with 85 are Peak Oil and Climate Change with US Fascism taking 59...

The Aurora is huge, a giant skyscraper fallen on its side floating in the sea. It reminded me of one of the concepts developed at a Hotel of the Future event we held in Lausanne a few years ago. I must find out what the staff to guest ratio is but there are staff everywhere (and the majority are Indian)

Amusing opening keynote by Michael Portillo. *A game of two halves* refers to his life before and after his *most humiliating moment* of losing his seat in 1997.I like his basic theme that most people will catastrophically fail at some point yet life still continues and often life is richer as a result (*never trust anyone who has always been successful*!!) Great anecdotes about his Dad and his uncles fighting against each other in the Spanish civil war leading to his father becoming a refugee in England and his time spent with Margerat Thatcher - especially the moment he saw in her eyes that she realised she made a mistake on the day she resigned (he suggested that had she spoken to all the ministers personally the would have supported her - the fact that she didn't was her *arogant* mistake

Left Southampton and awoke to sunrise coming in through window - N49.4299 W2.4994 - Saint Peter Port, Guernsey in the distance - an unexpected observation: even in the flat sees this huge ship still rocks.

Excellent keynote by Tim Collins (Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict) if sometimes a little frightening when you realise what he has done in his career to date (i found myself wanting to ask him what it was really like to go into an SAS mission in Sierra Leone... it looked so far removed from this Irish guy in a suit telling jokes on stage)
I liked his description of the 6 characteristics defined by Templar (responsible for British acitivity in Malaysia in the 1950's) that he used when he returned to lead the Royal Irish Regiment after his time in the SAS.
1. prioritise - you have to understand what it is that you are expected to deliver - nice example of Templar camping outside Churchills office until he was told what to do...
2. organisation - what are the roles required to achieve the mission
3. people - excellent descritpion of how the German commander Von Hammerschmidt (sp?) placed his staff in terms of whether they were bright or stupid and lazy or industrious. The bright and lazy are ideal candidates for the leadership (have the ideas but are too lazy to implement it so they are good at delegating), the stupid and lazy are the ideal workers (they just want to be told what to do so that they can then eat and sleep) and the bright and industrious are good as staff sergeants (the middle management who are capable of translating the message between top and bottom and are hardworking enough to go and speak to everyone and make it happen). You have to be careful of the stupid and industrious since they can often cause havoc in any organisation...
4. spirit
5. instructions on daily basis - keep feeding back on progress towards priority
6. let them get on with it.

John Perry, SCALA - how to achieve an energy efficient supply chain
20-25% of delivery vehicles on the roads are run empty (even given the increase in back haul traffic)
KM travelled per pallet - exponential curve showing upto 13km for primary / secondary BUT upto 50km for tertiary (ie the local delivery) the implications here are that local delivery may not be as efficient in terms of number of miles driven (hence increased carbon footprint) according to current practice

We ran two workshops both went well - hoping to post data (along with all research to date) on an external site soon.

In relation to Collins talk, overheard and useful: outcome - the objective that we desire - strategy is the plan for what you will do (in your control) to achieve the outcome.

Amongst others, also met Jonathon Clark (marketing for friends reunited), Sally Uren (Forum for the Future), Chris Arnold (DMA), David Magliano (headed up Londons pitch for the 2012 Olympics), Rob Smith (Go mad thinking), Mark Allat (Conservative way forward), Justin Suter and Matt Hobbs (IBM global consulting) and Richard Wilding (Cranfield)

Andrew Walkingshaw - *sketching* data by creating simple query interfaces based on structured data repositories. Had similarities to the Bricks framework. Generated quite a discussion around how and who should be marking up the content. I liked one of Tim O'Reilly's comments *you need to create the context for a set of interactions* and then gave an example of not just asking parents to contribute to a wiki about baseball games, rather provide them with a system that has all the structure of the little league games, info on who is playing when etc, and then *allow* the parents to upload information such as commentary, photos, organisational data etc *what ever they choose*. Just sitting and listening to all the real examples being cited had my head racing with ideas that i would love to implement on the internal Arup investment and technical news websites.

Josh Koarer and Jon Durant - Incorporating science into social networks. An interesting conversation around citizen science and Josh's idea of subscribing to feeds made by / on behalf of animals at your local zoo (I would definately campaign for that - how cool would it be to get rss or twitters from your favourite bear / penguin / lion...) would probably encourage me to return to the zoo more aswell. Really liked Jon's theme around making the context of science accessible in the built environment. He gave the example of the physical / virtual signposts along the gene-mile in Cambridge. I mentioned the BBC's coast work and urban tapestries project.

Henry Gee - what is sci fi for? Last and really interesting session. Henry works at Nature and amongst other things is responsible for the future article on the back page - he has been soliciting one page sci fi stories from the scientific community and has been getting them at the rate of one a day - wow. It is not about visions of the future, rather a reflection on our current pre-occupations. His biggest plea was for people to write stories not scenarios...

Other notables / things to look up:
Josh Knauer of MAYA: making sensor nodes for home energy monitoring and on sale at home depot
Sara Winge at O'Reilly (conceived with Tim the FOO camps) loved the DoC cards - copies are in the post!
Ditto with Frank Rijsberman at google.org - amongst other things he was very interested in our 2007 cardsets around water, climate change and the 2008 poverty set.
Simon Quellen Field *light tube man* has a cool science toys website
scifoo prototypes on JoVE
Arnab Chatterjee (Shell Amsterdam) interesting work on innovation and gamechanger
Convergence discussion with Denise Caruso and Kim Stanley Robinson. In biotech (DC) how do you assess the risks and how do you *project* 21st century regulation. Risk analysis not cost analysis - see Denise book *intervention* for stories on transgenic food and what the FEA did. Also (KSR) the morph from capitalism to socialism may be occuring due to an increased convergence around economic, social and environmental analysis (see Joseph Schumpeters creative destruction).
Nature scifoo
flickr scifoo
technorati posts and photos
http://www.connotea.org/tag/scifoo
google blog search
and a scifoo facebook group

All in all a fantastic event - many thanks to Tim O'Reilly and the team for the invite.

154 sessions to choose from - hmmm, how do i do that...

Visual Garage - We'll Fix Your Graphs and Visuals with Felice Frankel. Interesting session. Managed to present and get feedback on the Bop visualisations and had some great (if severe) comments. But that is what was great - an open honest critique of what i presented since the room genuinely wanted to help people do stuff better. Wish there was something like her Image and Meaning workshops in the London area. Had a few conversations post session with Tamara Munzner, an infovis expert at Uni British Columbia in Vancouver. She also recommended looking at prefuse

Listening to the World: Voices from the Blue Deep - Chris Clark - great presentation on the convergence of comp sci, maths and nature. He is using the sensors measuring energy in the mid pacific between Hawaii and USA. The military uses this for obvious tracking purposes. Chris has been given access to the data to track *biological objects* which has led to an understanding that type n whales communicate over hundreds of miles. The males *sing* to attract mates. The vis of the data was pretty cool it showed different energy bands (Hz) on the y axis and time on the x. At the top was lots of shipping data and during a few months in the latter half of the year was a very distinct band of *singing*. The speeded up (25x) audio sounded pretty cool. Group also discussed data logging bird activity over space and time and issues around the NSF funded NEON air quality monitoring project in 11 locations across the US (to granular to generate accurate results...?)

Computable Data/Mathematics - next was a demo by Mathmatica guru Theodore Gray, some really nice demos showing very simple and visual programming, worth a browse through

100 dollar laptop demo - Ted Kaehler - pretty nifty little machine and looks great. Had some excellent software written in smalltalk to encourage a very visual, object oriented approach to programming - again website worth a browse.

Freebase Demo - Danny Hillis - convergence of data: we do not necessarily know how our data will be used. Freebase is a framework and application for hosting and sharing data, and a tool for presenting data across mulitple datasets from one source.

Micro-UAVs - Chris Anderson - making sub 1000 USD autonomous aircraft using model planes and phone / camera / gps units. amazingly cool and done with his 9 year old son... see his posting at the long tail blog (yes he did write the book)

Finally was a silent observer during the howtoons sessions - not sure if this was the jet lag setting in or because my brain could not fire as quick as everyone else in the room - amazing, buy the book when it is out in November and i just hope the howtoons party bags make it onto the internet.