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]

a really great site that combines information visualization with journalism. check out this page to help you decide which airline you want to fly.....http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/reduce-your-chances-of-dying-in-a-plane-crash/

he made a good presentation at TEDGlobal 2010

In this thoughtful RSA presentation professor Jeremy Rifkin talks about what ultimately motivates human beings from the moment they are born. Contrary to previous visions of society and humanity, he dispels the view that newborns are first and foremost motivated by utilitarian desires, the will to survive and the need to extinguish their libido. He suggests that our first drive as humans is the drive to belong and that we are naturally softwired towards empathetic behaviour to feel another's plight because of mirror neurons in our brains. We are not softwired for aggression and materialism rather we are softwired for attachment, companionship and sociability. When talking about an empathetic civilization we are not talking about Utopia or heaveb where there is no such thing as suffering; because in order to feel empathy one needs to experience frailties, pain and weaknesses.

Rifkin also makes it clear that if we are not able to extend our empathy beyond the human species, we have no future on the planet. He also asks the audience to consider how empathy has changed across history and how it has affected consciousness. And as a species can we shift our consciousness?

View it here

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].

be careful if you are flying to the UK to inspect the banknotes you are given. only notes with the economist Adam Smith's likeness are legal tender now. Banknotes with the composer Edward Eiger no longer are required to be accepted in shops.
this is the old bank note:
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/47434000/jpg/_47434305_elgar.jpg

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44416

we all knew what was to come....and id does not make it any easier to see.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/assignment-35/

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.'