Surveillance and sousveillance

Review by furtherfield of The 4th Radiator festival. Going Underground – Surveillance and Sousveillance… good overview of projects relating to privacy and surveillance.

Siftables, the toy blocks that think

Maker Faire Newcastle, 14-15 March

Maker Faire in Newcastle is on this weekend… the website isn’t exactly overflowing with information, but it looks like most of the stuff is happening about 200 yards from the Railway Station (come out of the station, turn left, look for the “Life” centre).

I think most of the hacker exhibits will be in a big white marquee.  I just spotted this photo of the workshop schedule on twitter.

The plan is to go down on Sunday, on the 10.30am train from Waverley.

Maker Faire, Newcastle, 14-15 March 2009

This could be good — a chance for an Atelier day-trip at the very least.

The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest – a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation.

More details on MAKE blog.

ITP Winter Show 2008

The winter show by masters student’s on NYU’s long-running Interactive Telecommunications Programme is currently happening in New York City.

ITP is a two-year graduate program [masters course] located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible.

It’s a massive course so there’s information on-line about a lot of projects, but you’ll probably start to see reports and videos of stuff emerging on blogs like MAKE and We Make Money Not Art.

See also: Interview with Tom Igoe, who’s head of Physical Computing there.

The Language of Things

There’s a review in December’s ICON of “The Language of Things” by Deyan Sudjic, who apart from being a writer and critic is also director of the Design Museum in London.

Unlike Barthes or Baudrillard or even Berger, who was distilling Marx and Walter Benjamin, Sudjic has no theoretical agenda. What he uses to navigate design, interestingly, is his own moral compass. He’s a critic trying to reconcile his fascination with the language of designed objects and his disapproval of the hold they have over us.

The review references a number of other important works, and touches on the coverage of Design-Art.

Where’s my Robot?

One for Gavin mainly, but an interesting bit of TV from many perspectives — BBC’s Horizon programme “Where’s my Robot?”, on the current state-of-the-art in Robotics.  (iPlayer stream expires Tuesday 23rd December.)

Given that “useful” robots have been one of the on-going promises of technological progress for so long, it’s useful to reflect on what that might mean.

Are we simply expecting an evolutionary step in labour-saving devices, as with washing machines and dish-washers?  The results of research into creating Artificial Intelligence continue to be fragile and unimpressive.  Meanwhile, the most commercially successful robot of all time is the (much-hacked) Roomba, a small autonomous vacuum cleaner.

Or perhaps the future of robots is to be companions or “entertainment”…?

The idea of the Robot has been with us since the 1920’s and — especially in Japan — still seems to have currency today.  But does it still represent a vision of the future, or is it now perhaps a nostalgic, retro idea of what might have been?

Hard-Wired Devices

The work of Roger Ibars is relevant to the dissertations of a few in this group, and is probably of interest to everyone.  The interview with him in PingMag provides a good introduction.

Roger appreciates the aesthetics of classic electronics from the two “cultures” of domestic appliances like alarm clocks, and from gaming such as classic joysticks.  His series of “hard-wired devices” brings these two worlds together in playful and intriguing ways.  He also recognises that he has an emotional attachment to these classic objects, and that others have it too. This is partly who/what he’s designing for.

…old electronic devices are easy to hack and modify – but not just because they are old. I generally use high quality electronic devices. Objects that are well-designed, with great materials, quality plastics and long lasting electronics. Poorly-designed objects tend to disappear over time but conversely, great designs can still be found in electronics second-hand markets everywhere. Emotional attachment to objects is of course another driving force – I feel I have to rescue all this material culture before it’s too late.

As a hacker and interaction designer, he also plays with and explores the notion of interaction itself.

I wanted to find examples of real people being emotionally attached to objects that behave mechanically. In Japanese culture, I found what I was looking for. For example, the Japanese tradition of Karakuri dolls is very interesting to explain and inspire this connection of mechanical culture and things that behave by themselves. My collection of self-made objects was looking at this landscape of objects that remove the user from the interaction and start to “use themselves”.

Arduino Workshop #1

We had the first in a series of Arduino workshops yesterday.  It was good.

The next one will focus on looking at a range of switches and sensors.

Digital by Design – Troika

Back cover showing contents from Troika’s new book Digital by Design.  Apart from the “usual suspects” of interaction design, also includes a range of artists working with technology, including Brian “Modified Toy Orchestra” Duffy and a particular favourite of mine, Peter Vogel.

This is in my office and you’re welcome to borrow it so long as you wear white cotton gloves and leave one of your kidneys as a deposit. ;-)