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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]