New Economic Imaginaries
Amongst the works that have emerged through the ‘after money’ related projects which include the AHRC Design in Action, ESRC After Money, EPSRC OxChain and EPSRC PETRAS, a series of products and platforms have provoked a line of thought to consider the extent to which interaction with these prototypes are able to impact upon the […]
Apocalyptic Design in the Capitalocene: Every-day Geopolitics and Blockchain
OxChain conference paper at Postcards from the Anthropocene June 22-24, Edinburgh Chris Speed & Kate Symons This post is an edited version of a conference paper given at Postcards from the Anthropocene conference. In Design Informatics we have a series of projects that specifically deal with international development agencies. In particular, we have worked closely […]
Plastic Dinosaurs
Short 7 minute talk / intervention into the Talbot Rice Gallery / Exponential event on the 24th of April 2017 that was framed as: “Join an event that accelerates from 10 years to beyond 100 million in just 2 hours, moving from speculative talks to experimental poetic and musical performances. Taking the lead from the […]
Things2Things and the KASH Cup
As the term the Internet of Things reached peak hype according to Gartner in the summer of 2016, a collaborative project with Elisa Giaccardi (TU Delft), Ron Wakkary (TUE) and the Design United collective offered a chance to pause for a moment before the term tumbles into the trough of disillusionment. Working across the three […]
ArtCasting: Where does it take you?
In 1991, during my undergraduate Fine Art degree at Brighton Polytechnic I was part of a small three-person show entitled ‘Common Ground’. Along with Esther Lane, Ed Harper we set up a small show in the foyer of the Grand Parade site for what I recall was a chance to show off works during the […]
Bodystorming the BlockChain
Context In April Design Informatics was invited to develop a Lab of Labs for Martyn de Waals Design And The City programme in Amsterdam. Taking place over 48 hours, the workshops were intended to expose ‘contemporary design methodologies, and their relationship with living labs and smart cities’. The team (Larissa Pschetz, Dave Murray-Rust, Hadi Mehrpouya […]
Practising the Block Chain
For the past year I have been working with Debbie Maxwell (now York Uni) and Dug Campbell (Bitcoin Scotland) to make the blockchain accessible to designers to allow them to ideate through its possibilities. Although hyped, the blockchain represents (for me at least) a way of thinking that challenges some of the control and linearity […]
ThingTank
Way back in September 2013, I joined a week long ideas retreat in Moscow to develop solutions toward the design of new innovation platforms. Funded through the MIT-Skoltech initiative, part of the Skoltech, the week seemed to respond to the following question: “How can an institution or government seed, grow, and maximize technological innovation and […]
Ghost Cinema App: Temporal Ubiquity and the Condition of Being in Everytime
Last year Chris Barker and I worked on the Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface and Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge project. The AHRC-funded research project was conducted by the Universities of Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh in partnership with English Heritage (EH). The project aimed to complement The Survey of London (EH) work on the parish of […]
PuBliC: Future Everything one day living labs (x2)
During the Future Everything festival February 2015 Design Informatics were invited to develop and deliver a 48 hour workshop for the festivals Future Lab strand. Our proposal entitled PuBliC originally intended to offer a platforms across which Pedestrians, Bikes and Cars (or other road transport) could cooperate toward better travel experiences. In the end we […]
Toilet matters
A short blog post on the ongoing implications for a family home as it becomes reconstituted through the addition of data that is streamed from smart objects. Living in an environment that is equipped with an Internet of Things involves the placement of multiple sensors that record change in conditions, in order to construct a […]
“Is Your Marmite Watching You?”
Design Informatics took part in this year’s Edinburgh Fringe with the Beltane Public Engagement Network. It showed a new and improved version of Take Me I’m Yours which we have previosuly shown at the Expanded Narative Symposium and at Ubicomp. Is Your Marmite Watching You? explored what it might be like when all of the […]
Producing Data: Practices, Materialities, Values
An interdisciplinary symposium 3rd – 4th September 2014, University of Edinburgh Hosted by: Design Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh Organisers: Chris Speed, Gian Marco Campagnolo, Siobhan Magee and New Media Scotland The term ‘data’ is ubiquitous across our homes and workplaces, academic and mainstream media, political discourses and ethical disputes. Sometimes its […]
The Haggle-O-Tron: Design intervention in secondhand retail
The Haggle-O-Tron: Design intervention in secondhand retail adapted from the DIS workshop by Chris Speed, Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh Mark Hartswood, School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Eric Laurier, School of Geosciences University of Edinburgh Siobhan Magee, Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh Martin de Jode, CASA University College London. Andrew Hudson-Smith, CASA University College […]
CoGet
So a brief summary and documentation of the CoGet workshop at Future Everything in March 2014. Across the connected city small things play a large part in sustaining the flow between people and places. Cups of tea, bottles of water, books, four way plug adaptors, bicycles, computers and many more objects are the ‘things’ that […]
CoGet @ Future Everything
We are experimenting with our social logistics software CoGet at Future Everything in March: http://futureeverything.org/events/coget-things-move-people-around/ Based upon the research from the Sixth Sense Transport project that combined social networking with locative media to support collaborative travel practices, CoGet makes a further leap toward a future in which objects borrow our daily routines to move themselves […]
Take Me I’m Yours: Beyond the Supermarket
Beyond the Supermarket is a show that features supermarket goods as actors. Using the publicly available smart phone app Take Me I’m Yours, a human actor interacts on stage with local products that are usually found in the cupboards and fridges of our kitchens. Beyond the Supermarket was first performed at the Expanded Narrative symposium […]
Co-Things
Way back at the end of July, Jen and I came together to present some of the data portraits that she’d collected from the Comob Net database of groups using the iPhone app. The data portraits were gathered during her residencies at ISIS arts and Pervasive Media Studio. The portraits soon became enduring images of peoples connection to […]
Shaping Things
Transposition and Mutation During the Edinburgh International Festival, August 2013, we ran two interlinked events to stimulate conversation and practice about the use of 3D printers and the role of digital and social systems. Part 1 consisted of a game of 3D Chinese Whispers that took place over 12 days between students of an Edinburgh […]
Things move people around
So this is interesting for Internet of Things experiences. Objects telling us to where they want to go… Part of the Tourism Work Package led by Janet Dickinson and Julia Hibbert from Bournemouth University has involved working with visitors to the Tom’s Field campsite in Purbeck. The visitors have been using the Sixth Sense Tourism app for iPhones […]
MapLocal Community Mapping
Last year and into this year I was involved in an AHRC Connected Communities project led by Phil Jones with Colin Lorne and Antonia Layard (University of Birmingham) in which we designed an Android app that allowed residents of communities to gather information about their neighbourhoods. The app was developed by Chris Blunt (Plymouth Software) […]
Patch-Scape; pads, pods, phones and Spatial data
Digital Landscape Architecture Workshop, June 2013 This is a chance to show off some of the fascinating work that Chris Barker and Pierre Forissier developed for the DLA workshop in Bernberg in June. The workshop developed an interesting Patchscape that took live data from a bespoke iOS app, Comob Net and used Processing to manifest […]
Time of the Clock and Time of the Encounter
This AHRC funded project investigated the difference between the time of the clock and the lived time of experience. We live in a world dominated by the time of the clock, yet many aspects of life have a different rhythm and temporality. The time of community, especially, is very often more complex and differentiated that standardised […]
Temporal Tactics for Mr. Seel’s Garden
Time to blog on The Memories of Mr. Seel’s Garden AHRC Connected Communities project… Many of the projects that I get involved in highlight the stress that network media is placing upon a processional model of time in which the present day is somehow at the edge of time, and all that has gone before […]