10:37, Friday 21 Apr., 2006 Link

Talks: This summer, it looks like I'll be revisiting some themes from recent and not-so-recent presentations. The slides for these are online:

• Sci-Fi I Like (Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths College, February 2006).
• Assumptions, Attention and Affordances, a variation of a Mind Hacks and user interfaces talk I do periodically (BBC Digital Futures, February 2006).
• The 3 Steps: The History of Physics and the Future of Computing (reboot7, June 2005).
• Glancing: I'm OK, You're OK, an old presentation but the more abstract ideas towards the end are relevant again in the context of physical computing (ETech, February 2004).

There are two talks lined up right now. The first is a session at reboot8 in June, called Making Senses. Here's the intro:

The grand project of cataloguing the world (whether with barcodes or URLs) is - though only just begun - well under way. The next challenge is the one we faced when we first encountered a confusing, massive world, millions of years ago.

We no longer navigate but experience. Coming to the fore are Martin Rantzer's "supersenses", new senses letting us see through this new ocean. Instead of taking a resource-centred approach, attaching data to objects, let's mine our history of biological senses for clues on how to take a human, experiential approach. We'll take as our springboard not the five Aristotelian senses, but the entire gamut: active and passive; surface, proprioceptive and far-reaching; peripheral and focal; personal, environment and social. And we'll look at the sensory surface we'll need when items in our home represent messages from loved ones and have environmental histories attached, or when we're choosing whether to take life-changing advice from someone we've never met in some online community. How do we design for this; what technology should we build?

The second talk is for Blink's "We Love Technology" in July, for artists and folks in that sector. The theme of the day is our emotional engagement with emerging technology and its development (that engagement goes both ways--we both influence and are influenced). It's a provocative topic, and while I have a number of ideas I want to bring up, I haven't pinned myself down to a title yet. Very much looking forward to it though.