This fall continues to be batshit busy, and as usual I’m posting about events… Here’s a few that are coming up – if you’re in Toronto you should definitely check them out!

Ignite! Toronto – Peter Horvath and I started the Toronto chapter in August, and edition #2 is coming up again on November 25 at the Drake. If you missed the first one, videos and content are here. We’re hoping for another speaker to be featured, as Mark Argo was, on O’Reilly TV. Also, follow us on Twitter, and RSVP here!

MEIC5 is coming up on November 26 – we’re still firming up the schedule but check back to the RSVP for updates!

LIFT@Home – Tom, Mark, Fran, Milena and I are thrilled to be co-chairing the travelling edition of our favourite conference. Date: November 17, 6-9:30pm, Cdn Corps Hall. Topic: DemoCamp 2019. More deets and tix here.

And for a more current version of DemoCamp, #24 will be held on December 3, at the Rogers Theatre. Tix are here.

I’ll also be speaking at a few places as well, w00t!

UCLA: Mobile Media Symposium – Friday November 13
Geospatial Media, with Julian Bleecker, Mark Hansen and Ben Hooker.

Canadian Marketing Association: Experiential Marketing – Tuesday December 1
Mobile Futures, With Tom Purves and David Elchoness

Don Tapscott – Net Generation

Kids of the Baby Boom are bathed in bits. Talks a bit about Growing Up Digital, etc.

In the late 90’s he had an interview w Pamela Wallin – 60minutes of internet surfing on TV. Don’t kid wasn’t so thrilled – ‘Dad’s going on TV to use the internet for an hour? Why would anyone want to do that? Stupidest show ever. I’m so embarrassed, all my friends are going to see this.”

Interview with his son later – “Dad, you adults are obsessed with technology. It’s sort of like a TV show where you check out the refrigerator ‘technology’. Oh look, Dad found some content – it’s called meatloaf.” Kids are the authority on new technology. (heh)

Facebook group started for Wikinomics over 24hrs – growth of community and expectations demonstrative of self- organization. Build platforms to enable collaboration and creativity.

Joe O’Shea – Rhodes Scholar doing his Masters ot Oxford, President of the Student Council ot FSU, sat on 18 ctes + chaired 6, setup a health clinic in the 9th Ward on NOLA after Katrina, developed a Global Peace Exchange with 14 countries + a summit, etc. Doesn’t read books.

How you spend your time between the ages of 8-18 influences and affects your synaptic pathways and behaviours for the rest of your life. How does this portend what Millenials will be doing in 10yrs?

Bruce Nussbaum +
Talk about the good, bad and ugly of open innovation (buzz word that ppl have created when they are full of shit.)

We’re all ppl at the end of the day, and we can’t do things as we’ve always done. Open means opening the spirit. At NEstle, 37% of company works in R&D – 50M ppl in the world who are equally smart. Looking outside can be way more beneficial.

Despite the buzzword, they still represent change, and a committed to change.

BN: What kinds of problems are best solved via open innovation?

Example: Need to create an ice cream that maintains texture and taste but is not frozen until delivered to the consumer/retailer. (saves on costs, refrigeration, etc). Problem contextualized and put out to an integrated network of other business and academia – leveraging the network of expertise.

[battery time prohibitive for further blogging of this session, more soon!]

i’m in Providence, RI today and tomorrow at BIF5, and will be liveblogging as i can.

Michael Samuelson
‘he who is not busy being born must be busy dying’ – bob dylan

the great wisdom of BIF5 comes from the gestalt.
michael opens with a discussion of a male friend who had breast cancer resulting in a double mastectomy. he did a self-exam, found a lump. 2 doctors examined him, said ‘don’t worry, it’s probably just a cyst’

he followed up and had surgery to have it removed. turned out to be a 3rd grade tumour, required a radical mastectomy. (also went on tomoxofin as part of treatment – shared menopause with his wife – hilarious bonding experience – she believes every man should go on tomoxofin for at least 6 months)

men die more from embarassment than from anything else.
resulting in an insurance company partnering with him to lead an institute in cancer prevention.

his persistence in not settling with the status quo, and not ignoring the constant comments not to worry, and of being empowered by the ‘well, what do you want to do?’ response from medical professionals opened his mind to how the medical system is broken.

as an innovator you are deeply indebted to the joseph campbell’s of the world – you are on a journey, and there are shapeshifters everywhere, guardians who will prevent you from doing what you want. you need mentors to help you.
and don’t listen to anyone who tells you to be realistic, practical.

impossibility deals with physics, improbability deals with spirit. live a life of healthy uncertainty. gather smart people around you.

Paola Antonelli
Anger is a very powerful force. The truth is often dramatized.

The interview for MOMA (with Philip Johnson) started with the provocation “Design is dead.” That statement forced her to respond as to why she disagreed. The importance of a hook, of something that forces you to articulate your anger, your passion, your beliefs, was a lesson not forgotten.

Designing “design” shows for MOMA was challenging as most of the MOMA audience is taking their prescription of matisse and picasso.

there has been (changing now) a lack of critical stature for design in the US (would include Canada as well). we need to become better design storytellers. for the ‘design + the elastic mind’ show, she hired an illustrator to create small
vignettes that communicate the narrative of process, materials, idea, etc.

designers are moving towards storytelling as a means to illustrate the implications of a new idea [scenarios, etc...]. also speaks towards empathy. design transforms revolutions into objects.
“design and the elastic mind’ was successful because of the narrative.

bringing design to business, to innovation, etc… design for debate (from RCA) – design props to force ppl to reassess expectations, etc.

curating is sifting [what is your filter? where does your pattern recognition come into play? what story are you trying to tell?] also the curator is a hunter-gatherer [magpie].

Ethan Zuckerman

starts off talking about iphone transformed into an instrument via an app call the okarina. the network option, which allows you to see who else around the world is also playing.

do technologies bring us closer together or create a false sense of connectedness via globalization.

upon graduation from college with a lucrative philosphy, he went to ghana (accra) as an ethnomusicologist. idea of what his life was going to look like shattered when he was landing and the city of 3m ppl had NO electric light. hardest thing wasn’t apartment, etc – but rather that no one would talk to him and tell him what their lives were like.

that changed when he met his landlord (educated in the USSR, defected to midwest USA before returning to Accra) – who tutored him in social customs (ie – never get angry – always laugh to diffuse). patrick (the landlord) was the cultural bridge that enables you to embrace your xenophilia and ask questions [interesting phrasing].

other examples include a soweto music producer and paul simon’s graceland (boyoyo boys of soweto). what does it take now? with copious amounts of digital infrastructure ad information we are still incredibly bad at understanding how/what/why people behave.

Indie Chinese media group volunteers to translate all global media into Mandarin to understand how the rest of the world preceives them (includes Economist, NYT, also MIT Open Course Ware [WIN!])

Global Voice bloggers blog for the common project [values, understanding, etc] for purposes of solidarity as well as from a desire to tell stories, to communicate the realities from their POV.

Joey Ito (VC who is also obsessed w WoW) discusses the behaviour in his guild. Common context of guild enabled offworld problem solving and mentorship. How does that happen in a context such as Global Voices – shared cultural purpose and collaboration? And finally, does the iPhone Okarina enable or disable collaboration? Maybe it’s time to do a duet.

Jay Rogers
The doubt and disbelief that a car company cannot be reinvented are pervasive. Improbability is something to seek out – you should try to break it apart.

10yrs ago – US Marines, dropped into a war zone, made friends w Safa, a local Shiite. Jay defused bombs (!!!). One day, Safa was en rte to work w the British/US basecamp w 3 colleagues, they were stopped by thugs who shot his 3 friends in the face, killing them, and threatened to kill him and his family if he continued working with the army. he made a choice to try to improve his, and continued to go to work everyday.

transportation uses 71%of all imported oil. 60% goes to cars. he lost ppl to a war on oil that preserves that import relationship.

flip to his grandfather – former owner of Indian motorcycles. launched newsletters during WW2, crowdsourcing innovations. launched passion and commitment to cars, loves them. but going into the 21stC without the highest consumption in the development world is shameful
cars haven’t been adopted by the bobby flay-martha stewart- slow food movement – the axiom of you can do it – we can help.

applied war experience and strategy (sniping, military leadership, etc) to car industry.

Local motors – starting with the community – designing cool cars that ppl are deeply committed to loving and using.
Design-based innovation competitions – over 44K designs on the website. [BESPOKE AUTO!!!]

Can Creative Commons be applied to things in manufacturing and tangible value. Yes! All inhouse tools are open source. Big supporter and activist of open innovation.

If you want to connect with someone you need to build an experience that they will love and become angry for, that they will respond and defend. They will own the ideology and the brand, and share it for you. Keep you engaged with something that grounds you throughout your daily life.

If you want to be accurate and real you need to be on the street, you need to be local, speak the cultural language and . Micro-factories challenges the culture of centralized manufacturing [invites crowd to discuss dealing w economies of scale at break].

Local Cars = 5x faster + 100X Less Capital.

Community delivers great design meant to be enjoyed by the community. Silicon Valley is not the only place where disruptive innovation.
[This guy is AWESOME]

I came across 3 really awesome articles in the past few days, all somewhat inter-related and crossquotidian POVs of cities and urban life and experience and the future, both the near and paleo kind.

Why do I blog this? The urban design interface is perforated by the past and future, by contemporary idealisms, by ambience and aggregation, by ecology and technology and humanity and data. The 3 articles illustrate new ways of seeing, doing, breathing and living.

The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future, Matt Jones, from io9

Excerpts:

Lord Rogers stated that “our cities are increasingly linked and learning” – this seemed to me a recapitulation of Archigram’s strategies, playing out not through giant walking cities but smaller, bottom-up technological interventions. The infrastructures we assemble and carry with us through the city – mobile phones, wireless nodes, computing power, sensor platforms are changing how we interact with it and how it interacts with other places on the planet. After all it was Archigram who said “people are walking architecture.”

We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the “maximum cities” of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal – people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.

Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The “shrinking cities” project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.

The Street as Platform, Dan Hill, City of Sound
Excerpts:

Three kids are playing an online game on their mobile phones, in which the physical street pattern around them is overlaid with renderings of the 19th century city. They scuttle down an alleyway behind a furniture showroom as the virtual presence of another player, actually situated in a town forty miles away and reincarnated as a Sherlock Holmes-ian detective, indicated on their map by an icon of a deerstalker and gently puffing pipe, stalks past the overlaid imagined space. The three play a trio of master criminals, intent on unleashing a poisonous miasma upon the unsuspecting and unreal caricatures generated by the game.

Instead, this is all everyday technology – embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the street, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. Each element of data causes waves of responses in other connected databases, sometimes interacting with each other physically through proximity, other times through semantic connections across complex databases, sometimes in real-time, sometimes causing ripples months later. Some data is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, some is open, collaborative and public.

Yet how much of this activity is obviously perceptible on our streets when viewed through conventional means? The snapshot above, without the explanatory narrative of the systems being touched by these activities, would just like a freeze-frame of a few people and vehicles set against a backdrop of buildings. A photograph or drawing would show only a handful of people, a few vehicles and some buildings. Traditional urban planning might note patterns of flocking or grouping, when tracking the flow of people through a space, yet would they make a causal observation based on the presence of the open wifi that created a ‘flock’?

The sketch above deliberately traverses quite a few modes of activity – from private to public; individual to civic; commercial to recreational; residential to vocational. And in all instances systems are in flux, in development, or require implementing, testing and shaping.

In many of these instances there are decisions to be made about openness, responsibility, privacy, security, interaction, experience. Some of these will be directly under the aegis of government, some through public-private partnerships, some though architects of the built environment, some through architects of this informational environment, some through commercial enterprises, some through NGOs, some through municipal institutions, some through education, some through individuals or community groups, and so on. There are decisions to be made about raw infrastructure – the equivalent of transport networks and power supply.

A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City, by David Byrne, WSJ

Excerpts:

There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I’d take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney’s with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it’s not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city’s qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place’s cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.

Here are some things that make a city livable for me:

Chaos and danger
To some, security means rigid order and strict rules. I do believe we do need some laws and rules to guide and reign us in a bit, and I don’t just mean traffic lights and pooper scooper mandates. But there’s a certain attractiveness to New Orleans, Mexico City or Naples—where you get the sense that though some order exists, it’s an order of a fluid and flexible nature. Sometimes too flexible, but a little bit of that sense of excitement and possibility is something I’d wish for in a city. A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy.

Mixed use
This is a Jane Jacobs phrase. A perfect city is where different things are going on, relatively close to each other, at different times of the day. A city isn’t a strip of hotels and restaurants on a glorious beach; it’s a place where there are restaurants and hotels, but also little stores, fashion boutiques, schools, houses, offices, temples and banks. The healthy neighborhood doesn’t empty out at 6 p.m., as most of downtown L.A. does. In my perfect city there would always be something going on nearby.

The MEIC is super stoked to be hosting the Inaugural Mobile Categories for the Canadian New Media Awards! If your company, or you know of a company, that is interested in submitting a nomination – the application forms (for all categories!) are here.

There are 3 new categories for Mobile this year:

Best in Mobile Marketing
Brand, agency or campaign who has demonstrated innovation and exceptional execution in mobile marketing. Entrees will be judged according to potential to influence consumer perception or purchasing habits.

Best Mobile Application
Any application that delivers services to a mobile phone. This application demonstrates excellent functionality, innovation, audience reach and frequency, and demonstrates excellence in the use of the mobile medium.

Best Location-Based Service
Any mobile website, application or experience that obtains a geographical location to provide enhanced services and experiences. These services may include navigation and mapping (your nearest restaurant or gas station), weather services, traffic updates, mobile commerce (location based advertising) or highlight points of interest (health, work or personal).

tom and i spent a romantic (and far too short) weekend in rome in early september at the end of a family holiday in ireland. apart from being hot, dry, ancient and urban, the biggest difference between the two countries was the food. irish cuisine is pretty good, centring around seafood (zomg lobster) and various farm creatures. however, the noble potato is still prominent in many meals, as are broccoli and carrots – which seem to be brought out with every entree. meh.
rome, and italy for that matter, is a mouth asplosion. everything is good, from the streetcafe panini to the handmade pasta to gelato and coffee and wine (listed below are some of the places we ate at and recommend). everything that i could stuff in my mouth in italy felt touched by bernini. feeling slightly heady, we lamented (o woe!) on how we were going to eat when we returned back to canada. turns out, we raised the bar and tonight i made gnocchi w tomato sauce + spinach + oyster mushrooms, with a barbaresco wine and followed by a peach/blueberry pie (pasta recipe for 2 ppl). simple yet perfect.

NOMNOMNOMNOMNOM

Gnocchi – 1lb, Storebought at Festival Foods on College/Grace, but handmade by little Italian ladies. Cook in a large kettle of salted water til they float. Strain (if you don’t use right away add a wee bit of olive oil to prevent stickiness)

Sauce – 1 can San Marzano tomatoes, 2tsps chopped garlic. 1 small chopped onion, 3tbsps olive oil, 5 leaves basil, sea salt
- heat large skillet to medium heat, add onion and cook til translucent
- add garlic, cook for 2 minutes
- add tomatoes + liquid + basil + salt
- cook for 20 minutes, or until sauce becomes velvety
- remove from heat, remove basil leaves
- add to food processor or blender and puree til smooth
- strain through a medium sieve (not necessary so do so only if you don’t like seeds)
- set aside and keep warm

Oysters + Spinach
- melt 1tsp butter over medium heat til slightly brown in a medium size pan
- add wiped and torn oyster mushrooms (about 1.5c) + sea salt
- brown (don’t crowd them – make sure your pan is wide enough to accommodate all your mushrooms)
- when brown, add 3 handfuls of washed, dried spinach. stir in.
- when wilted remove from heat. set aside and keep warm

Serving
- add gnocchi to a bowl and spoon in 1/3c- 1/2c sauce per serving, or enough to coat the gnocchi generously. stir.
- serve each portion of gnocchi in their bowl
- divvy up the spinach/oyster mixture and spoon on top
- top with a bit of shaved pecorino and enjoy!

Roman Holiday
- Pizzeria di Ovi (Trestevere)
- Vecchio Roma (Jewish Ghetto)
- Caffe Sant-Eustachio (Piazza Navona)
- Trattoria da Bucatino (Testaccio)

As well, my good friend Eli Singer is producing the latest edition of Casecamp as a fundraiser for Sick Kids Hospital, with the lovely and talented Diana Kimball. The daytime event is held at the Carlu, and tickets sell for $100. The evening event will be an open event with just a sampling of what we’ve come to love about the fantastic events that Eli curates. Go! Go!

Holy Events Batman!

The next week in Toronto is going to be an exercise in schedulers staying calm and carrying on despite the amazing lineup of events that starts this Friday (and this has nothing to do with TIFF, unfortunately…) Friday is the start of the inaugural MobileInnovationWeek, the first in what is looking to be an annual event in mobile + wireless awesomeness. I’m thrilled to announce that the MEIC is a proud partner in Mobile Innovation Week, and that we’re co-chairing Mobile Business Bootcamp as well as producing MEIC4.

The events are:

I’m organizing MEIC4 (which is a free event that will lead into the FITCMobile/MMW main party at The Fifth), and happy to announce the following speakers (more to come!):

• Alec Taylor, VP Windows Mobile Business, Microsoft
• TBD, Enstream Ltd
• Dylan Pask, OCAD + MEIC Research
• Michael Lewkowitz, CEO Igniter, Ltd

As well, I have a discount code for the Mobile Business Bootcamp (an awesome lineup of over 25 speakers and 8 sessions that will cover every aspect of mobile business and startup tips) – ping me if you’re interested!

See you next week!

from core 77’s blog:

Even using “rapid” prototyping, it took French jewelry house Boucheron’s craftspeople 1,500 hours to produce Marc Newson’s fiendishly complicated Julia necklace. The fractals-based diamond and sapphire piece will debut tonight in Paris, and unsurprisingly, it will likely be “one of the most expensive necklaces Boucheron’s ever made.”

this year at sxsw09 tom and i decided to launch a little prototype qr code-based game, something we came up w o the saturday afternoon and deployed over the next 24 hours. our goals were primarily to test qr codes in a large-scale environment, and more than anything to see what would happen.

i shared an ignite presentation (heh… an adventure ;) with matt milan last week at a workshop here in toronto called situate.us – a day long session exploring the applications and design of situated computing. all in all an amazing day, and major props to matt, michael and daniel for organizing ( as well as the other participants for bringing diverse flavours of awesome).

the premise of the project was this: imagine you’re an intrepid explorer who has stumbled upon sxsw09 for the first time, and it is the technological equivalent of the galapagos islands. the media you discover are somewhat familiar, and echo that which you’ve seen before, but some are completely new species, and essentially you think ‘what the hell is this intarweb?’ and you communicate your discoveries via twitter.

the technical side was pretty lowtech – we wanted to use readily available tools due to time and $$ constraints, so twitter, a qr generator, tinyurl & fedex were the basic platforms, as well as qr readers available on smartphones. every time our explorer found something, he twittered about it and linked to the site via tinyurl. each tweet generated a qr code, which we printed out on paper and distributed across the conference.

the results? well, it sort of worked… it was a good learning experience, in that we found out that printing qr codes on glossy paper = reader FAIL. we used tinyurl, when really we should have used bit.ly for tracking purposes. also, we didn’t really talk it up, preferring to see how ppl would react to random qr codes distributed across the conference (taped on streetposts, tables, walls, etc). turns out, with no context, not very well. so it didn;t work as well as it could have, but that’s what experiments are for!

ps – the last slide w the T800 and lentils is from tom’s recent presentation on augmented reality.

last week torch partnership and sLab hosted the latest edition of the unfinished business lecture series, and we were treated to a robust and inspiring presentation by gong szeto, a new mexico-based designer. recently, gong has been designing derivatives trading platforms for financial services, and his hyperacute knowledge of these systems has inspired a unique perspective towards design, as revealing the meta layers of economics, politics, etc, and the implications around an emerging set of ethics relating towards the products, services and systems we design. As bruce nussbaum wrote last year – did innovation cause the crisis on wall st?

gong gives good reason to believe this, and more importantly, frames why. the blurb from the talk is here as is the slideshow, but be sure to check his notes on slideshare.

What implications does the current global economic crisis have for Design? For Gong Szeto the answers lie in understanding how design has evolved over the last 100 years in parallel with capitalism. We are in the midst of a global economic crisis, one whose contours are barely understood, even by today’s leading minds. This crisis reveals the very underpinnings of how our world works, and it is the story of finance (a classic tragic comedy) and its colossal role in the development of modern society.

Design, the myriad ways it is practiced and consumed, owes its very existence to the thriving of a capitalist political economy. Design cannot claim primacy in this system, but is, instead, a shadow or derivative of the priorities of supply-side and demand-side economics.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has called financial derivatives “weapons of mass destruction.”. Gong Szeto will demonstrate the powerful properties and dynamics of derivatives in financial world, and apply this framework to understanding Design’s origins and future possibilities. He will try to make the case that Design’s complex derivative nature, if better understood, can be combined with the powerful emerging attributes of massively shared social web platforms, and proactively insinuated in a (post) capitalist political economy, taking shape as “weapons of mass possibility.”

bruce sterling has an extraordinarily thoughtful piece in interactions magazine where he writes about, among many other ideas, why our current technosocial space is limited by the paradigms of previous centuries in designing our collective futures. bruce’s writing and speaking of late has resonated pretty deeply of late, it seems he simultaneously mourning, rejoicing in wonder and worriedly glancing at the state of the world. some of my favourite pieces of the article are below, but you should really go read the whole thing..

What science fiction’s user base truly desired was not possible in the 1930s. Believing their own rhetoric, science fiction users supposed that they wanted a jet-propelled, atomic futurity. Whenever offered the chance at such goods and services, they never left science fiction to go get them. They didn’t genuinely want such things-not in real life.
What the user base genuinely wanted was immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up. Science fiction movies helped; science fiction television helped. Once massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) were invented, the harsh limits of the print infrastructure were demolished. Then the user-base exploded.
No sane person reads science fiction novels for 80 hours a week. But it’s quite common for devoted players to spend that much time on Warcraft.
This should not be mistaken for “progress.” It’s not even a simple matter of obsolescence. Digital media is much more frail and contingent than print media. I rather imagine that people will be reading H.P. Lovecraft-likely the ultimate pulp-magazine science fiction writer-long after today’s clumsy, bug-ridden MMORPGs are as dead as the Univac.
What truly interests me here is the limits of the imaginable. Clearly, the pulp infrastructure limited what its artists were able to think about. They wore blinders that they could not see and therefore could not transcend.
The typewriter limited writers. Magazine word counts limited writers. Even the implicit cultural bargain between author and reader introduced constraints on what could be thought, said, and understood in public. Those mechanisms of interaction-the letter columns, the fan mail, the bookstore appearances, the conventions-they were poorly understood as interaction. They were all emergent practices rather than designed experiences.

and

We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.
These two inherently forward-looking schools of thought and action do seem blinkered somehow-not unimaginative, but unable to imagine effectively. A bigger picture, the new century’s grander narrative, its synthesis, is eluding them. Could it be because they were both born with blind spots, with unexamined assumptions hardwired in 80 years ago?
There is much thoughtful talk of innovation, of transformation, of the collaborative and the transdisciplinary. These are buzzwords, language that does not last.
What we are really experiencing now is a massive cybernetic hemorrhage in ways of knowing the world.

and finally…

Rather than thinking outside the box-which was almost always a money box, quite frankly-we surely need a better understanding of boxes. Maybe some new, more general, creative project could map the limits of the imaginable within the contemporary technosocial milieu. Plug that imagination gap.
That effort has no 20th-century description. I rather doubt that it’s ever been tried. It seems to me like a good response to events.

The Hammer Metric is measured by the strength of one’s desire to smash any designed tool (device, machine, system, etc) with a hammer in relation to particular aspects of design, functionality or use, especially as said usage relates to feelings of epic frustration or FAIL. As such, a low rating is desired, as it reflects a minimal urge for destruction based on what could be construed as user-centric antagonization on the part of the designer/maker.

there are some really great conferences coming up over the next month or so – loads of good ideas, practices and people!

LIFT 2009 – feb 25-27, 2009
this is by far the best conference i’ve ever attended (granted there haven’t been many) and this year’s program maintains it’s strength in pushing the boundaries of the conference experience with speakers such as vint cerf, matt webb, natalie jeremijenko (who spoke at ocad earlier today), anne galloway, dan hill and many many others. as well, art projects by thinktank collective kitchen budapest and retrosabotage. unfortunately, i’m not going to Lift this year, due to a mix of deadlines and other conflicts. booo! i keep hoping some magic elf will stop time for the week of Lift and deliver the required aeroplan points… i send laurent, nicolas and the rest of the lift team the warmest wishes for another soon-to-be incredible conference.

SXSWi 2009 – mar 13-18, 2009
what does one say? bbq. parties. ideas. alternatives. practices. le digerati. swag. innovation. invention. insight. awesomeness. austin in march is welcome after the extended months of gray winter, and sxswi is a really fun and inspiring conference, with an amazing lineup this year. w00t!

IN09 – mar 17-19, 2009
the latest rebrand of the conference that i produced last year, IN09 will bring together the best of the Canadian digital and interactive media scene, as well as some pretty fantastic international speakers. and hurry – early bird ends on february 27

google.org and ge announced a partnership this week in creating a platform for measuring and affecting individual use of electricity with powermeter. using networked analytics that give detailed information on energy consumption as well as compare your usage with your friends or neighbourhoods, this positions google and ge to provide proactive green benefits to the consumer as they hack the grid, as well as creating a rich database of behavioural metrics that can and will inform the nature of near/far consumer products and platforms. from the site:

Our lack of knowledge about our own energy usage is a huge problem, but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and fight global warming by reducing our power usage. Studies show that access to your household’s personal energy information is likely to save you between 5–15% on your monthly bill, and the potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting. For every six households that save 10% on electricity, for instance, we reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one conventional car off the road (see sources and calculation).

Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.

h/t to @avantgame