Congratulations Dr. Williams!

Mobilizing Practice: Engaging Space, Technology and Design from a Thai Metropolis

Abstract: The project of ubiquitous computing aims to embed computation into everyday spaces. As a practice that is heavily concerned with space and place, its stance towards mobility is sometimes conflicted — treating mobility by turns as a disruption or as an opportunity — and almost always conceiving of it as free and empowered. Conducted in industrial and academic research settings in places like Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, or Atlanta, ubicomp research tends to deal with the settings and mobilities that its usually upper-middle-class researchers actually encounter: the commute to work, the nuclear family’s stand-alone home, a walk through a city center.

Based on a year of ethnographic field-work focusing on spatial and mobile practice in and around Bangkok, Thailand, I propose some alternative visions of mobility and production of space: the anchored mobilities of transnational retirees, the artistry of stability work in an always-mobile slum, the embodied and symbolic experiences of quotidian journeys through Bangkok. These practices, while enabled and mediated by information technologies, call into question some of the assumptions we make about place and mobility, and provoke us rethink what technological interactions we might design and how we can design them.

Committee: Paul Dourish (chair), Don Patterson, Ken Anderson (Intel), Beatriz da Costa

This is a brilliant cinematic masterpiece which expresses the zeitgeist of many in the department who want espresso, know it's present-at-hand, but fail to be able to convert it to ready-at-hand. Watch, savor, react.

"Many congratulations to LUCI occupant, provocateur, and artist-in-residence, DOCTOR Garnet Hertz, who is now officially all signed off, demonstrating once again that the logistics of getting bums on seats and ink on the page is often a challenge comparable to the other years' of work." -jpd

This web site will automatically generate a paper/presentation title for you based on the titles from urban computing conferences. Some of them hit just a little too close to home, so I suppose this post is just a little reminder to keep it real...

Here are some that it generated for me:

• Incubating the Striated Game
• Prototyping the Responsive Space
• Sketching the Mesh Market
• Getting the Embedded Wars

urban computing conference title generator

See also the post-modern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

This is a video rebroadcast of a talk by Molly Steenson given in the Department of Informatics on 10/15/2009. Molly is a design researcher and architectural historian who studies interactivity and responsiveness in architecture. Molly was an Associate Professor of Connected Communities at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in architecture at Princeton University. In this talk she discusses the original "series of tubes" and buildings that function as computers.

A wacky cool contest from DARPA. Also how awesomely relevant is the Nena song from the awesome 80's?

DARPA Network Challenge

"To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways."

Congratulations to Informatics faculty member Bill Tomlinson on having his book, 'Greening Through IT' published by MIT Press.

"Environmental issues often span long periods of time, far-flung areas, and labyrinthine layers of complexity. In Greening through IT, Bill Tomlinson investigates how the tools and techniques of information technology (IT) can help us tackle environmental problems at such vast scales. Tomlinson describes theoretical, technological, and social aspects of a growing interdisciplinary approach to sustainability, "Green IT," offering both a human-centered framework for understanding Green IT systems and specific examples and case studies of Green IT in action.

Tomlinson contrasts the broad ranges of time, space, and complexity against which environmental concerns play out to the relatively narrow horizons of human understanding: it's hard for us to grasp thousand-year projections of global climatic disruption or our stake in melting icecaps thousands of miles away. IT can bridge the gap between human scales of understanding and environmental scales.

Tomlinson offers many examples of efforts toward sustainability supported by IT—from fishermen in India who eliminated waste by coordinating their activities with mobile phones to the installation of smart meters that optimize electricity use in California households—and offers three detailed studies of specific research projects that he and his colleagues have undertaken: EcoRaft, an interactive museum exhibit to help children learn principles of restoration ecology; Trackulous, a set of web-based tools with which people can chart their own environmental behavior; and GreenScanner, an online system that provides access to environmental-impact reports about consumer products. Taken together, these examples illustrate the significant environmental benefits innovations in information technology can enable."

Get a copy of this book here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12058

Garnet will be displaying his new book of photos (for sale in the vending machine) in Milan in October.

"Documentation of the book project, "A Collection of Many Problems (In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook)" can be found at http://conceptlab.com/problems/. It is meant as a visual introduction to media archaeology in the spirit of The Dead Media Project.

The bookwork, "A Collection of Many Problems (In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook)" will be on display on a podium in the center of the space. In the space there is also a place for people to write notes and sketches on paper related to the topic of The Dead Media Handbook - a project proposed by author Bruce Sterling in 1995: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Media_Project"