LUCI Blog

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"