I gave presentation on the theme of City of Memory at the Devices of Design colloquium held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Run by the CCA in partnership with the Fondation Daniel Langlois the event addressed the implications for architecture and urbanism brought about by the increasing use of digital media in design practices. The other speakers were:
Marco Frascari (G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture, Virginia Tech);
Mario Carpo (Consulting Head, Study Centre, Canadian Centre for Architecture
Associate Professor in Architectural History, Ecole d'Architecture de Paris – La Villette);
Mark Wigley (Dean, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York);
Peter Galison (Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics, Harvard University);
Greg Lynn (Full Professor, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien);
Bernard Cache (Architect, Objectile, Paris)
The event also considered the longer term implications for museums and archives in conserving digital artefacts – both digital artworks and architectural materials. The second day saw a presentation by Alain Depocas on the Variable Media project by the FDL and Guggenheim investigating emulation as a means of preserving works created on and for obsolete technologies into the future.
The event also coincided with a brilliant show at the CCA, the 60s: montréal thinks big, charting the social cultural and architectural shifts that transformed Montreal into a dramatic modernist city.
On another note we (somewhat belatedly) finished the documentation from our last Creative Lab on Social Tapestries held at the LSE in September. It includes a section on the Bodystorming Experience we ran as part of the event.
Download the DIFFUSION eBook (A4 PDF 333Kb).
Via SpaceandCulture we have yet more proof that industry can directly benefit from working with artists by learning new processes and methodologies that can be directly translated into their own practices.
Intel's Ken Anderson and UC Berkeley's Jane McGonigal have presented a paper on "Place Storming" at NordiCHI 2004 that claims to be "an original method of brainstorming technological concepts, particularly in the area of pervasive computing". Wow.
Its amazing to us that Ken can make this claim considering that one of his research team took part in one of our own Bodystorming Experiences back in May 2003, he attended a talk I gave on Bodystorming Experiences and other techniques we use at the People Inspired Innovation Conference in September 2003 at BT Exact to an audience of specialists in the pervasive computing field, and that we have been disseminating our outputs and documentation from Bodystorming Experiences back to him and other colleagues at Intel over the past few years.
Proboscis has always been clear in distinguishing our specific development of Bodystorming Experiences from the more general practice of bodystorming (which we first learned about via IDEO) but to call Place Storming an original method? Its not even an original appropriation of an idea – HP Labs got there first with their Model Storming.
I've presented UT and Social Tapestries three times this last week. First at the DTI's Next Wave Knowledge Transfer Meeting on Wednesday 287th; then at the Ordnance Survey Research & Innovation group in Southampton on the 28th; and finally this evening to the Geographic Information Club at City University here in London.
Its been an exciting week of conversations and dialogues with colleagues and fellow researchers delving into the minutiae of possibilities that UT offers, and the range of possibilities that we can explore for ST.
We're also getting closer to finalising a series of collaborations building upon UT for Social Tapestries with Kingswood School, Hull; Mauro Cherubini of EPFL in Lausanne; France Telecom R&D; Christian Nold's Bio-Mapping project and Mikel Maron's Worldkit. In addition to this we're just starting to develop a collaboration with the Community Development Foundation and Citizens Online.