Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable. A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

… to minimal and yet decidedly satisfying representations like Digg:

It was interesting to see how much more impressed the audience were by the simpler designs, which stylishly conveyed meaning with remarkably little text or visual complication on the screen. The user’s ‘growing literacy in complexity’, said Ben Cerveny

We were then given a whirlwind techno-cultural tour of the life and times of Brian Fling

I’ve often wondered how significant sci-fi films and programs have been in influencing real-world technology (are there any employees of NASA for instance who didn’t grow up as Trekkies). So I was very pleased to listen to Nathan Shedroff

A more frustrating example can be found in Honda’s Asimo

Anyway, it's hard to argue with the speaker’s key point: that by being aware of these trends, ‘sci-fi is good for your career’.

Robin Hunicke

August de los Reyes’

When Tristan