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The latest weeks we have been exploring the potential of an Internet of Things for memories and – by extension – for dementia. Tales of Things, a collaboration project between five universities, is developing a project very close to our interests in this perspective. ‘Tales of Things’ “(…) encourages users to ‘tag’ objects with digital media using the sort of technology found in Oyster Cards and bar codes. Users can upload an image of the object and an associated memory in the form of text, audio or video to the project’s website – talesofthings.com – or using a dedicated iPhone application”.
http://machineslikeus.com/news/project-explores-internet-things.

Picture by Kurt Stockman, Timelab, Ghent

By ROB VAN KRANENBURG

The question of how to store, interpret, and use relevant information will be one of the most important in the coming decades with the increasing merging of analogue and digital situations, systems, and contexts. Pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), sentient computing, pro-active computing, Disappearing Computer, Digital Territory, Ambient Intelligence, all these terms point to a shared 21st century vision on computing as running in the background.

Not only computers, but our whole environment is becoming smarter because computing power and connectivity disappear into it. What will business and cultural industry look like in such an environment? How will this changing environment be translated into educational concepts?

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar changed? The oral literacy – dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall – was made redundant because the techniques could be externalized via the pencil.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century,” Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991). With changing tools, power changes.

In this workshop we will brainstorm about what a master in an IOT is. Does it visualize changing tools and relating power structures? Does it help to manage and/or reconfigure those structures? Can it be internationally organized? And if it can, how? Is it a mash-up of existing programs? Is it a new program? For who? Can Council provide a set of core modules that are generic to a global situation and by linking up with local institutions make these relevant for real everyday transactions, exchange, services?

The workshop will be moderated by Dan Calloway, Liesbeth Huybrechts, and Rob van Kranenburg

You can register here