CFP: Social Media – New Masses
CFP: Soziale Medien – Neue Massen (Lueneburg, 2-4 Feb 11)
Deadline: Aug 31, 2011
2. Medienwissenschaftliches Symposion der DFG: SOZIALE MEDIEN — NEUE MASSEN
Presentation on Online communities and social media for designers @Heimtextil ’11
Gardening and Facebook
Designer Bashkim Isai created a garden that “feeds on social interaction” – in other words, the plants will survive only if you will be a very good friend on Facebook. Just like any other plans, they need water, soil, and nutrients, but the way these elements are used depends entirely on how many people become friends with the garden on Facebook and the comments on its wall post.
The mechanism is the following:
“Meet Eater is rigged up with a system to register physical contact and social media interaction. Watering is triggered by human contact and nutrients are delivered when you start hanging out with it on Facebook. Of course the novelty of such a project could draw more attention than is desired. If the plant becomes over loved it will call for quiet time via the Facebook page, just as you or I would.”
The experiment had quite a success as in 81 days it gathered more than 5000 fans on Facebook, constantly interacting with the garden.
Check it out for yourself andlet us know what you think – it is at least an interesting way to rethink our relationship with nature, using the interactivity and connectivity that social media have to offer.
source: Mashable
Cultural Probes and Pecha Kucha (20.6.10). A little report.
Our Social Spaces researchers had an active day yesterday making and sharing stories about their research and personal work and experiences. We joined a workshop on Cultural Probes and a Pecha Kucha evening.
Making an MBA for IOT Workshop at the LIFT @ Brussels Conference
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