I’ll be presenting The Golden Institute and have the great pleasure to generally ramble about Design Fictions on a panel at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Design fiction is an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling. The goal is to move away from the routine of lifeless scenarios-based thinking. We will share design fiction projects and discuss related techniques for design thinking, communication and exploration of near future concepts.

Along with Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory), Jake Dunagan (Institute For The Future), Stuart Candy (Long Now Foundation), Jennifer Leonard (IDEO) and special guest Bruce Sterling.

Saturday, March 13 at 12:30 in room 12AB

I felt like crap that day, losing my voice (and was actually hiding from the film crew), but I’m thankful that they managed to grab me after all.

The Golden Institute

Growth Assembly

The term ’social collider’ mapped just after launch…

The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

…and the same search term 16 hours later

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

Give it a go at http://socialcollider.net and follow @socialcollider on Twitter for updates. There’s also a Flickr-pool for your screenshots. Happy colliding!

Fantastic, a computer within the computer. It’s kind of the opposite of Pongmechanik, since in both cases hardware and software collapse into each other.

Little Big Planet is marvelous anyway, it gives the player the impression to play with objects (toys) rather than videogame-sprites. Because of its richness of visual texture but also because the physics model feels real and engaging, you can play it with up to four people and the attention to detail is at times almost unbelievable.

And you can design levels and contribute them, apparently with great freedom–that is where the above came from (and Dot shared it).

Here’s a shot of the exhibition on 21st street, more photos and my post about it on WMMNA. It ended a few days ago and it was just great. Thanks Sarah, Amanda and everyone involved for setting up such a good exhibition.

Buttons will be on show at Eyebeam’s Untethered show in New York City, from September 25th to October 25th, with opening and artist talks on Thursday the 25th at 6pm.

A “sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function”, the exhibition is curated by Sarah Cook and features some wonderful work. Please come by, I’d love to say hi.

You get to be a band with your friends, and it really feels like performing. Some things are well designed these days. So now I got a real blister on my finger from a simulated experience (see below).