blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming

I might turn this into a bit of a visual sketchbook in the future.

Juan Enriquez really hits it at management consulting firm McKinsey’s What Matters blog:

The life code is a lever and perhaps the most powerful instrument human beings have ever used. It will make the Industrial Revolution seem simple, even quaint. It will become the world’s dominant language, and all of us will have to be literate to thrive.

Must-read ––

We’ve just announced this and you’re invited–

Stuart Candy is a multimedia futurist at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies in Honolulu and the first Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. A pioneer in so-called “guerrilla futures”, both his widely read blog the sceptical futuryst and his PhD research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa are about the communication of foresight through the design of future-evoking situations and artifacts. In 02006, with colleague Jake Dunagan (now at the Institute for the Future), he started FoundFutures, a public art initiative devoted to making future scenarios experientially available in everyday life. Late last year, Stuart served as Game Master for the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game, “Superstruct”, and he is currently leading development of a public alternate reality game about pandemic influenza hitting Hawaii.

March 16th at Demos, 19h. Free but limited capacity, please RSVP on Meetup

Now available (PDF), my dissertation at RCA Critical Historical Studies, which is part of the first year at Design Interactions. On the ‘matrixical relations’ of California’s technology culture between business and idealism and futures for art and design as social prototypes and storytellers.

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).

Why has the present happened the way it has? What decisions were taken to develop one technology over the other? What happened to the technological and architectural utopias of the late 1960s? Fred Turner has convincingly shown that California’s information technology culture was built on a sort of mutually sustaining joined venture between idealism and libertarian politics. Where else in the past have been choices that might have lead to alternative presents and how might they be different?

The Present as Utopia:

This will be an experiment in, instead of extrapolating the present into the future, looking at the past and imagining slightly twisted presents that resulted from them. Initially looking at tiny changes, small narratives will find systems, objects, and behaviors that are different but live in a today. They might reflect on the way that things are right now, maybe showing working alternatives and point at the political implications of technology, that things go the way they go because someone decides so.

Starting points: Think about the scale that is to be looked at (read Mike Davis’ City of Quartz since Los Angeles is such a good example), maybe make timelines, look at developments to tweak, create narratives and prototypes and bring them alive.

The Ordinary Future:

Forget about flying cars and five-assed monkeys. The future will feel as normal as the present does. There will be a dash of excitement here and there, but genetic modification and many associated things will not even be noticed anymore. Re-interpreting Arthur C. Clarke on the use of biotechnology: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic nature.’ If the engineering-style approach of synthetic biology becomes a reality, it might be a re-run of the last 40 years of computing. Abstraction layers will allow ever greater interaction and importance for what today is the domain of specialists.

Starting points: What applications might arise from the technology and how would they shape things? How do synthetic systems relate to evolutionarily developed ones? What does that say about time and scale of engineered biology (Julian Bleecker’s worry about the different speeds of technology and evolution)? Create sketches and visualize them before the backdrop of ordinary life.

…

It’s two subjects to look at, but they share the technique of using the present, one looking back and one looking forward. Is that a good thing? There’s currently some overlapping parts, but I’m confident that they are different enough that the outcomes will be far apart by June. Ideas?

(Both images by Superstudio, who have a criminally short Wikipedia entry.)

Earlier tonight at Indian take-away, checking Twinkle. Randomly checked the ‘near me’ tweets, noticed lots @stephenfry. Didn’t mean much to me, turned attention back to TV screen where a documentary was showing, and it took me a few moments to realize that it was by/with Stephen Fry, who is in fact a British journalist. All the people were twittering him comments about his show, scene by scene. I keep being amazed by Twitter, especially by what people make of it in times of elections and such.