Tag: shift08

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My talk ‘Maker Households’ was the closing key-note of the SHiFT conference last Saturday.
This posting gives you the slides (with text) and the video of my talk (made by Siert Wijnia with his iPhone. Thanks!). The video starts about a minute after the beginning of my presentation.
This is the text that goes before the start of the video:
I am here today to do two things:
Pedro and his team asked me to try and bring everything that happened in the past 2 days together under one notion: ‘Maker Households’.
And the second thing I want to do is to talk to you about how we can start looking at DIY not just as a skill or skillset, but also as a literacy.
So we can live in these what I call ‘Maker Households’.
But to be able to do both of those things I need to take a somewhat winding detour.
I need to discuss internet and mobile communications with you, what is great about it, and what is problematic about it.
And I also need to first talk to you about the state of the world we live in.
Because only then you will see why I think DIY as a literacy, or Maker Households, is not just an exciting thing, but also may well be our only feasible way forward.
So let’s start with the detour leading up to this story that I created over the past two days. And the detour starts with something you are probably familiar with.
In the past 15 yrs we mainstreamed 2 new infrastructures and connected people in the furthest regions of our globe to it: Internet, and mobile communications.
These infrastructures are unique compared to any other infrastructure that went before.
First of all. Conventional infrastructures basically always connect two geographic locations.
Your bathroom to the sea..
Now hit play 🙂

Ton Zijlstra on Maker Households – SHiFT 2010 from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Closing key-note of the SHiFT 2010 Conference

These are the slides (with the text below the slides)

(to be re-added, after replacing Slideshare)

I would appreciate any feedback.


A great illustration of my talk, made by Bauke Schildt / @bschildt (copyright, used with permission)

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On the first day of SHiFT08 in Lisbon last week I participated in the workshop on SPIMEs by David Orban. SPIMEs are transient applications that are aware of SPace and tIME, hence SPIMEs and can interact with their surroundings through sensors and an internetconnection. Those spimes are the core of the internet of things.
In the workshop we split up in groups to come up with different spime applications. To be able to do this and have a reasonable change of coming up with something, David gave us a recipe to follow:
1) Choose the spime’s sensors for its interaction (electromagnetic, mechanical, chemical, social sensors etc.)
2) Choose the level of spime data aggregation for your application (loca, global, non-geographic)
3) Choose a point in the timeline of technological development (now, at some specific point in the future)
4) Design machine to machine interaction (reliability, redundancy, systems needed etc.)
5) Design machine to human interaction (what is ‘friending’, information display, social objects)

With that recipe our little group (as shown in the picture above) went to work. We ended up with a spime application that is based on detecting people falling.
The final presentation on our spime application, dubbed ‘All Fall Down’, that I gave on behalf of our little group has been taped and uploaded to YouTube by David.

On the sidelines of the workshop I had a little chat with David as he was preparing some slides for the other groups in the workshop.
One of the groups had drawn their slides on paper, which David then photographed. The pictures he edited and cropped into Keynote slides, after which the group gave their presentation. The interesting bit is perhaps not so much in the process of this, but very much in the last remark David makes in the video above: it means you can bring in the laptop as a tool at the very end. I totally like that. Because the laptop is not a social object in group work, but pen and paper is. During this workshop Jose (the guy on the left in the pic) and I both worked on our laptop, which helped to keep our notes and work organized, but which was a barrier in the conversations. Pen and paper on the other hand serve as just as good a means for note taking, but at the same time enhance the conversation. (As seen here, e.g. during Elmine’s Birthday Unconference)

An enjoyable workshop, the concepts and take-aways of which were reinforced the next day as I attended David Orban’s presentation on the same subject, and during the conversations we had during the conference, amongst other over a seafood lunch.

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I had great fun at the SHiFT08 conference in Lisbon in the past days. Inspiring stories both on and off stage, lots of familiar and new faces, great conversations, and great sea food.
Meanwhile I have added all SHiFT08 pictures to Flickr. Feel free to tag them if you want (which following up on Stephanie’s advice is now possible for everyone). I am in the process of uploading video to Youtube, a few of which are already online.
The slides I used as introduction to the Knowledge Cafe I gave at SHiFT08 are up on my personal slidesharing site of course: