LIFT06. Day 1

Too much content and too many people to summarize the first day at LIFT06. I leave the running notes to Nicolas Nova, Bruno Giussani, Mauro Cherubini and Daniel Kaplan. Most relevant talk related to my work have been:

Bruno Giussani’s keynote [Bruno]
Matt Jones, Nokia – “Play & Mobility : Small Toys, Loosely Joined” [Daniel]
Bruce Sterling, Spimes and the future of artifacts [Bruno] [Daniel] [Nicolas]
Stefana Broadbent: The specialization of communication channels [Bruno] [Daniel]

One of the most joyful moment was when was when journalist Bruno Giussani was talking about the now existing “cloud of connectivity” over 70% of the population of the world and we (all with engineering background) could not get setup a basis Subethaedit back channel because we do not have the control over the routers and subnets. Very ironic moment (not for Bruno Giussani who I value his talent to grasp and communicate about technologies and people) and great for my thesis! We were covered by a few clouds of connectivity (WiFi, GSM, UMTS, …), which does not mean that a collaborative service would work. Technology is about chaos, complexity (in scale up), disturbance, frustration and of course adaptation.

I enjoyed Bruce Sterling vision on technology that “of course” lead to disturbance and cutting edge meaning “broken last week”. Moreover his spimes are not about being aware or smart. They have no computational capabilities nor ubiquitous. The “wands” control the spimes (same way as a mobile phone is a current gateway to the connected world. Bruce mixes wild ideas of “Fabjects” (objects on demand) with actually pretty down-to-earth, pragmatic requirements and questions of adoption and deployment. I hope that in Bruce’s next novel, the main character will feel either some sort of frustration to be among seamless spimes or incredible mental load to manage seamful spimes . And what about the ultimate goal of ubiquitous computing and the “Internet of things” (the term to talk about spimes if we want to make money)? Why would people want it? Reaching sustainability, having a society that can cleanup for itself. It is related to the study Effects of Pervasive Computing on Sustainable Development that I mentioned a few weeks ago.

In yesterday’s workshop Julian Bleecker mentioned first class citizen, first class objects and some objects becoming more important than humans. It think it is also now also relevant for countries, when the economy in World of Warcraft is more powerful than in some third-world nations. A break-down in this virtual world would create more disturbances than a catastrophe in a poor african country.

The terms Internet and Web are now definitively mixed, even among a specialist crowd of LIFT (browsing the Internet!). I am not a stuck up purist, but I am not sure if this is a good sign…

Finally a couple of nice expressions (mainly from Cory Doctorow (brilliant speaker!)):
“dot-com non-sence”
“dumb info hippie”
“John Doe lawsuits”
“as lost as last year’s Easter egg”
“jurassic era blogjects”
“a rothweiler beating the living shit out of a teddy bear”

Tag: lift06