A couple of Saturdays ago, still buzzing from a week of NHS website and service manual launches, and the NHS Expo, I took part in my first UK Health Camp. I learned loads, put faces to names I’d long followed from afar, and posed a question of my own to a windowless basement room full … Continue reading Brains trust: notes from my session at UK Healthcamp
On my holiday, I started reading into some topics I ought to know more about: artificial intelligence, genomics, healthcare, and the fast approaching intersection of the above. Here follow some half-baked reckons for your critical appraisal. Please tell me what’s worth digging into more. Also where I’m wrong and what I might be missing. 1. … Continue reading AI, black boxes, and designerly machines
On the last day of Foocamp 2011, after a whirlwind of other fascinating conversations, Edd Dumbill introduced me to the business strategist and researcher Simon Wardley. Over a tasty Californian street food lunch Simon proceeded to draw me a literal back of a napkin sketch of his “pioneers, settlers, town planners” model. I was intrigued because … Continue reading What do Wardley maps really map? A settler writes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjwYdvwC8CE "Evolution. What's it like? So one day you're a single-celled amoeba and then, whoosh! A fish, a frog, a lizard, a monkey, and, before you know it, an actress. [On-screen caption: "Service limitations apply. See three.co.uk"] I mean, look at phones. One, you had your wires. Two, mobile phones. And three, Three video mobile. Now … Continue reading “Evolution. What’s it like?” The three lives of the front-facing camera
This summer, after a lovely 2 week holiday in Tuscany, I returned to Leeds and straight into a classroom full of government senior leaders discussing agile and user-centred design. Their challenges set me thinking once more about the relationship between technology and social relations in the world of work. One well-known story from the Italy … Continue reading And yet it moves! Digital and self-organising teams with a little help from Galileo
HT to Emma Bearman for tweeting me this Imperica article on Cedric Price. It's so important to see change as a thing people demand of technology, not, as often framed, the other way round. "Technology enables variation" - that's basically what I meant in appropriating John Ruskin's term "changeful."
It puzzles me that technology so easily becomes the dominant metaphor for explaining society, and not the other way round. "Self-organise like nanobots into the middle," exhorts dConstruct host Jeremy Keith as we assemble for the afternoon session at the Brighton Dome. We shuffle obligingly to make room for the latecomers, because everyone here accepts … Continue reading dConstruct 2013: “It’s the Future. Take it.”
The fantastic culmination of James Burke's talk at dConstruct last week set me thinking about a misleading trope that seems to recur with regularity in our discourse about technology. Through his 70s TV series James was a childhood hero of mine. I wrote about his talk in my summary of the event, and thanks to … Continue reading A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home
The web is 21, says Ben Hammersley, it can now legally drink in America. And yet, as it strides out into young adulthood, it has much to learn. At dConstruct we hear some of those lessons - ones about humility, unpredictability and the self-appointed tech community's responsibilities to the rest of humankind. I agree with … Continue reading dConstruct threads: Arrogance, uncertainty and the interconnectedness of (nearly) all things
In the corner of an attic room in one of Britain's oldest factories a small group are engaged in the assembly of a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. They - it - all of us - are there for Laptops and Looms, a gathering of people whose crafts cross the warp of the digital networked world with the … Continue reading The Dissolution of the Factories, or Lines Composed a Few Days After Laptops and Looms
The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we're going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We … Continue reading And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet
A desire to put some theoretical acro props under my vague unease with the determinist narrative of so much of our technology discourse has led me to the writing of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. His work on the social construction of science, an ethnography of the R&D lab, has a special resonance for me, … Continue reading On the way to dConstruct: a social constructionist thought for the day
Ten years ago this month the Sunday Times published an article by Douglas Adams called "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet". You can read it here. Some starting observations: It's a tragedy that Adams died, aged 49, in 2001, depriving us of more great literature in the vein of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, … Continue reading Ten years on, can we stop worrying now?
Last month's Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology, was based on the insight that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. I was pleased to help meet that need in a very small way, with a short … Continue reading Why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day
The payphone has bluescreened... ... the departure board has 404ed... ... the giant TV screen is somebody's Windows desktop... Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Since posting my three broken technology pictures, I've been suffering the blogger's equivalent of what the French call "l'esprit de l'escalier," and for which German has the … Continue reading Sous les pavés, la plage
Matt Edgar writes here 